Chess960 tournament

[Alexander Schmidt]

Hi Roman,

What GUI did you use for the tournament?

Arena and Polyglot, see other post.

Anyway, nice to see the Chess960/FRC-capabilities are tested. Was motivation enough now to fix a long known castling bug and enable perft/divide features for Chess960/FRC as well in the next release (0.0385).

Thanks a lot! Unfortunately most of the Chess960 engines are too strong for me, I am happy that there are some weaker to play against, hopefully some more will follow

I like Chess960 because I was sick of learning opening theory. My theory is from 1990, latest opening books are able to beat me without engine

And Chess960 is very nice for enginematches, with standart chess you always have to think about the booksettings, large enginebooks result in boring games, on the other hand an engine should play with it's own book...

[hgm]

Note that WinBoard would not have this problem.

[Alexander Schmidt]

Note that WinBoard would not have this problem.

Does it support UCI Chess960 engines?

[hgm]

Only through Polyglot (and if you have WB 4.3.13 or higher). But it does not expect the engine to say anything after sending result.

[Alexander Schmidt]

Thanks, I will take a look on it

[Roman Hartmann]

Hi Alex,
thanks for the info. I completely forgot that polyglot supports FRC as well. When I tested Arena recently and tried to play an FRC-game it would send the castling moves in winboard-style even though the engine was running as an UCI-engine. I forgot to try it with polyglot.

I agree that Chess960/FRC ist a nice chess variant mainly because the whole opening-book-stuff is not yet that important. Anyway my opening theory is not even from 1990 but rather still on the bookshelf

best regards
Roman

[Roman Hartmann]

Hi Pedro,
thanks for the info. I completely forgot that polyglot supports FRC as well.

best regards
Roman

[Alexander Schmidt]

tried to play an FRC-game it would send the castling moves in winboard-style even though the engine was running as an UCI-engine. I forgot to try it with polyglot.

Hi Roman,

Arena implemented Chess960 UCI support first, SMK did it later in another way, so there are two UCI Chess960 standarts...

Best,
Alex

[hgm]

What Arena does for FRC is no standard, but a bug. I was told it cannot understand (and cannot make the engines understand) positions like

[d]3k1rr1/4ppp1/8/8/8/8/4PP2/3K1RR1 w Ff - 30 5

[Alexander Schmidt]

What Arena does for FRC is no standard, but a bug. I was told it cannot understand (and cannot make the engines understand) positions like

I dunno, maybe there is a bug in handling fen strings in special positions.

There are no problems in games or enginematches because the engine gets the startposition and the moves.

BTW, the latest Beta don't work at all for UCI engines and Chess960, and I guess If there is a new Arena release it will support the official UCI protocoll.