Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 04:35:10 11/09/05
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Hi Harald and Reinhard, For the benefit of readers who don't understand German, I'll reply to Harald's translation rather than Reinhard's message: On November 08, 2005 at 14:03:06, Harald Lüßen wrote: >Sorry Uri-Babel, I could not resist. This is my translation: > >" >Chess-960 positions are a SUPERSET of positions of traditional chess. >Therefore it does not make any sense to make an either-or decision to >which this position belongs. From a strictly mathematical point of view, all of this is obviously 100% correct. From the subjective point of view of a chess player, it is not so clear. As you can verify simply by asking a few chess players, it is perfectly possible (and even very common) to have a strong interest in the subset known as classical chess, while finding the superset known as FRC (or Chess960, or whatever) to be irrelevant and completely without interest. For these players (and, for the record, I am not one of them) FRC does not feel like a superset of chess at all, but rather like a different game which gradually becomes more and more similar to chess as the game progresses. Which brings us to your next paragraph: >During a game, especially after both sides have castled, the resulting >positions can hardly be devided artificially in two sets. Situations >with few pieces can be looked up in endgame tablebases, which build >a common knowledge base. Exactly. When the user sets up a position and the position could just as well have resulted from a normal chess game as from an FRC game, there is no reason why he should set the FRC flag before sending the position to the engine. With a little common sense it shouldn't be hard for the user to make a sensible decision. >Where is the sense in a requirement to mark e.g. few-piece-positions >as Chess960 or traditional and then perhaps use different evaluation >functions for them? In few-piece positions it makes no difference at all, as you say. In such positions, my program (and, I assume, all other programs) would use exactly the same evaluation regardless of the game type anyway. But I don't see why the existence of positions where you cannot tell that the game was an FRC game can be taken as an argument in favor of never telling the engine what kind of game it is playing. The progress from an obvious FRC position to a "generic chess position" is a gradual one. What is the problem in telling the engine that it is playing FRC, and letting the engine decide when the FRC-ness of the position is a relevant characteristic? I don't see any reason why it is a problem that the engine receives a "setoption name UCI_Chess960 value true". After all, you are free to simply ignore this command if you prefer. >This is as useless and dispensable as an attempt >to distinguish Bavarians from Germans. I once met a Bavarian who became rather angry when he was introduced as a German. ;-) >Reinhard [poorly translated by Harald] The translation looks good to me. :-) >I think in most of his points (often written here and at other places) >he is right. But that is not enough. Critics are: > >- Some people just don't like Chess 960. They are happy if it has >problems. This is a point of view I just can't understand. Why do people care what games other people like and dislike? >They don't want to see it mixed with traditional chess. This, however, is a view I can easily sympathize with. For the millions of chess players who are not interested in FRC at all, it would be very frustrating to download big game files which are "polluted" with FRC games. At the moment this is not likely to be a problem, but it could quickly become a problem if FRC were to become more popular. I therefore think it is very important that games in PGN files are clearly marked as FRC games, in order to make it easy to filter them out when desired. Exactly how they are marked isn't terribly important to me. Just using a [Variant "fischerandom"] tag, like XBoard does, is fine. Comments about the different styles of FENs snipped, because I don't care about the topic and have no strong opinions. As long as I have a protocol that informs me about what game I am playing, I'm happy. Tord
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