Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Oct 9, 2016 08:36 AM UTC:

The best place to discuss about Chessprogramming is the programming section of the TalkChess forum. I posted a tutorial for interfacing engines with WinBoard on WinBoard Forum.

If your main interest is in large variants, it is probably best to use a mailbox representation of the board. Mij preferred way for generating moves is to associate a 0-terminated list of board steps with each piece,one for every direction it moves in. A move generator can then for each piece loop over these directions, and for each direction loop over distances if teh piece is a slider.

Fairy-Max it also keeps a secondary step and primary and secondary 'move rights' for each such direction, to allow for bent moves like those of the Griffon or Xiangqi Horse. This limitation to two legs is not completely general, however. For the diagram I therefore expanded this system to a sort of interpretable intermediate code, where each direction can consist of an arbitrary number of (boardStep, range, rightsFlag) triple,which each in addition list how many legs of the move in this direction still follow (so they can be skipped if the move fails to meet the reqirements indicated by the rightsFlag in an earlier leg, e.g. if the XQ Horse finds its first square blocked). So there really is a 0-terminated list of (boardStep, range, rightsFlag, remainingLegs) quadruples, where each direction first loops over legs (until it finds remainingLegs = 0), and each leg then loops over distance if the range fieldfor it specifies so.

In the diagram script I compile the Betza move descriptors to such lists, writing a separate description for each allowed direction (or combination of directions, if it is a multi-leg move) of an atom. E.g. the XQ Horse, afsW, would get 8 moves each consisting of two legs, because the first leg allows all four W steps, and the second step doubles the number of paths by allowing two different continuations through the s = l + r specification. For each of the 16 legs the step direction is then unique, and the step can be obtained by rotating the basic atom step in that direction.


Edit Form
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.