H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, May 2, 2019 09:43 AM UTC:
Greg Strong:
Any guess when you think you'll have your new cwda engine ready for testing?
Hard to say; perhaps 2 weeks if I would give it priority. But the Tenjiku Shogi implementation in Jocly is still not finished, and already 2 months (of 4) have elapsed on its clock in the yearly Modern Tenjiku correspondence championship in which it is supposed to participate...
Main issue is that I want it to recognize drawishness through lack of mating potential, which would include strongly discounting the score in end-games like KBBPKBN, because of the almost undodgeable N-for-P sac leaving a KBBKB known general draw. This requires the knowledge of which Pawnless 5-men CwDA endings are general draws, which I must first aquire by generating EGT for those (with FairyGen). And there are rather many of those, especially if I want to keep open the possibility to test individual pieces out of their own context (i.e. dropping the requirement that the two pieces fighting on one side must belong to the same army, so that I can test, say, WD+R vs R to see if the (winning) advantage of a WD is preserved on adding equal pieces on each side). An additional complication is that the standard version of FairyGen counts on 8-fold symmetry, although I once made a compile that can handle 4-fold symmetric pieces. But even that would not be able to handle the Nutters pieces other than Fibnif.
Otherwise there are only minor issues; KingSlayer supported only 6 piece types (1-6, code 0 being reserved for empty squares), and I already added some initialization code to set their move tables to that of the various armies. I still want to allow use of code 7 as an extra piece type, which requires a small code change because originally I used the 7th entry in the array that counts the number of pieces that is present of each type to hold the 'game phase' (minors + 2*Rooks + Queens). So I must move that to a separate array. And I still have to fix a-side castling for the Clobberers.
Hard to say; perhaps 2 weeks if I would give it priority. But the Tenjiku Shogi implementation in Jocly is still not finished, and already 2 months (of 4) have elapsed on its clock in the yearly Modern Tenjiku correspondence championship in which it is supposed to participate...
Main issue is that I want it to recognize drawishness through lack of mating potential, which would include strongly discounting the score in end-games like KBBPKBN, because of the almost undodgeable N-for-P sac leaving a KBBKB known general draw. This requires the knowledge of which Pawnless 5-men CwDA endings are general draws, which I must first aquire by generating EGT for those (with FairyGen). And there are rather many of those, especially if I want to keep open the possibility to test individual pieces out of their own context (i.e. dropping the requirement that the two pieces fighting on one side must belong to the same army, so that I can test, say, WD+R vs R to see if the (winning) advantage of a WD is preserved on adding equal pieces on each side). An additional complication is that the standard version of FairyGen counts on 8-fold symmetry, although I once made a compile that can handle 4-fold symmetric pieces. But even that would not be able to handle the Nutters pieces other than Fibnif.
Otherwise there are only minor issues; KingSlayer supported only 6 piece types (1-6, code 0 being reserved for empty squares), and I already added some initialization code to set their move tables to that of the various armies. I still want to allow use of code 7 as an extra piece type, which requires a small code change because originally I used the 7th entry in the array that counts the number of pieces that is present of each type to hold the 'game phase' (minors + 2*Rooks + Queens). So I must move that to a separate array. And I still have to fix a-side castling for the Clobberers.