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@H.G.Muller,

..Respected Mr. muller,

Question: How to express Non-crossable board positions such as D, H, WX, DX, HX, WXX, etc.?

Huge benefits with non-crossable board positions. could create thousands of fun chess variants, suitable for brain exercise mental computation and body fare.

Thank you so much!

Dear respected h.g.muller? why your applet page is not working now ? could you tell me what is happening? Thank you very much.

sincerely yours, Adella Hardy.

Thanks very much. I'm so grateful for your cherishable suggestions. After trying some of the cannon-distance-predestined system, it's so much fun, and very controllable in winning many moves, or board positions, or combinatorial tactical arraying of different-firing-range of different types of cannons, will hit desired targets in different board positions.

Thank you for your precious help on this amusing yet very accurate-counting-planning-pre-required chess variant. Voce ist eine beautiful star en el ciel.

1aa.  With cannon in location A1,  and pao buttress in A2,  how to cannon the target at location A4?  how to target A6?      I know that A1----A2 (buttress) --->A3 (target) is:   paW.     But how to write  A1----A2 (buttress) --->A4 (target)?

Note that the a1-a2-a3 hopper would be pafW. If you do not restrict the direction of the second leg, like in paW, it would also allow a1-a2-b2.

For a1-a2-a4 it depends on whether you want to put any conditions on a3. If that must be empty for the move to be allowed, you would write pafafW. So you would start with a 'hop on' leg (p) far reaching the 'mount', and then continue with two more steps in the same direction (f) instead of just a single step. By default the target square of a non-final leg must be empty, so anything on a3 would block the move. If you don't want that, you have to overrule the default by explicitly writing what the target square can contain: empty (m) or any piece (p). So you get pafmpafW when you want to allow the move in all cases (and thus effectively ignore a3).

1ac.  On diagonal Pao.   With cannon in A1,  and buttress in D4,  how to cannon target E5?   How to target  F6?   How to target  G7?  How to target  H8?  How to target I9?  How to target  J10 ? 

The diagonal hopper that must land directly behind the mount, but can have this mount at any distance (sliding towards it) would be written as the corrsponding slider (so B for diagonal), but to indicate that it no longer slides beyond the mount you would write an extra y before the a: pyafB. If you would want it to land two squares behind the mount, this would become pyafmpafB. The mp would indicate that the square between the mound and where the piece lands can be either empty of contain a piece. If you want to require it is empty you should have written pyafafB, which by default is the same as pyafmafmcB.

Dear respected h.g.muller,  could you do me a favor by answering some questions?

      1aa.  With cannon in location A1,  and pao buttress in A2,  how to cannon the target at location A4?  how to target A6?      I know that A1----A2 (buttress) --->A3 (target) is:   paW.     But how to write  A1----A2 (buttress) --->A4 (target)?  

     1ab.  With cannon in A1,  and pao buttress in A3,  how to cannon target at A4,  is it possible?  And how to target A6?    Let me summarize: A1----A3 (buttress) --->A4 (target)?        A1----A3 (buttress) --->A6 (target)?   


      1ac.  On diagonal Pao.   With cannon in A1,  and buttress in D4,  how to cannon target E5?   How to target  F6?   How to target  G7?  How to target  H8?  How to target I9?  How to target  J10 ? 


       Thank you so much!  My sincere gratitude for your precious suggestions.  And could I suggest that we could design a much more specific or clear-in-each-detail cannoning system?  It's so much fun, to lauch cannons, with Different Buttress Holding Locations, from different directions, e.g.,   prF. 

       And a in-each-detail-specific cannoning system could add huge amounts of  amusing physics, accurate counting-targeting,  logic, and other  tactic puzzles or situations never encountering before. And this in-depth detailed research will  elicit much more sense of probability winning control on chesses playing or designing. 

        Could you design more cannoning gadgets, or other specific detailed appliances, dear h.g.muller?  Thanks so much.  You are brilliant.

Dear respected H.G. Muller, how can I, using lamed or blocked system, get blocked forward wide horses (2 horses)?

How to write blocked backward-left wide horse ( only 1 horse), by using afsW system?

Thanks so much.

With blocked version such as a, af, we could create numerous amusing new checkmating patterns or puzzles. For instance, lamed horse, lamed Dababba, lamed camel, lamed zebra, etc., once released from being lamed, it could combine with checking bigger pieces, achieve a lot of valuable positions or pieces. And we could intentionaly lame ( block) or unlame (unblock) our own pieces for tactical benefits.

With unblocked DX, DY, AX, AY, etc., we could combine them with lame-able pieces to spice up combinatorial checking or tactical effects.

h.g.m, thanks so much. my sincere gratitude for what you've done.

I don't understand what you mean by 'unblockable aA'. If the piece you want would be on h8 of a 16x16 board, where should it be able to move to?

HI respected H.G. M, could you do me a favor by telling me how to get an unblockable aA? In aA, it's blocked. How do I get an unblocked thing? My sincere gratitude for your precious aid and suggestions. --adelle

• Mitsugumi Shogi

(Same as old page, but with the hyphen removed)

Link?

Mitsugumi Shogi seems to be missing. It doesn't have as many problem pieces as its big brother Suzumu Shogi, so it can be added to the list without much trouble. I've also successfully tested a modified NextLeg function, which relieves the AI from having to use cumbersome recursive functions to vet moves for the range capturing pieces, which I will implement in the CVP articles soon.

Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi have been moved to different pages. There is no longer a hyphen separating the words "suzumu/mitsugumi" and "shogi," so if those could be updated that would be greatly appreciated.

Also, Hanten Shogi and Gyaku-sama Shogi no longer exist, so they can be removed from the list.

OK, I added those to the list.

Some time ago I slimmed down the Quiescence Search of the diagram's AI, because in large variants with many powerful pieces it was still prone to search explosion. (It now unconditionally searches only Low x High captures that capture the last-moved piece, or punish moving away a (soft-)pinned piece; other captures need to consume part of any remaining depth budget.) Because of this diagrams that used impractically long thinking time might now perform acceptably. For instance, after this change I had no problems having the Diagram play Macadamia Shogi against Ai Ai. (But I still don't want to add Macadamia Shogi to the list, because it is not possible to enter the triple capture of the Lion Dog. Even though in practice there probably will never be an opportunity to make such a capture.)

Hectochess now has a diagram with playable AI. I also made a new variant, Banner Xiangqi, which has its own playable diagram as well.

However, I noticed that Ryugi was missing.

Oh, I completely missed that one.I added it now. 9 hours is pretty extreme. That was on 2 ply? There must be an enormous search explosion in quiescence search. I guess the problem is jumping generals, which can always make captures, mostly bad ones. And the diagram's AI doesn't use a transposition table yet. So if you have several generals, it will be trying all their captures in combinatorially many orders. In my Tenjiku Shogi engine 'Inferno' I solved that by riguorously pruning any H x protected L capture in QS.

Anyway, the diagram behaves badly for long thinking times, because the search is done by the main thread. This triggers complaints from the browser ("a script is slowing down your browser") if it takes more than 10 sec. I mus figure out how to delegate the search to a 'worker thread' that runs in the background; this is what Jocly does for ist AI. (In the 2-vs-1 checkmating appletI solved it by generating the EGT in steps, having each step schedule the next through a timeout, so that it could attend to other browser functions (such as actually displaying and formatting the step results) in between.)

I left diagrams where I was in doubt out of the list. That included most large Shogi variants, also my own 13x13 variants. These can be added later if they check out OK. Perhaps dai Shogi should not even be in the list; I never tried that one. Sac Chess also seems to give problems, at least at > 2 ply.

This is a very nice index you have so far. However, I noticed that Ryugi was missing. While it is admittedly not my favourite game, it is just as simple for AI to play as Yangsi, if not simpler. If you can add Ryugi to the list that would be great.

Also, my larger Shogi variants have diagrams that an AI can play as well, though not including these is sort of understandable, as the AI would of course take a very long time to make a move. I actually had the AI play a game of Taishin Shogi (my largest game) for the first 60 or so moves, and in the worst case it took upwards of 9 hours for the AI to make a move due to the sheer size and complexity of the game, which only increased as more moves were made, although this would theoretically lessen as the board thins.