Spacious_Mind wrote:Also I was just curious about the US Patent at the top of your page. The idea of Archbishop etc is not new and was used previously in historical variants of chess. To what does the US Patent apply?
The idea of playing on 10x8 with these two new compound pieces is indeed very old, nearly as old as what we now call 'orthodox Chess'. The first reference to it was by Pietro Carrera in 1617, who called the new pieces Centaur and Champion.
It was rediscovered several times, and each time a different initial position was used. The patent purely applies to the initial position. If that is enough to stand up in court is for the lawyers to decide; no one was interested to contest it.
ps. will you ever consider adding different game times to Winboard... ie 1s per move or even fractions of seconds. With all the increased speeds of computers I am just wondering if this someday becomes interesting.
WinBoard already supports fixed time per move (non-accumulating). In old WinBoard versions you could only specify this by a command-line option (-st or -searchTime), and maintaining the clocks was left up to he engine.
The development version (available as alpha version from my website) does fully implement this: it can be selected in the TC dialog, and the clocks are maintaned and displayed by WinBoard.
Sub-second resolution has already been possible for a long time, through specifying time odds. E.g. a time-odds factor of 60 would allow you to specify seconds where otherwise it would be interpreted as minutes.