Derek Nalls wrote on Sat, Jul 28, 2007 09:47 PM UTC:
We all agree that the relative piece values for FRC and CRC (to a lesser
extent) are reasonably well-established. I think we should reaffirm WHY
(even if it seems too obvious to some of us) in order to pinpoint what
important steps need to be taken to bring other desirable chess variants
into our realm of understanding.
Thru much human effort, relative piece values for Chess (FRC) were
understood with only a little less accuracy than today long before chess
computers and programs attained impressive playing strength.
Notwithstanding, powerful computers and AI programs are now available and
affordable even to individuals in the modern era. Accordingly, I think
this great resource should never be neglected and furthermore, should be
regarded as indispensible to our future endeavors.
Even in the absence of any predictive theory, a powerful program,
custom-written to play a single chess variant as well as possible, can
determine the correct relative piece values for an entire lineup of
pieces. The greater the depth (in plies), time or number of positions
searched per move throughout a playtested game, the more narrowly it can
define the range of correct values for each unique piece (although a
tantalizingly-large, range of values remains with any game playtested at
survivable times using today's state-of-the-art technology).
Since FRC & CRC are fairly, closely related, it seems probable that no
predictive, universal model for relative piece values will mature until
additional reliable, experimental testbeds involving less-related chess
variants have been created to test results against.
Forget about the Zillions Of Games program. It only plays chess variants
that are closely related to Chess reasonably well- NOT great!- when given
a lot of time per move. The less related a given chess variant is to
Chess, the worse the ZOG program plays to the point of taking an enormous
amount of time to make poor moves.
The recent development of achieving within-range relative piece values for
CRC is a useful roadmap. How did it happen? Out of appr. 8 billion people
worldwide, an adequate number of individuals took an interest in learning
to play one of a few popular Capablanca Chess variants very well. A
minority of these chess variant players succeeded at their goal. For
whatever reasons, three programs were written and made available for free
for the worldwide popular IBM-compatible, MS Windows configuration that
the best human players confirmed to be strong. In the course of making
each of these three programs as strong as possible at playing one another
and some of the best human players, the relative piece values for CRC were
refined to the point that improvements in playing strength no longer came
easily and quickly with adjustments.
How many efforts of this magnitude is the worldwide chess variant
community capable of? In any case, we need at least a few more.