ChessGUI and Carrera, Embassy, Janus

[Matthias Gemuh]

ArcBishop and Chancellor can now also play Carrera, Embassy, Janus
under ChessGUI. Nunn tests now also possible under ChessGUI.

Matthias.

[slobo]

What GUI do they use, Mathias?

[Matthias Gemuh]

What GUI do they use, Mathias?

Very funny question !

The 2 mentioned engines play all the variants available in ChessGUI :
normal,chess960,capablanca,8x8_capablanca,gothic,bird,caparandom,carrera,embassy,janus.

Visit my website.

Best,
Matthias.

[hgm]

I guess the question was meant as: "which protocul do they use to communicate with the GUI?".

ArcBishop and Chancellor are WinBoard engines. They will thus run under any GUI that supports WinBoard protocol and these variants. Currently that is only ChessGUI and WinBoard_F, I suppose. Although WinBoard_F does not support all of the mentioned variants, which mostly differ only by initial setup of the back-rank pieces in the opening array.

WinBoard_F currently only supports Capablanca Chess and Gothic Chess on a 10x8 board. Other variants have to be played by pasting the FEN of the opening array (or have WinBoard load it from a file).

As a philosophical note: Personally I think it is a bad idea to give variants that are identical in all respects except the opening array a different name. It leads to an unwieldly proliferation of names.

[Matthias Gemuh]

As a philosophical note: Personally I think it is a bad idea to give variants that are identical in all respects except the opening array a different name. It leads to an unwieldly proliferation of names.

That is why I call them Caparandom variants in ChessGUI.

Matthias.

[smrf]

Indeed mostly of those variant family's opening arrays using the extended Capablanca piece set at a 10x8 board could be represented by a specific CRC (Capablanca Random Chess) number. You could experience e.g. this using the SMIRF FullChess GUI+Engine.

Reinhard.

[hgm]

WinBoard still has a (currently disfunctional) menu item 'New FRC game...', that pops up a window where you can either ask for a new random setup, or give in a number describing a particular setup.

It might be an idea to use that in a future version in a more orthogonal way: call it 'New random game...' in stead, and keep it active in any variant. It would then look at the normal opening array for that variant, and shuffle it. It could list the numbers you need to put in for some standard setups like Bird and Carrera, or even put them as variable menu items there (only present when variant Capablanca). I don't know if there are reasonably common 8x8 variants with another opening array.

I could either add tick boxes through which you could specify the desired type of castling (FRC-like, or only with corner Rooks, and King moving 2 or 3 steps in their direction), and if the shuffle should be restricted to having the King between the Rooks, or even only on the two central files.

That way you could play 'Fischer Random Shatranj', or Shatranj with castling.

[smrf]

The SMIRF-GUI supports e.g. Chess960 (Fischerandom) or 10x8 CRC games and already several types of castling.

I would have supported Winboard or UCI since long, if those protocols would be supporting such variants in a compatible manner. I have made several proposals without any positive result.

Thus I have created and published the TMCI interface design. By this and the X-FEN approach the SMIRF-GUI has shown, that such compatible extensions are possible. Nevertheless there still has been no cooperation to establish a common one by more interested programmers.

And because of such still missing compatible protocol extensions I am slowly working to have then a UCI-2 based multivariant protocol approach.

Reinhard.

[hgm]

Very wise. As a GUI that is not compatible with any existing engine but one, is of no use whatsoever...

Fortunately the existing WinBoard protocol already offered complete support for all 10x8 variants, and no protocol extension were needed to run the currently existing 10x8 WB engines (ArcBishop, Chancellor, Fairy-Max, TSCP-Gothic) with full functionality in both protocol version 1 and 2 umder WinBoard_F.

Shogi does give somewhat more trouble, due to the nasty habit of Shogi players to Westernize the (number, number) board coordinates as (number, letter) rather than (letter, number).

[smrf]

... Fortunately the existing WinBoard protocol already offered complete support for all 10x8 variants ...

Well, but I am not talking of the support of variants by some fine tricks but of compatible protocol extensions. I am not interested in incompatible extensions.

Reinhard.