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Comments by crazytom

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About Game Courier. Web-based system for playing many different variants by email or in real-time.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sat, Mar 11, 2006 01:28 AM UTC:
It's good that you added the < /SELECT > tag, as it should be there and its absence might cause problems for some browsers. But that's not what Opera was choking on. The real problem is that the < SELECT > tag has no closing angle bracket.

That is, for one of my games the source has

< SELECT NAME='crazytom_bgimage'
when it should have
< SELECT NAME='crazytom_bgimage' >

Thanks for adding these new features and taking the time to work out the kinks. As far as my efforts are concerned, I figure the opportunity to change to something other than shogi-simple.png is easily worth looking at a little HTML.


Thomas McElmurry wrote on Fri, Mar 10, 2006 11:23 PM UTC:
The blank background field appears to be browser-dependent. Everything I've described in previous comments was done with Opera. The background field is not blank when I use Firefox. I've now used Firefox to make a move and change the background image in one of my games, and it looks like the setting was saved.

I had a look at the source for the verification page in question, and I think the problem is due to a missing angle bracket in the < SELECT > tag corresponding to the background field. Also the < /SELECT > tag appears to be missing altogether, but this doesn't seem to cause problems for either of the browsers I've tried. When I edited a local copy of the source, inserting the missing angle bracket was enough to make Opera place the appropriate value in the background field.


Thomas McElmurry wrote on Fri, Mar 10, 2006 06:32 AM UTC:
I see that there is now a 'Modify' button next to the display settings. Either this has been added since my last comment, or I didn't notice it earlier.

I've just moved in two games: one of Xiàngqí and one of Shogi. In each case my goal was to make a move and to change from the default background image to a new background image, hoping that this new background setting would be stored in the log so that the new image would be displayed the next time I view the game. I did some experimenting before submitting the moves, trying to get as much information as I could. I tried performing the actions of selecting a background image and entering a move in four different orders (described below, where, not knowing what might be useful, I've tried to err on the side of too much detail rather than too little). Each trial began in a new browser tab. The various trials did not exhibit all the same intermediate behavior, but as far as I can tell the end results are the same. Of course I could only submit each move once; after trying all four orders with each of the two games, I then repeated one of the trials before submitting each move.

  • Trial 1: I enter my move in the 'Moves' text box, select the desired image from the 'Background' dropdown menu, and click the 'Verify' button, without having clicked the 'Modify' button. The verification page loads. My move is shown in the movelist, and the resulting position is displayed. The new background is displayed, but the 'Background' field is blank. At this point I submit the Xiàngqí move.
  • Trial 2: I select the desired image from the 'Background' menu and click 'Modify', without having entered a move. The page reloads; the board is still shown with the original background image, but the new image is now selected in the 'Background' menu. I then enter a move in the 'Moves' text box and click 'Verify'. The verification page loads. My move is shown in the movelist, and the resulting position is displayed. The new background is displayed, but the 'Background' field is blank.
  • Trials 3 and 4 begin in the same way: I enter a move in the 'Moves' text box, select the desired image from the 'Background' menu, and click 'Modify'. The page reloads. The new background image is displayed and remains selected in the 'Background' menu. My move is now shown in the dropdown movelist, and the resulting position is displayed. The 'Moves' text box is now empty. I then continue in two different ways.
    • Trial 3: Without entering anything, I click 'Verify'. A page loads, with the heading 'Verify Your Move', but otherwise identical to the usual page where one enters a move. The new background image is still displayed and remains selected in the 'Background' menu. But the move which I just entered seems to have disappeared: it is no longer shown in the movelist, and the position displayed is the one prior to this move. I enter the move again in the 'Moves' text box, and click 'Verify' again. The usual verification page loads. My move is shown in the movelist, and the resulting position is displayed. The new background image is displayed, but the 'Background' field is blank.
    • Trial 4: I immediately reenter my move and click 'Verify'. The verification page loads. My move is shown in the movelist, and the resulting position is displayed. The new background image is displayed, but the 'Background' field is blank. At this point I submit the Shogi move.
When I submit each move, the 'move sent' page loads, showing the correct position with the new background image. I then immediately open a new browser tab and view the game, specifying my userid in the URL. In each case, the results are the same. Initially the board is shown with the new background image, but when the page automatically refreshes a few seconds later, it reverts to the original (default) image.

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Thu, Mar 9, 2006 11:52 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Bravo! for the new display options, and also for the new background images, some of which are very nice.

One problem: when I change the background image in a game of Xiàngqí or Shogi, the 'Verify Your Move' page shows the new image, but the 'Background' field is empty, and when I submit the move it reverts to the default image.


Rules of Chess: Castling FAQ. Frequent asked questions about castling.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Thu, Mar 9, 2006 11:39 PM UTC:
The rules of castling stated here are correct. But please don't take my word for it; you can compare this page to the FIDE Laws of Chess (rule 3.8.ii).

What specifically is it that you think is defined wrongly?


Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Feb 28, 2006 05:07 AM UTC:
Strange things are happening with piece sets. I've been using the Alfaerie pieces in both of my Chess games, but now one of them has spontaneously switched to the Abstract pieces and the other to the Medium-sized pieces.

Castling in Chess 960. New castling rules for Fischer Random Chess. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Mon, Feb 27, 2006 04:07 AM UTC:
The Chess960/FRC castling rule is certainly not 'overly complicated'. When it takes up the majority of an account of the rules, that is because it is explained in such a ridiculously complicated and confusing way. There is a problem here, which has probably turned some players away from the game, but the problem is in the presentation, not in the rule.

The rule itself is very simple:

The king moves to the c-file and the a-side rook moves to the d-file, or the king moves to the g-file and the h-side rook moves to the f-file.

That's it. One sentence (not including the restrictions on when it is permissible to castle, which are identical in all the rules discussed on this page).

The Chess480 rule, even though it was introduced as 'an appeal for simplicity', is no simpler, and arguably more complicated than the FRC rule.

Of course these are not the only possible rules. If I had been asked, before learning about FRC, how the castling rule should be generalized for random starting posiitions, I probably would have said that the king moves half the distance (rounded up) toward the rook, and the rook moves to the other side of the king. This rule is left-right symmetric and matches the Chess480 rule in 11/16 of the possible positions. But without the need for awkward special cases, it is in my opinion simpler.

I am predisposed to like symmetry, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to choose an asymmetric rule like the one in FRC. Yet there is something appealing about the asymmetry, particularly in this context where it produces twice as many actually distinct positions. For this reason I'm still inclined to prefer the FRC rule.


Game Courier Ratings. Calculates ratings for players from Game Courier logs. Experimental.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Wed, Feb 22, 2006 06:19 AM UTC:
When I view the ratings for all tournament games by using '?*' as the tournament filter, exactly one player is displayed in a different color than the others. How is this possible? Does it indicate an error in the code, or in my understanding of what the colors indicate?

Chess/Xianqi/Shogi Tournament #1. Enter the First Chess/Xiangqi/Shogi Game Courier Tournament![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Feb 21, 2006 07:07 AM UTC:
Here they are.

Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Feb 21, 2006 03:59 AM UTC:
Excellent; that seems to solve all my problems. Thanks.

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Feb 21, 2006 01:38 AM UTC:
Okay, I think I understand now.  I had been thinking of the Abstract piece
set as the default, not realizing that it was in fact a setting which had
overridden a previous default.  So it makes sense that I can't override
it in the URL, especially now that I've gone and learned a bit about the
GET and POST methods of form submission.

Here's a related thought (related from a user's perspective, anyway). 
When I enter my userid and view a game in which it is my opponent's turn,
the board is displayed, along with a message saying 'It is not your turn
yet', etc.  But the board is shown from my opponent's perspective. 
(Actually, a quick check of my current games seems to indicate that it is
shown from the perspective of the player to move [i.e. my opponent] in
Chess and Xiangqi, but from the perspective of the first [Black] player in
Shogi.)  Perhaps it would be more user-friendly if specifying a userid
ensured that the board would be shown from that player's perspective.

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Mon, Feb 20, 2006 03:49 AM UTC:
But the strange thing is that it's only a few games (Chess, Balanced Marseillais Chess, possibly others) that behave this way. With most games, the piece set (and other display settings) can be changed in the URL. For example, the Xiangqi preset defaults to pieces with simplified characters, but it's possible to change to traditional characters.

My reason for using the URL to tweak settings is that I make copious use of bookmarks, so that I can get to any game with just a few keystrokes. And if I want to use the positions from my games as desktop backgrounds, this is most easily done if I can construct a URL that produces an image using my preferred piece set and the appropriate orientation. I've done this happily for many of the games I've played via Game Courier, but I can't do it for a game of chess. I can look at the board from Black's side, or I can use the Alfaerie pieces, but for some reason I can't do both.


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Thomas McElmurry wrote on Mon, Feb 20, 2006 02:18 AM UTC:
Yes, a fascinating game, and a victory for the Chess960 champion over the
FIDE champion!

Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Mon, Feb 20, 2006 12:28 AM UTC:
It seems that, when viewing a game of chess, one can't change the piece set by adding a query to the URL for the log. For example, this link should display the game with Alfaerie pieces, but the Abstract pieces show up instead.

Chess/Xianqi/Shogi Tournament #1. Enter the First Chess/Xiangqi/Shogi Game Courier Tournament![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Wed, Feb 1, 2006 05:59 AM UTC:
Some semantic nitpicking:

  1. When the tournament rules mention 'White' and 'Black', presumably 'White' means the first player (White in Chess, Red in Xiangqi, Black in Shogi) and 'Black' means the second player (Black in Chess and Xiangqi, White in Shogi)?
  2. The first round will be a true round robin (meaning everyone plays everyone) only if exactly seven players participate.
  3. If my understanding of the Buchholz-Solkoff and Sonneborn-Berger tiebreaks (as explained here) is correct, then this page's description of Buchholz-Solkoff is incorrect, and that of Sonneborn-Berger is incomplete and potentially misleading.

Oh, and sign me up, please.


Invader Zim Chess. Chess based on the show, Invader Zim. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Wed, Feb 1, 2006 05:45 AM UTC:
Well, I meant 10^14, which is called 100 trillion in the American system and 100 billion in the British system. Being an American, I called it 100 trillion as I've been trained, but I agree that the British system is more logical.

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Jan 31, 2006 01:30 AM UTC:
I can't tell whether the game is good or bad, because I can't parse the rules. Nevertheless, if sets are ever sold at a price such that immortal_invader can afford 99999999999999, I'll buy one too, just to make it an even hundred trillion.

Besides, I could always use it as a chess set.


[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Fri, Jan 20, 2006 12:41 AM UTC:
Antoine's proposal should work very well if the number of players is
prime.  If the number is divisible by 2 or 3, there's a small weirdness. 
Look at the Shogi pairings in the 9-player example: players 1, 4, and 7
play one another; 2, 5, and 8 play one another, and 3, 6, and 9 play one
another.  No one in any of these groups plays Shogi against anyone in
another group.  A similar partitioning into 2 groups would happen with
Xiangqi with an even number of players.  I don't know how much, if at
all, this should bother us.

Here's an interesting possibility, inspired by Fergus's idea of having a
champion for each game.  Perhaps the final round could consist of the top
Chess player, the top Xiangqi player, the top Shogi player, and the top
overall player (and, if some of these should be the same person, the 2nd
overall player, etc.).

I would prefer to allow draws by agreement even in Shogi, although they
should be discouraged except in clearly drawish positions.  It doesn't
seem fair to me to penalize both players for playing equally well just
because the game ran long.  If length is a concern, there must be some set
of carefully chosen time controls that will address the issue.

Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sat, Jan 7, 2006 08:09 AM UTC:
The 404 when trying to view an entire comment is something I've noticed before. A workaround is to first go to the 'all comments' page and then click on the 'view entire' link for the relevant comment.

The problem seems to be that the link from the PBM Game Logs page points to http://play.chessvariants.org/pbmlogs/displaycomment.php?commentid=11172, while the link from the corresponding Comment Listing page points to http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=11172.


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Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sun, Jan 1, 2006 02:20 AM UTC:
I won't say much about game selection and tournament structure; I'll play
in just about any event as long as the games are appealing and I have the
time.  All the ideas posted here so far are good, but I hope the
multivariant tournaments with democratically selected games won't go
away; part of the fun of these has been the exposure to games that I might
not have played otherwise.  My only real 'complaint' about the polling
process is that good old Chess doesn't seem to stand much of a chance of
getting through, and I'd like to play it alongside other games.  (Hmmm...
maybe a 'Big Three' chess/xiangqi/shogi tournament?)

I have some thoughts about scheduling, which apply mainly to largish round
robins.  In GCT1 the games were divided into three rounds; this worked, but
led to periods of relative inactivity if a round had one or two very long
games.  For GCT2 it was decided that games would be assigned as players
became available.  This was a good idea in principle, but in order to run
smoothly it seems to require an inordinately large (and prolonged)
time commitment from the director, who must continually check for finished
games and determine which players are available, how many new games can be
assigned, which of the remaining games should be assigned first, etc.

It seems to me that the game-assignment process could be automated.  I'm
thinking of a script which could run periodically (once a day, maybe) and
assign games until it couldn't assign any more without exceeding a
specified maximum number of ongoing games for any player.  The algorithm
to work out which games to assign wouldn't have to be very complex.  The
part that I don't know anything about would be the interface with Game
Courier.  Perhaps Fergus can tell us whether this would be feasible.

Game Courier. PHP script for playing Chess variants online.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Tue, Dec 20, 2005 06:54 AM UTC:
The plain, uncheckered Shogi preset uses PNG rendering, but when I use the wooden Japanese pieces with this preset, the characters indicating promoted pieces show up in a sort of brown, rather than the desired red.

Nova Chess 100. Missing description (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sun, Dec 18, 2005 08:39 PM UTC:
Michael,

In Case 2, 4 BCQ pieces must be placed on 4 squares (c1, d1, e1, d2),
giving only 1 combination of filled squares.  The same applies to Case 3. 
Removing this factor of 4 reduces Case 2 to 72 combinations and Case 3 to
144, making the total number 864, which matches the figure I found by
counting in a somewhat different way.

Nova Chess features a great many unusual and interesting pieces, but the
pieces in any given set should be fairly easy to learn, and the game looks
quite playable.  Nevertheless, it will be a while before I've played all
possible scenarios. ;)

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sun, Dec 18, 2005 05:51 AM UTC:
Perhaps I'm a bit too fond of counting things, but I tried to count the number of piece sets, and came up with 1492992 (using standard pieces) and 34992000 (using extended pieces). This led me to notice that the Armiger, Duke, and Earl are not listed in any family. If I add two of these pieces to the Knight family, then I get 1658880 and 38880000, but that still leaves one piece unfamilied.

I also count only 864 starting arrays.


Storm the Ivory Tower. A Smess adaptation of Chinese Chess. (9x10, Cells: 90) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sat, Dec 17, 2005 07:19 AM UTC:
The only thing I would recommend changing on the latest board would be to extend all the arrows to the centers of the squares. On squares with both long and short arrows, the long ones are more prominent, and this may make it easier to miss the short ones.

I like the new Clodhopper and Fuddy-Duddy pieces in the Smess-style set. I preferred the name Dumbo, though, as it seemed so perfect for a piece based on the elephant. Fuddy-Duddy makes some sense too, but I've known ministers who are anything but dull, conservative, and unimaginative.


Thomas McElmurry wrote on Fri, Dec 16, 2005 02:39 AM UTC:
I rather like the whimsical, hyperactive feel of the Smess board and of the Smess-style board Fergus has created for Storm the Ivory Tower. I haven't played the game yet, but I expect that this board would add to the experience in one way, by giving it a unique flavor, but detract from it in another way, as the loud colors and diverse styles of arrows might make it hard to see several moves down the game tree. (But perhaps playing a few games would help me to understand the structure of the board better, so that I wouldn't have to rely as much on the visual representation.)

I also like the more minimalistic look of Michael's board. I don't think I would have any trouble playing on this board. I can see where Fergus is coming from, though; I wouldn't call them optical illusions, but in some parts of the board the patterns formed by the triangles are noticeable. Some of these patterns have their own kind of beauty, and to my eyes they don't obscure the squares, but I can easily understand how some people could find it hard to play on this board, just as others find it hard to play on the Smess-style board. My own opinion is that Fergus's board is more fun to look at, but Michael's would probably be easier to play on.

As I write this I've just noticed Fergus's recoloring of Michael's board, which I like very much. The checkering helps a great deal (more than I expected), the texture gives the board life, and the colors are very well chosen. And it preserves the elegant simplicity of Michael's design.

If there's any interest in yet another StIT board, I think it would be nice to have one in the style of All the King's Men, which I think in at least two ways would be an appropriate complement to the Smess-style board. In All the King's Men, the squares resembled a wooden floor, and the arrows had a simple, uniform style, easy to see but not distracting. Iff Fergus and others are interested in having such a board, and if no one else wants to create it, I would be willing to try my hand, although I probably won't have the time until after New Year's Day.

BoardGameGeek's Smess page has some nice images of various editions of Smess, Take the Brain, and All the King's Men.


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