KingSlayer for "Chess with Different Armies" released

[hgm]

Five years ago I wrote a simple demo engine, just for fun, and as a"proof of principle" for that it was possible to write an engine that would beat Fairy-Max in less than a week. Somewhat later I changed the name to King Slayer.

Last year I decided to do something useful with it: I adapted it for playing Ralph Betza's chess variant "Chess with Different Armies". Fairy-Max already supported this variant, but I wanted to have an engine with somewhat more chess knowledge for playing it, and measure piece values a bit more reliably. (Fairy-Max for instance doesn't know about the Bishop pair, making it hard to use it for measurement of values of color-bound pieces.) Greg Strong already included a Windows binary of a beta version of KingSlayer-CwDA in his ChessV release last year.

Last month I had again some time to work on KingSlayer, and I now have a version that seems good enough for release. It supports 5 armies: FIDE, Clobberers, Rookies, Nutters and Dragons. And it offers a feature to build custom armies. Although it also plays orthodox Chess, it should be weaker at this than the original version of KingSlayer, as I had to remove part of the Chess knowledge that was not generally applicable to all armies.

I uploaded a Windows executable bundled with a logo and a README file to http://hgm.nubati.net/CwDA.zip .