Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jul 3, 2008 10:25 AM UTC:
George Duke:
| Right, that paragraph could be improved, let's see. That was written 
| in late 1996, when copyright mailed in USA, and not revised for the 
| CVP 2000 article. If one King and Falcon stand on own back rank, 
| and other King at its bank rank, with no other pieces on board, no 
| checkmate is possible with good play.

I did some more tests using a converted Joker80 engine, and it seems that on a 10x8 board this statement is plain wrong. Joker has no difficulty at all in checkmating a bare King with King + Falcon, even if they all start from their own backrank (or even if the bare King can start in the center). Even if I let the defending side search 100x longer, making it search ~10 ply deeper, so that it sees the mate coming long before the winning side does, and would avoid it if possible.

David Paulowich:
| Falcon Chess has the opposite problem: I have not seen anyone state 
| that King and Falcon can force a lone King into a corner. 

OK, so I am the first then. ;-) Even an engine with a comparatively shallow search has no problems driving a bare King into a corner with King + Falcon, as long as it knows that it is bad for a bare King to be closer to a corner. Even if the defending side enormously outsearches it. This applies to 8x8 boards (where there is ironclad proof through an end-game tablebase) as well as 10x8 (where it is based on time-odds play testing).

This page really need thorough revision. Apart from poor presentation, some of the statements in it are just plain false, or very unlikely to be true at least...

Edit Form

Comment on the page Falcon Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.