Re: Chess960 and Standard Chess differenz
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 7:22 pm
I agree. Chess960 is not really a different variant from normal Chess. Nevertheless, it is useful for a GUI to know if you want to play FRC or normal, because in FRC you would generally want it to shuffle the postion, why with 'normal' you want a specific initial position, without having to feed it to the GUI as a FEN, or even as a number (518) for every game you start. (This is an even more trick point in 10x8 Chess, where there is not one, ut several standard starting positions, depending on if you play Capablanca, Gothic, Bird, Embassy.)
And even if an FRC-capable engine would not have to know if it is playing FRC or normal, and just await the FEN it gets, it would be useful for the GUI to know if a given engine actually implements the FRC castling rules. Then it can warn the user in advance that the engine does not play FRC, rather than have him discover it when he tries to castle. (Of course this would not be a problem for setups like RBQNKNBR.)
In WinBoard 4.3 I included the option to play any variant as a shuffle game, having the GUI randomly pick an opening setup, or having the user fix an arbitrary setup by giving a number, or asking for a one-time random number hich will be used over and over again. But if you do this for a game that has ordinary castling, the Rooks and King are exempt from the shuffling. So to the GUI this does make variant normal in shuffle mode different from FRC or variant nocastling (the latter two in shuffle mode by default): it randomly picks opening setups in all cses, but from a different set of positions. Note that nocastling can alwayss be played as normal chess. But the GUI still has to know how it should shuffle. This is another reason the distinction is useful.
And even if an FRC-capable engine would not have to know if it is playing FRC or normal, and just await the FEN it gets, it would be useful for the GUI to know if a given engine actually implements the FRC castling rules. Then it can warn the user in advance that the engine does not play FRC, rather than have him discover it when he tries to castle. (Of course this would not be a problem for setups like RBQNKNBR.)
In WinBoard 4.3 I included the option to play any variant as a shuffle game, having the GUI randomly pick an opening setup, or having the user fix an arbitrary setup by giving a number, or asking for a one-time random number hich will be used over and over again. But if you do this for a game that has ordinary castling, the Rooks and King are exempt from the shuffling. So to the GUI this does make variant normal in shuffle mode different from FRC or variant nocastling (the latter two in shuffle mode by default): it randomly picks opening setups in all cses, but from a different set of positions. Note that nocastling can alwayss be played as normal chess. But the GUI still has to know how it should shuffle. This is another reason the distinction is useful.