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H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jun 4, 2023 11:20 AM UTC:in Chess the object is to capture the king, not achieve checkmate.
No one says that of orthodox Chess, because it obviously would not be true there: there is no way to win an orthodox Chess game other than by checkmating the opponent. Not so in Ultima, where stalemate is a second winning condition, rather than a draw. And 'smothered stalemates', where a player doesn't have any moves even when he would be allowed to expose his king, are not nearly as hypothetical in Ultima as in orthodox Chess: Pieces without replacement capture can easily be boxed in, even if they are not frozen by an Immobilizer. So I would not exclude that the sentence was just intended to convey that stalemating is an alternative.
From a game-theoretical perspective there is no ambiguity in the rules: checkmate and stalemate are both won positions, whether the game ends there or whether one in some cases would have to play one more move to actually capture the king. So the whole discussion is about what I would call "game etiquette": what is the proper procedure for claiming the victory when the opponent exposes his king to capture. Should you actually capture the King and press the clock, or should you just stop the clocks and submit the claim? Or is this not a victory at all if there was an alternative, and should you allow the takeback and that alternative to be played, possibly in combination with a time penalty?
Some of the quotations attributed to Abbott seem to contradict each other, though. There can be two reasons for that: he actually changed his mind at some point how the game should be played, or he has always thought the same about that, but failed to express himself unambiguously. In the latter case we could speculate on what he actually meant. If it is correct that Abbott at any time mentioned that it was not allowed to expose your own king to check, this strongly suggests that he thought a move that did should be handled as per FIDE rules: take back and play another one. For if it would be handled the Shogi way (instant loss), there wouldn't be much reason to mention it at all: the game is over anyway, either by claim or by king capture, unless the players don't notice it, in which case it doesn't matter what the rule is, as it isn't going to be invoked. So it is a matter of weighing the "not by checkmate" against "it is illegal to put your own king in check", I would say the latter of those is the least likely to have meant anything else as what it says.
I can add that no matter what Abbott actually meant, tournament organizers are likely to enforce their own game etiquette. E.g. an on-line interface would be likely to make it impossible to enter moves that expose the king to begin with, and perhaps automatically resign for a player that is checkmated.
From a game-theoretical perspective there is no ambiguity in the rules: checkmate and stalemate are both won positions, whether the game ends there or whether one in some cases would have to play one more move to actually capture the king.
This isn't correct because players aren't perfect agents. They do not always identify and make the most optimal move. It is possible that someone in "checkmate" will move their king into an easily missed "check" (e.g. a check from the coordinator), and the opponent won't realize they could still capture the king.
Whether this is allowed or not clearly makes a difference when played in any setting with a third-party overseer (an arbiter, a computer client, etc).
he actually changed his mind at some point how the game should be played
Well, we know this is the case to some degree because the 1968 rules are very different from the 1963 rules. He then decided those had been a bad idea, and went back to the 1963 rules.
He even stated in both 1962 and 1963 that the game was still freshly developed and may still have issues. It isn't that surprising for some language of a newly designed game to be contradictory; an aspect of the game started out one way, and later in the design process was changed, but the rest of the rules weren't updated accordingly to reflect the change.
It should be assumed the part of the contradiction that was intended was the part the creator later explained was intended (capturing the king), especially when he also said the other part of the contradiction was not intended (the checkmate).
E.g. an on-line interface would be likely to make it impossible to enter moves that expose the king to begin with, and perhaps automatically resign for a player that is checkmated.
This reminded me that Abbott promoted "Zillions of Games" as a software that accurately enforces the rules of Ultima.
I just found and installed this piece of software and tried a game of Ultima on it. You can play against the computer or against other people.
In this interface that Abbott promoted as correct, you are allowed to enter moves that expose the king. You are allowed to move your king from a safe position into an attacked position. It does not automatically resign, allowing the opponent to make a mistake and miss a capture. You must capture the king to end the game, whereupon it says "King captured. Black wins!"
what is the proper procedure for claiming the victory when the opponent exposes his king to capture
According to the software Abbott promoted, the proper procedure is to capture the king.
I would not exclude that the sentence was just intended to convey that stalemating is an alternative.
No. As someone who loves Robert Abbott's work, I'm not okay with this blatant misrepresentation of his words. His paragraph again was:
The first puzzle is Mate in 1 and all the others are Mate in 2. This follows the conventions of chess problems, even though in Ultima the object is to capture the king, not achieve check mate. So, Mate in 1 should be translated to Capture the king in 2 moves (that is: White moves, Black moves, then White moves and captures the king). Mate in 2 translates to Capture the king in 3 moves.
After saying "in Ultima the object is to capture the king, not achieve check mate," he elaborated with "So" and even explained what he meant with "(that is: White moves, Black moves, then White moves and captures the king)." There is no way to misunderstand this language, and the attempt to do so makes me question the motivation behind it.
And again, these puzzles which require the king to be manually captured per the rules of Ultima were made in 1964, and explained in 2004. It makes it very clear what Abbott's intention was, and the only interface Abbott promoted for playing Ultima works that way as well.
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jun 4, 2023 03:12 PM UTC:Well, if Abbott expressed his ideas as a computer program, it doesn't matter what he said elsewhere at all. There is no ambiguity in computer code.
Since today is the last day of my paid subscription to Leonardo.Ai, I have been generating lots of images. Here are some I generated for Ultima pieces using only the name used in Ultima. I will display them without names, though you could find out what they are by examining the URL. Without doing that, what do you think each piece is? Were you able to recognize all the pieces? How suitable do you think pieces like these would be?
My eye:
1. King. Suitable mainly for display.
2. Chameleon. Suitable mainly for display.
3. Don't recognize, but I'd play with this one.
4. Knight, though it could be used as a longer-range alternate Knight such as a Nightrider or Midnighter. Good for either play or display.
5. Don't recognize, but good for play. (I might use that as a Berolina.)
6 Archbishop, perhaps? (It looks like it could be a decent Inquisitor or Kuhani, actually.) Another one suitable for either play or display.
- Knight,
6 Archbishop, perhaps?
These pieces are not in this game. See the description of the game on this page for the available options.
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 29, 2023 07:10 PM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from 06:35 PM:The Knight is not an Ultima piece, so it probably represents a Long Leaper. A Locust/Grasshopper would have made more sense, though. Apart from the obvious King and Chameleon the others look nothing like an Ultima piece. No cigar for Leonardo.
I'd guess the most recent is the immobilizer. For the others,
- King
- Chameleon
- Coordinator
- Long Leaper
- Pincer Pawn
- Withdrawer
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 29, 2023 08:48 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 08:13 PM:Most of these pieces look very much like some kind of Queen. Did you tell the AI how the pieces moved?
Daniel, you mixed up two of them. Your clue is that one of these uses a very literal, though wrong, interpretation of the name.
These pieces are not in this game. See the description of the game on this page for the available options.
Oh, I'd reached this from just viewing Comments, and thought it was from another page. I hadn't even noticed that it was Ultima! (Now, where's that "embarrassed smile" emoji?)
(I still like the horse one for a Midnighter, though.)
I redid one piece with the addition of a negative prompt to avoid an incorrect visual pun.
Most of these pieces look very much like some kind of Queen. Did you tell the AI how the pieces moved?
No, I just gave it the name of each piece as it is called in Ultima.
But I did just try it, and the results were less distinguishable from each other than what I got using names.
Bn Em wrote on Fri, Sep 29, 2023 09:58 PM UTC:For me, the tall knight is the only one of these that both suggests its piece (clearly the long leaper, starting where the Orthochess knight does — though I agree with Bob that it has wider applicability) and would fit in with a Staunton‐style set; I kind of guessed the last one (of the original comment) correctly from its mild rookishness but I wouldn't be confident about it; I find the 3rd and 5th almost indistinguishable w/o direct comparison (presumably the scale would help irl)
The king is nice enough for a very ornate set, provided it had suitably ornate companions to match; the chameleon is kinda pushing it tbh (and doesn't even resemble ebony)
The visual pun is quite funny ngl; I wouldn't have said either it or its replacement is terribly suggestive though
The pincer pawn and withdrawer?
The visual pun is quite funny ngl; I wouldn't have said either it or its replacement is terribly suggestive though
Still, the "visual pun" version would go well with the Gerfod. ;)
The pincer pawn and withdrawer?
Yes to one of those and not the other.
Whether the 1963 rules include checkmate remains an open question until someone gets ahold of the 1963 rules and checks. While the Zillions-of-Games file does treat capture of the King and not checkmate as the winning condition, it also says it is based on the original rules, and these would be the 1962 rules we can read on Abbot's website. Concerning Abbott's four Ultima puzzles, he describes the first one as "Mate in 1", and he describes the other three as "Mate in 2".
However, he says of these:
This follows the conventions of chess problems, even though in Ultima the object is to capture the king, not achieve check mate.
Notably, he is saying this within the context of having tested his puzzles with Zillions-of-Games, and this is the rule programmed into Zillions-of-Games. Zillions-of-Games claims to be based on the original rules. Since these rules say the game is won through capture of the King, and they do not explicitly mention checkmate, they could be interpreted to not include checkmate. It was presumably Mark Lefler or Jeff Mallett who programmed this interpretation of the original rules. However, the 1962 article on Ultima says "The same rules for declaring check apply as in chess." How are we to make sense of this if checkmate is not part of the game? Additionally, it ends with the sentence "We are especially interested in discovering the minimum number of pieces needed for checkmate." If checkmate was not part of the original rules, it would not make much sense to say this. So, it would have been valid to understand these rules as including checkmate, and Lefler or Mallett may have made a mistake, which Abbott repeated without accurately remembering his own rules.
Around the same time that Ultima appeared in Zillions-of-Games, David Pritchard published the rules in The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants and in Popular Chess Variants. In both of these, he claimed the object was checkmate.
In the 1968 rules, Abbott explicitly mentions that the game is won through checkmate, and this comes after a paragraph in which he said "The object of the game is to check the enemy king." Given the context, this sentence does not imply that the game is not won through checkmate, and accordingly, the similar sentence in the original rules, "The object of the game is to capture this king", may not have been intended to deny that the game is won by checkmate.
Given that checkmate may have been part of the original 1962 rules and was definitely a part of the revised 1968 rules, it's reasonable to expect that it was also part of the 1963 rules.
At this point, we probably have two traditions concerning the rules of Ultima. We have those who followed Pritchard in treating checkmate as a winning condition, and we have those who followed Zillions-of-Games in making capture of the King the winning condition.
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Oct 1, 2023 08:30 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 08:05 PM:Checkmate still exists in games that finish by King capture, as the condition where it is impossible to avoid such capture on the next move. It just doesn't terminate the game. Since at any serious level of play people would not blunder away their King, the only way to capture it would be by first achieving checkmate (or stalemate). So one could say that the goal is to achieve checkmate, so that you can then forcibly capture the King. 'Goal' doesn't necessarily mean terminating condition of the game; you can have many different strategic goals. So I don't see a very large contradiction here.
That it would be mandatory to declare check doesn't mean that it is mandatory to resolve it. Of course not resolving it means your King will get captured, and that sort of makes it mandatory enough for most players, even when the rules do not strictly demand it. The fact that check has to be declared makes it even less likely they would allow the capture by oversight. (Of course they could still move themselves into check by mistake; they would receive no warning against that.)
The special status of check is not really fundamental; it is a consequence of the peculiar way that Chess handles illegal moves. In Shogi any illegal move counts as a loss, and then it makes no difference at all whether moving into check is forbidden, or just a bad move that gets your King captured. In Chess it would decide whether you have to take back the move that exposed your King, and continue the game from there, or that the opponent can capture it for the win.
I got the 1963 edition of Abbott's New Card Games, and it says the same thing with the same words as the 1968 edition concerning the object of the game. The object is checkmate or stalemate in both the 1963 and 1968 editions. Further details are in the body of the page.
Would someone be able to convert the following pieces from the Alfaerie Animals set to SVG? These are the only pieces from that set not yet available as SVG.
and 
and 
and 
The other pieces are already available:
I don't know about any of those, but I have managed to replicate my Okapi into SVG if you want it. (It's just the Kangaroo, with a couple of black stripes across the bottom.)
No, the Kangaroo is one of the pieces that is already available as SVG.
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I don't believe many people would say "in Chess the object is to capture the king, not achieve checkmate." I don't think anyone would say that. But that is what Abbott said about Ultima, as a direct quote.
The extra clarifying statement he added at the end ("not achieve checkmate") specifically denies the possibility that he meant "this is equivalent to checkmate."
If the rules of Chess stated "in Chess the object is to capture the king, not achieve checkmate" then that is what would happen. Players would likely still resign before the game is over, as often happens now, but someone determined to play the game to completion would have to get the enemy king off the board to win. I think the wording that was used makes this very clear.
The examples Abbott laid out show that even when the king is guaranteed to be captured on the next turn, play still continues with both players moving normally. If the "winning" player doesn't perform the capture, then they don't win, and the game would continue until one of the kings was captured.
Could you elaborate on this? Apologies if I'm overlooking something, as I may have parsed through everything Abbott has ever written at this point, and it's a lot to keep track of.
From what I've seen, in all 4 instances where Abbott published an explanation about the rules of Ultima over the span of 42 years, he has always said you can capture the enemy king directly. In none of them does he suggest you're allowed to undo this outcome if it resulted from an illegal move, nor does he otherwise imply you have the right to redo moves without consequence. Again however, if I've overlooked something please let me know.
I'm not seeing anything Abbott has said that outlines special considerations for someone ending their turn with their king in an attacked position. If there are no rules addressing it, then presumably it would need to be resolved either by the rules or by the players making something up themselves. If it's determined by the rules, the only rule that seems related at all to this scneario is the first one: you are allowed to capture the enemy king.
Looking at Shogi, the 将棋連合規定 offers a similar resolution: If a player's move leaves their own king in check, and their opponent points it out, the player immediately loses the game. The outcome of this scenario is mechanically equivalent to the opponent noticing the king is being attacked and capturing it.
Then again, on the chessvariants page for Shogi, I don't see any mention of how these types of situations are resolved. Presumably it is left as an exercise for the players to decide how they'd like to resolve a rules breach when it arises. Perhaps that could be assumed here as well.
All I know is that throughout his entire life, Abbott has been very consistent with his choice of wording for what "the object of the game" is in Ultima, and yet in our "object of the game" section we aren't respecting that wording. We're actually saying the exact opposite.
When a game's creator states "the object of the game is to capture the king" multiple times, and eventually elaborates to specifically say "the object of the game is to capture the king, not achieve checkmate," it seems inappropriate to write that the object of the game is to "achieve checkmate."
I'd hope we could just write what the creator said, instead of the exact opposite of what he said. His own words aren't going to misrepresent him.