Engines playing Musketeer Chess, good price

[Dann Corbit]

Musketeer chess? Where's Annette Funicello?

[musketeerchess]

Musketeer chess? Where's Annette Funicello?

She’s in Disney studios playing a game of Musketeer Chess.

[JohnWoe]

Hi Toni
Nice work

Please try to make your engine compatible with Winboard and that engine vs engine games be automatic without need for human hands.

Also the 960Chess isn’t neede. There is variety in Musketeer Chess without hurting the beauty of the initial position in Chess which is not the case of chess960

Regards

Zied

Thanks for the reply!

I need to remove this Chess960 stuff as there is enough randomness by placing extra pieces. Simplification + small speedup also.

So Capitaine is based on Sapeli 1.67 which I just released. So it should work just fine using UCI interface with a capable GUI. Sapeli works under Windows. Capitaine as well. I will build Windows compiles as I'm done cleaning up.

Regards

[Ferdy]

I uploaded a new WinBoard-AA package: in the previous one promotions would not work for holdingless Seirawan, because WinBoard thought the promotion zone was in the 0th and 9th rank!

How do we castle with gating at rook file? In seirawan it was like h1e1, or rook captures king.

[hgm]

Oops, I guess the auto-gating code I added doesn't recognize this case yet. It just looks behind the given from-square of the move for a gatable piece. I will work on it, now that Christmass is over.

[Ferdy]

There is an issue on Leopard, A Leopard at E5 cannot capture a Leopard at C4. Perhaps related to pieceToCharTable, I remember I have this issue in Mandirigma.

[hgm]

Ah yes. I forgot that Lions (as well as Lances) are considered special pieces by WinBoard, and should not be used to just describe any other piece: Lances are considered a kind of Pawn (automatically promoting on last rank), and Lions are subject to the Chu-Shogi Lion-capture restrictions (making them royal for one turn after L x L). I guess I should have made the engine pick another symbol for the Leopard.

XBoard actually does have a second version of Lance and Lion amongst its 66 piece types, which do not have these special properties. And it does have an actual Leopard (as there also is a Chu Shogi piece with this name), which would of course be better. The Lance would be my preferred choice for the Amazon (Q+N compound, called Dragon in Musketeer), although XBoard also has a dragon image.

I hesitated in using any of these symbols of the extended set, because WinBoard does not have built-in images for those. But the WinBoard-AA distro uses external image files anyway, so perhaps it is better not to worry about that. Older WinBoard versions would not support the holdingless Seirawan anyway. And I suppose that people that really want to play Musketeer Chess would want to provide their own piece images, similar to those used by the Board Painter tool. So I will fix it in the engine so it sends another pieceToCharTable in its 'setup' commands.

[Edit] Ughh... KingSlayer-Aramis also did not perform corner gating on castling; it just castled with the 'stack', and then would perform the gating when the Rook moved away from f1/d1/f8/d8. I will adapt its MakeMove code to handle relocation of the Rook on castling a bit more subtly, unstacking the combi piece immediately.

[hgm]

I updated the WinBoard-AA package: the WinBoard now also should automatically gate on castling when there was something 'under' the Rook. I also updated the Musketeer engine so it handles this correctly. And it now orders different piece symbols, which should not have any side effect. (The crossed swords for ArchBishop was also troublesome, because in Seirawan Chess the Archbishop is called a Hawk, and WinBoard uses the Hawk symbol for both Archbishop and Hawk!)

[Ferdy]

I updated the WinBoard-AA package: the WinBoard now also should automatically gate on castling when there was something 'under' the Rook. I also updated the Musketeer engine so it handles this correctly. And it now orders different piece symbols, which should not have any side effect. (The crossed swords for ArchBishop was also troublesome, because in Seirawan Chess the Archbishop is called a Hawk, and WinBoard uses the Hawk symbol for both Archbishop and Hawk!)

Tried to play with it and KingSlayer-Aramis 0.2 was flagged by winboard making an illegal move.

[hgm]

Oh, I had completely forgotten that KingSlayer uses the same flag in the move encoding for indicating castling and double-pushing, and the moves have to be distinguished by testing the type of the moved piece. So the code I added to print a gating suffix when something is left on a1/h1 after castling also added a suffix if something was left on a2/h2 after the double-push e2e4. (Unfortunately WinBoard still needs gating suffixes from the engine, even though the gating in holdingless seirawan is fully implied by the move. It seems good practice to write the gating suffixes in SAN/PGN, though. Perhaps WinBoard should make gating suffixes optional on reading.

Anyway, I fixed KingSlayer-Aramis' move-printing routine to not add spurious gating suffixes on pawn double pushes, and uploaded it in the updated WinBoard-AA package.