After a small pause, needed to make repairs to Lime (which did not understand time controls of non-integer minutes), the main event has now started.
This will be a ponder-off tournament (2.4Gz Core 2 Duo, 128MB hash) with three cycles of full round-robin: 40/24', 40/16' and 14/36'. So every participant will play 6 games against every other participant, 54 games in total.
The time-odds factors that were finally decided upon are:
It might be that for VanillaChess this time odds is a bit low, as it seems to get comparatively stronger at longer TC. We will see if it can overtake one of the engines with factor 4...
The first cycle has been completed. The results are more or less what could be expected. Gerbil-KM is doing a little better than I expected; at faster TC it did not nearly as well, so I did not give it an extra time-odds handicap compared to the main field. But so far Gerbil could stay ahead of Faile, which is lightly handicapped compared to it. (It gets 20% less time.) It could just be luck, though, and things can still easily reverse.
Despite the time odds more than double that of the remaining field, JokerKM is leading the pack:
Gerbil was less lucky as in the previous cycle, and lost most of its lead on Faile. It still has half a point advantage, though. In the bottom half of the list, Vanilla Chess performed surprisingly well. It beat most of its competitors, and was even able to score a point against the current number 2, Lime. As a result, it has risen to well above two higher seeded (and thus higher handicapped) engines, CCCP and Dababba.
Next and last cyce will be 40/36'. The battle for first place is very close!
Joker not having it all it's own way for once.
Vanilla's performance is pleasing
It's gonna be a tight finish.
Will the victory smell of citrus fill the air?
The FEN caharacters WinBoard uses for Knightmate are:
M for the non-royal King (.k.a. Man or Commoner) that replaces the Knights
K for the Royal Knight (depicted as Unicorn)
So the initial setup would be
[d] rmbqkbmr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RMBQKBMR w
The Royal Knight castles like a normal King, so the differences with normal Chess from the engine perspective are tiny. (In converting Joker I did encounter n unexpeced problem, though: Joker's move generator first looks for pinned pieces, and then generates moves along the pin ray separately. But, unlike a Knight, a Commoner can have moves along the pin ray!)
If your eval recognizes certain combinations of material as draw (which Joker doesn't), you would have to make changes there too: KRK is a draw! (Just like KBK and KMK.) I have no idea what that does for the Rook value. (Never tested it!)