Comments by SamTrenholme

This is the second time when the essential issue about whether the opinion of a chess variant inventor or some anonymous entity posting here is more important. Personally, I have very little respect for the kind of people who post anonymously or pseudo-anonymously on internet discussion forums, complaining about things.

While I agree that Mats Winter was a little rude in his 'shup up' comment, I also feel that the comment was warranted. Someone came here and anonymously posted that all of Mats' variants deserve only one page. Mats was legitimately hurt. We know nothing about the anonymous person who said this comment; when people are allowed to post anonymously negative, hurtful things, people who are offering legitimate things, such as Mats, are put off and may end up leaving the site.

Anonymous trolls are very dangerous to internet discussion forums. They can very well chase off anyone who isn't a troll, destroying the forum. I saw trolls destroy Usenet, I saw trolls destroy Slashdot, I've seen them seriously damage Wikipedia, and I'm seeing them destroy Digg. I'm worried that they may start coming here and destroy the quality of this web site.

I think the policy of approving anonymous posts is an excellent one; I think it is what has saved chessvariants.org so far.

Again, this is a forum for Chess Variant inventors, not for anonymous trolls to flame Chess Variant inventors. I hope it stays that way.

- Sam

I just want to start a discussion about the Kramnik - Topalov world chess championship match which is starting tomorrow. This is the first time in 13 years where a orthodox western Chess match will determine both the world champion and the FIDE world champion.

It should prove to be a very exciting match. Kramnik became the classical world Chess champion when he beat Kasparov in 2000; Topalov is currently FIDE's strongest player. I personally think Kramnik will win the match; he seems to have his arthritis under control and has more 1-on-1 match experience than Topalov. Most people are rooting for Topalov; he has a more exciting playing style complete with sacrifices.

Anyway, the first game starts tomorrow. Any thoughts on this match?

- Sam

If you have a copy of the saved games where you beat ChessV, I know Greg would love to see them to see where ChessV went wrong.

- Sam

You know, it's interesting because both Grand Chess and Circular chess, in fact have world champìonships and world champions (Grand Chess's world champion, John Vehre, has been known to play games right here on the variants server). The idea of a world champion for chess and all of chess' variants is an interesting one. It's like a triathlon, where the winner is a good swimmer, but not necessarily the world's best swimmer, a good bicyclist, but probably not as good as Lance Armstrong, and a good, but not world's best, runner.

I'm sure both Kramnik and Topalov would be beaten in Shogi by the world Shogi champion, but this doesn't make them poor FIDE chess players.

- Sam

ChessV won't save games unless one explicitly uses 'save game' to save the game; in fact, ChessV sometimes doesn't save a game correctly. :)

It's still a work in progress, but is an excellent program.

I see three Janus Chess games; the one Stephen has is still open and no one has taken the challenge, according to the logs. Remember: Making a move has two steps, verifying the move, and then confirming the move.

One thing I like about Arimaa's rules is that it is very easy to adapt the rules to different bords, such as hexagonal, triangle, or even more exotic boards.

OK, I've looked over Dan's game. The problem seems to be that, for Janus Chess, ChessV values pawns too much over development. This will be a little tricky to fix. Basically, ChessV can play a large number of 10x8 chess games, some of which have pieces weak enough that a pawn is, in fact, more valuable than the development of three pieces. Greg's only option is to add a new variable for each game ChessV supports: How valuable development is. This will vary, depending on the game being played.

Dan played well. I personally think 5. ... Ah6 is a good try for black to both hold on to the pawn and to defend against the gambit.

As another note, if you give ChessV enough time to think about the move, it sees that white can force a mate after 15. Bf2.

- Sam

Kramnik won the second game against Topalov. Here is a commentary on the second game.

- Sam

Dan: I always play a single game of Schoolbook. After I end my game with Jeremy, I can send you an invitation...or you can send me an invitation. I can't guarantee that you'll get white; Game Courier decides what color one gets.

- Sam

My concern is that this variant may be too drawish. A queen is just plain simply nay to impossible to force a capture of; someone with a royal queen can force a draw against a much stronger opponent.

- Sam

Now, I wonder who is going to make a game courier preset and play this game? I figure that a game will take long enough that one's kids will end up finishing the game. :)

I just want to say that I'm enjoying Dan's game a lot. I enjoy watching his playing style and the thinking behind his moves. There are a lot of Chess variants here on this server; however, is fairly rare to have a chess variant played as well as Dan plays them. (We also have John Vehre around)

- Sam

[This comment is no longer relevant]

How do you choose whether to be white or black when issuing a challenge?

I was playing around with ChessV and was able to set up a preset to modify it so that it would not be so greedy in the opening of Janus chess. Basically, with ChessV, it's possible to change the values of the pieces. What I did was make all of the pieces have one third of their normal value. For example, ChessV feels a pawn is worth 1000 points, a rook is 5000 points, and a queen is 9000 points.

What I did was make the pawn worth on 333 points, the rook only worth 1666 points, the queen worth 3000 points, and so on. What this does is make factors not directly having to do with material, such as the position of the pieces, three times more valuable. Once I did this, this is how ChessV handled Dan's gambit play:

1. Ah3 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nd3. Stock ChessV tries too hard to hold on to the pawn here: 3. ... g5?. However, by tweaking ChessV to only be one-third as greedy, ChessV responds with the much more sensible 3. ... f5 or 3. ... Ng6, depending on how much time we give ChessV to think about the position.

My experiments show that tweaking like this, when done for the course of the entire game, will make ChessV make some unsound sacrifices in the late mid-game and end-game, resulting in the 'stock' ChessV winning the game. However, if I have the tweaked version of ChessV play white only for the first ten moves, than give the stock pieces to the normal ChessV, the result is the same as giving both sides the stock pieces: White wins the game.

For Greg's info, this testing was done at an I-depth of 7 and with pruning and razoring disabled.

If Dan is interested, I'm willing to see how well he does against the tweaked ChessV (for the first ten moves, anyway).

- Sam