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| Muller, no, it's not written in the same language as Axiom. Axiom 
| is not an engine. It is a language, close to Forth, which is used 
| for writing engines for Zillions. 

From the way I understand the Axiom description, this is not correct.
Axiom is a general-purpose game-tree-search engine that uses the interface
and protocol specifications of ZoG, and can thus be used as a plug-in for
the ZoG GUI. Axiom can be customized for a specific game through a
powerful scripting language ressembling Forth. But the script in no way
describes an independent engine capable of playing the game being
described. It merely serves to inform the Axiom engine (a binary
executable in DLL form) of the peculiarities of this game (the rules for
making moves and the goal, with perhaps some strategic clues like piece
values). Just like ZoG contains an intrinsic AI that can be configured
through ZRF files with a lisp-like language, and Fairy-Max can be
configured through game descriptions that are lists of step-vectors for
the participating pieces in the fmax.ini file.

The Axiom language is only powerful because it includes primitives that
activate the power of the engine in the DLL.

| Moreover, advanced chess engines foremostly draw their strength 
| from advanced algoritm techniques, and certainly not only well-tuned
| piece-values. 

Sure, you got to have both. Buth the algorithmic techniques are well
known, and comparativey easy to program. Using all search tecniques that
are publicly known, together with  simple but not too rudimentary
evaluation, brings you at about 2400 Elo. (On the CCRL scale, where Rybka
~3000 and Fairy-Max ~ 2000). The remaining strengt must come from
selective pruning of moves that seem poor, or superior strategic insight
that cannot realistically be replaced by extra search depth, and both
requires expert knowledge of the game being played.

| Anyway, I only tried to give you some interesting ideas. Axiom is a 
| clever thing.

Ideas are always welcome, but this one simply 'doesn't fly'. Axiom is
clever, in particular because of its generality. That doesn't mean,
however, that it would automatically any game you give it a script for
very well. Its author stated that Axiom was mainly meant for connection
games like Go, and that for simple Chess-like games the ZoG intrinsic AI
might actually play stronger. But in both cases it will depend strongly
how wel the script that defines the game is written. And I can easily
imagine that you run into a barrier there much earlier in the ZRF language
tan in the Axiom language. But that in itself does not imply that it would
be easier to write a strong Axiom script.

It seems that the Axiom engine nowadays also has an accompanying free GUI,
btw, so it can be used indepedently of ZoG. Greg Schmidt (the Axiom author)
pointed out to me, however, that ZoG does not have as good an engine-GUI
separation as I thought. It can use plug-in engines, but for almost none
of the games there exist ZRF files for it actually does so. These games
are all handled by the AI that is intrinsic and inseparable from the GUI.
So it is not possible to play 99%+ of all ZoG games in any other way than
through the ZoG GUI. Which is then only capable of playing them against a
Human (or Human-operated computer) opponent. 

That makes ZoG quite useless as an entity to communicate with. It simply
has nothing to say...