Comments by JorgKnappen

@Joe: The clue to my rating of the Shatranjian Shooters is the observation that a Ferfil ist worth a Knight is worth a Bishop. To my experience this is true for a single Ferfil compared to a single Bishop. A pair of short range Ferfils does not generate a feelable pair bonus, though.

The Shaman ist about 1.25 pawns above the Ferfil. The Hero is similar to the Shaman, but has a larger overall mobility, I rate it half a pawn above the Shaman. The War Elephant is like a Queen, therefore it is 1.5 pawns better than its components. This gives the following calculation:

2 Heros @4.75 Points   = 9.5 Points
2 Knights @3 Points    = 6   Points
2 Shamans @4.25 Points = 8.5 Points
1 War Elephant         @10.5 Points
===================================
Sum                     34.5 Points

compared to 32 Points for the FIDEs. I don't know whether the Shamans already have a feelable pair bonus, therefore I don't put it in.

Of course, with a jumping general (about 7.5 points) the army is on the low end of the CwDA scale. 31.5 is less than the FIDEs have. The Hero and the Shaman are very tactically dangerous pieces, specially against the FIDEs with their unprotected rooks in the back rank.

By the way, Falkener goes further back in time than expected: The Dover reprint was made from an 1892 edition!

Falkener, Edward, Games Ancient and Oriental, Dover Publications 1961 (reprint of 1892 edition)

I have taken the time to cross-check the list of Shogi pieces with the sources I have. I found no errors (but I discovered some in my own transcripts ...).

A few comments: The Chinese Cock moves differently in Taikyoku Shogi on one side and Maka Dai Dai Shogi and Tai Shogi on the other side. The movement pattern given here is the Taikyoku pattern. A piece with the same move is known as Blind Dog (Moken) in Wa Shogi.

Old Kite and Old Kite Hawk are different translations of the same japanese word (kotetsu), what is named old-kite-hawk here is the piece from Taykyoku Shogi.

Savage Tiger (or with different translation of moku: Fierce Tiger) has different moves in Taikyoku Shogi (like a Lance), Dai Dai Shogi (the move given here represent english sources; japanese Wikipedia has 2 steps diagonally forward), and Heian Dai Shogi (moves as Cat Sword, better known in the west as Ferz).

Fergus, while at testing: The navigation from a user submitted page to the comments is currently gone. The newest comment is displayed (if there is one), but there is no way to the full list of comments or the function to add a comment.

Editor-made pages are not affected; they have the navigation right.

Fine, it works again. Good work, Fergus :-)

Unfortunately, the fix is not yet complete; here is the Link to Archabbot Chess from the Alphabetical Index section "Ar":

http://play.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MParchabbottches

and it now returns a 404 (instead of the home page of the pbm system).

After some hacking, I found the true link which works:

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MParchabbottches

-- replacing "play" with "www" fixes the link.

First, it is really good to see Bittern in place of Ibis.

The table format is good, though I'd like to see the non-oblique leapers,
too. I was able to 
extract their names (assuming extensive use of Bi- and Tri- prefixes), the
only missing ones are 11:0, 11:11, 13:0, and 13:13 up to diameter 15.

If you consider further replacements; I'd suggest to take out Wyvern
because of its usage in Glenn Overby's Beastmaster Chess for a combined
leaper.

Problemists use different names for a few pieces in the table, but this is
not a serious problem for me. Synonyms are much easier to deal with than
homonyms, because the piece name is a handle to its moving pattern.

Considering articles, I suggest the following additions:

Une (french)
L' (french)
Les (french)
Il (italian)
Gli (italian)
Lo (italian/spanish)
Los (spanish)
Las (spanish)
De (dutch)
Het (dutch)
Een (dutch)

I think it is a good thing to ignore articles in subject ordered lists.
Traditional german library instructions do exactly this.

Look here

http://xkcd.com/1078/

Ralph Betza somewhere defined the quantum of advantage (aka one tempo) and
quantified it to 0.33 pawn units.

But: It is not clear at all that the advantage truely exists. For example
look at the game known as Dawson's Chess: Black and White have lines of
chess pawns placed on the 3rd and 5th rank. Winner is whoever manages to
break through the opponent's pawn line.

Whether White or Black wins is intricately dependent on the number of
pawns, there are even mathematical papers on this subject, e.g., 

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/papers/unpublished/DawsonChess.pdf

Dawson himself analysed the game by hand to upto 40 pawns.

After following the long thread on the first move advantage in chess, I am
curious about the first move advantage in Shogi.

The major difference between chess and shogi lies in the "decisiveness"
of the two games: Western chess is rather drawish, while almost all shogi
games come out as wins or losses.

Is there a first move advantage in shogi (I don't know statistics, but I
suspect that there is a first move advantage, although some Shogi pages
claim the opposite) and how large is it?

The compound of Quintessence and Rook is namend Leeloo in Quintessential Chess after the Fifth Element in Luc Bresson's film.

The compound of Quintessence and Queen is namen Pentere (with synonym Quinquereme) in Quinqereme Chess

The missing compound of Quintessence and Bishop I name Sai after Fujiwara no Sai, the ghost in the Go board in the manga Hikaru no go. Go is in japanese homophonous to the number 5. The ghosty connection is suggested by the analogous pieces Banshee (Nightrider-Bishop compound) and Dullahan (Knight-Ferz compound). Speckmann also reports that the Janus/Paladin (Knight-Bishop compound) was called "die reinste Geisterwaffe" (a pure ghost-weapon) by a problem solver.

The Sai is even stronger than the Banshee (having more directions and attacking more fields on the same board), but seems to be less tactical on 8 times 8. Because of its strength I wasn't yet able to design a CwDA army for the Sai. A simple modification of the Fearful Fairies is not possible.

Can-mate Knight: Moves and captures as a normal FIDE Knight; but when the endgame KN vs. lone K is reached, it gives immediate check (and checkmate, if the lone King cannot capture it).

Switching off the can-mate property is not so easy. Just defining a Cannot-mate Rook as normal Rook, but when the endgame KR vs. lone K is reached, it it automatically a draw, unless the last capture gives checkmate -- seems to work, but in practice the stronger side will be keen to keep a pawn or two on the board and perform the mate with the full Rook before it is too late.

Thanks, Matteo, for digging out the reference. It says

"Of the 2,323 public matches in fiscal 2008, white players won 1,167
and lost 1,156, a win rate of 50.2 percent, it was discovered on
Tuesday. The previous highest win rate was 49.5 percent in fiscal
1968, and the lowest 46.4 percent in fiscal 2004."

So, there was a constant black (who moves first in Shogi) advantage for
4 decades, but in 2008 the situation was reversed. Given the relative small
number of recorded Shogi games, the 2008 result may be just a statiscal
fluctuation. Are there more recent numbers published somewhere?

Here's the position for mutual perpetual check with bishops and
nightriders. You need two bishops on the same field colour (or a queen and
a bishop); a position with bishops on different colour does not exist
because the kings come too close to each other.

Bishop's team: Ba2, Bb1; K b3/c2

Nightrider's team: NN f8, NN h6; K e6/f5

... it just fits on an 8x8 board.

Thanks for that links, it is a very enjoyable slide show.

In Derzhanski's list (
http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/whos-who-on-8x8.html )
tentative values for the Ultima pieces are given. They are calculated by
Zillions of Games and may be grossly inaccurate, but I have not seen other
estimates for them.

Maybe experienced player of Ultima can say something about the practical
values?

In addition, I recommend reading the series Ideal Values and Practical
Values
(
http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/ideal-and-practical-values.htm
) by Ralph Betza. It contains lots of insights in piece values. But the
gold standard for piece values still is playtesting (between humans or in
computer play).

Hmm... it your decision, at last.

Possibilities include:


(1)

If you cannot gate in a piece in the last possible move because you are in check, this counts as checkmate and you lose the game.

If you cannot gate in a piece in the last possible move and you are not in check (may happen on a very crowded board), this counts as stalemate and the game ends in a draw.

(2) 

Game goes on and you just have forfeited the right to bring that particular piece in play (put it to the place where the captured pieces are). For most pieces this is a huge penalty, but you may even want to trigger this situation in order to avoid a Wuss on your side.

Maybe additional rules become necessary: What happens if you can gate in either a pawn or a major piece, but not both (e.g., because you can block a check with a pawn move or a piece move)?

Nice and original board design: it looks like a world map. Unfortunately I
cannot understand the text ...

Where has Michael Howe's Universal Chess gone? I still have a printout,
but now Universal Chess is something different here.

It was another system to create lots of chess pieces and assigning
buy-point values to them; including names for ready-made pieces.