New project: very general engine for variants

[rdhoffmann]

Would love to see this happen!

I wrote engines for Horde and Los Alamos variants and cannot find any sparring partners, other than Fairy Stockfish.

[hgm]

It should be easy to configure Fairy-Max for Los Alamos Chess. And I am pretty sure Sjaak II and Nibiyu should be able to play it too.

[rdhoffmann]

Great thank you hgm! It seems Sjaak II has similar depth and strength as my LA engine, maybe a little weaker but not by much.

[catugocatugocatugo]

Any news about this hgm? Can you use this project to power jocly? That would certaintly be wonderfull!

[fire_varan]

Any news about this hgm? Can you use this project to power jocly? That would certaintly be wonderfull!

If you are eager about creating engines for some variants, you could try some neural networks.
I have vibecoded one engine for Whale Shogi already and it seems to play the game properly:

https://pastebin.com/PRDGV8fn

[catugocatugocatugo]

Any news about this hgm? Can you use this project to power jocly? That would certaintly be wonderfull!

If you are eager about creating engines for some variants, you could try some neural networks.
I have vibecoded one engine for Whale Shogi already and it seems to play the game properly:

https://pastebin.com/PRDGV8fn

Thanks a lot! I'll take a look!

[fire_varan]

In terms of Shogi variants:

I managed to extract logic from the ShogiVar application (many thanks to hgm for converting this from Visual Basic to ANSI C back then) and created an XBoard engine supporting 17 Shogi variants.

https://github.com/fire-lizard/svengine

Seems to work with XBoard just fine.
Any feedback is welcome.

[hgm]

(many thanks to hgm for converting this from Visual Basic to ANSI C back then)

Great to see someone actually benefitted from that. It was quite a tricky operation; none of the BASIC compilers/converters I could find wanted to do the job. In the end I used an edit script to change most of the BASIC syntax to C syntax for the most common statements. That left only a few places with rarely used constructs for which it was more efficient to convert those by hand. The most challenging was to figure out what events exactly the event-handler routines had to react to.

And I have to thank the original author Steve Evans for honoring my request for putting the code under GPL, so that I could do this.