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H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Oct 22, 2008 05:29 PM UTC:
M. Winther:
| I bet you wouldn't be able to program certain of my most advanced 
| pieces in Fairy-Max.

As Fairy-Max is written in C, and C is a recurive language, and recursive
languages are equivalent to a Turing machine, and a Turing machine can
calculate anything that is calculable, you would lose that bet with
mathematical certainty!

Moves of Catapult pieces, for instance, are akin to castling moves, and it
would be fairly easy to built something into Fairy-Max that would allow
this type of 'castling'. If I had the motivtion to do it. The Catapult
pieces do not particularly appeal to me, as they violate what I consider
to be one of the defining characteristics of a Chess variant: that it
moves only one piece per turn.

Note that  am not in any way denying that what I do, could be done by Zillions. But the differences I want to measure do not result in 6-0 scores. A Pawn advantage in Chess results only in 18% advantage, and even less in Capablanca-type variants. I want to measure piece values to a precicion of at least a quarter Pawn, resulting in advantages of ~3%. To get the statistical noise below that I need 50-1000 games, so I cannot afford to let the engines spend half an hour on a game. They must play 1-min games, and play them at a sufficient high quality for the results to be meaningful. So I want the best engine I can get, and I doubt Zillions would qualify as such. But you can convince me by showing that Zillions can beat Fairy-Max in, say, Knightmate.

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