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M. Winther:
| Muller, which are the chess variants you are testing? Zillions is World
| Champion in several hundred chess variants. 

That does not really prove much about its strength if it was the only
contender... I have been testing games like Shatranj, Knightmate,
Capablanca, Superchess (as in Superchess & Monarch), Falcon Chess, Great
Shatranj. And I am testing many 'unofficial' variants consisting of one
or two unorthodox pieces embedded in a conventional setup, e.g. replacing
Knights with Cannons, Modern Elephants or Dababbas, or (pairs of)
Grasshoppers, Ferzes, Wazirs, Xiangqi Horses; Rooks with Nightriders,
Queens with Centaurs or Amazons. Usually in setups with different Armies,
on 8x8 or 10x8 boards.

| Rybka is only World Champion in one. Without Zillions, how would it be 
| possible to test and try Hexagonal Chinese Chess, recently invented by 
| L. Smith? It would take a century. 

Well, the game does not seem listed here, so it is hard for me to comment
on it. If I would be interested in it, I might configure Fairy-Max to play
it. If very exotic pieces that defy Fairy-Max' piece-definition format
would participate, and I was interested enough, I would hard-code the
particular piece in Fairy-Max, or add general support for the property
that made it impossible before. (I did this for the Falcon, for example.)
In general I am not so much interested in entire variants, as in
individual Chess pieces occurring in those variants.

| And it beats me easily in Xiang Hex when I try it. Zillions is
| very appropriate for 99% of all chessplayers. It's beyond me how 
| a person interested in boardgames can refrain from buying Zillions 
| at $20.

This is because I am not interested in playing against engines, but in
building them, and I already have developed engines that can do the things
I am interested in (piece value measurements) which I consider highly
superior to Zillions (w.r.t. playing strength). If I had teleport ability,
why would I buy a Rolls Royce?