Bughouse

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

Moderator: Ras

jorose
Posts: 373
Joined: Thu Jan 22, 2015 3:21 pm
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Full name: Jonathan Rosenthal

Bughouse

Post by jorose »

What are your thoughts on bughouse?

It seems to me there are a few variants from an engine perspective.
  • 1 Engine plays on two boards and has full control.
  • An instance of an engine plays on one board and another instance of the same engine plays on the other board.
  • An instance of an engine plays on one board and another agent (engine or human) plays on the other board.
In the latter two, either information could be limited (via some communication protocol) or the engine could see the full board and clock states on both boards.

Compared to crazyhouse, bughouse has a number of additional elements. Notably, a player may choose to not make a move in order to prevent the opponent from giving their partner material. In engine bughouse, ideally there is some command to wait until something has occured, so if all 4 players call the wait function, the clocks could get artificially adjusted to save time. I am not sure what kind of time controls are ideal for bughouse nor the exact ruleset that would be interesting for engine play. However, I do feel like bughouse should have a much higher skill ceiling than crazyhouse or regular chess.
-Jonathan