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Ok, here are the 2 apothecaries:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess+1&settings=Apothecary1working

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess+2&settings=Apothecary2working

They are mostly the same, so there is one or the other.

Please ignore the move forcing attemps. For now just the initial position matters. A long time ago I wanted to move forward. I still do. But the initial position still has errors and that should be taken care of first.

Give me a link to what you're working on, and I'll take a look.

Unfortunately I seem to still get the behavior I got two years ago, meaning the second part (the else part) of the code always executes in the two if statements conditioned by the coin1 and coin2 variables. I had tried to use rand 1 2 instead of rand 0 1  and set (rand 0 1) meaning adding parentheses. None of these work. They were desperate attempts anyway .

Game Courier selects a new seed for each game, and it keeps the same seed throughout a game. To test this, you need to make sure you are playing separate games each time. You could issue invitations to yourself, try it out on different browsers, or start each game in a new private or incognito window. If you go back to your preset's menu between games and refresh your cache, that should also work.

Hello everybody!

Once again I need some help with the game courier programming.

I am attempting once again to write rule enforcing presets for my 2 apothecary games.

In my first presets, which I use as basis for development, I had written a short code meant to choose out of the 24 legal initial positions.

Next there is an explanation about what the code is supposed to do.

As I have written in my article apothecary 1&2 have 24 initial possible position which can be chosen by 2 throws of coins and a throw of dice. The first coin throw would decide the placement of the major pieces. If it is centralized (on the d,e&g files) this should be 1 otherwise (on the b,e&i files) it should be 0. The dice throw then decides which of the 6 permutations of pieces occupy the 3 designated fields on the files decided by the first coin (they occupy the 2nd rank for white and the 9th rank for black). The second coin should decide if the bishops occupy the remaining files closer to the king (bishops in) when the coin is 1 or  closer to the edge (bishops out). Take note that the fields on the a and j files (ahead of the rooks) are empty.

In order to achieve  that I had used the following code for apothecary 1 (for 2 there is just a piece naming difference so far):

empty b2 c2 d2 e2 g2 h2 i2 b9 c9 d9 e9 g9 h9 i9
set coin1 rand 0 1;
set coin2 rand 0 1;
if == coin2 0:
drop Q any b2 e2 i2;
drop A any b2 e2 i2;
drop G any b2 e2 i2;
copy b2 b9;
copy e2 e9;
copy i2 i9;
flip b9 e9 i9;
else:
drop Q any d2 e2 g2;
drop A any d2 e2 g2;
drop G any d2 e2 g2;
copy d2 d9;
copy e2 e9;
copy g2 g9;
flip d9 e9 g9;
endif;

if == coin1 0:
drop N last b2 c2 d2;
drop N first g2 h2 i2;
drop n last b9 c9 d9;
drop n first g9 h9 i9;
drop B last b2 c2 d2;
drop B first g2 h2 i2;
drop b last b9 c9 d9;
drop b first g9 h9 i9;
else:
drop B last b2 c2 d2;
drop B first g2 h2 i2;
drop b last b9 c9 d9;
drop b first g9 h9 i9;
drop N last b2 c2 d2;
drop N first g2 h2 i2;
drop n last b9 c9 d9;
drop n first g9 h9 i9;
endif;

My questions are:

1. How do I know that the preset sets a new random seed, if it does, as I do not seem to find any mention on that in the developer guide besides the constants chapter (by the way the link to fisher random chess from the developer's guide seems to be wrong although I could find the game through game courier->games to play-> the letter F->...)?

2. How would I test that the distribution among the 24 position is constant? The play button (playing with myself) yields the same results always?

Thanks!

Hei, Nobody here?

Moreover, I want to try to implement these games which now seem better to me into ChessV2 (where 10x10 games look nicer and games are generality easier to implement).

There I want mostly to attempt to evaluate the piece values, using the HG Muller method.

This will be especially tricky with the joker does not have a fixed value as I discussed a while ago here mostly with Greg but depends heavily on the opponents material :)!

Then I'll try to automate the presets and change the 2 articles accordingly :)!

I hope this time laziness won't get the best of me :)!

Almost a year ago it seems I had promised the automatization of my two apothecary games presets. So far laziness got the worst of me it seems :)! But before that after good feedback from the community, my own thoughts on the matter and according to the initial plan I had decided to change the rules to both the games a bit.

I'll start with apothecary 2 as it has more changes:

1. With the exception of the knight there will be no more divergent pieces as many have told me they are are confusing (the ones here I mean).

2. The zebra seems to have too long jumps so I had decided to change the zebra to a second camel.

3. Now , according to 1, the camel is a full WL (in Betza notation). Because the name "camel" has a classic meaning I thereby rename this piece "the mameluke". As mamluks were many times camel riders and some of them were rising to the governmental ranks (wazir).

4.Also according to 1, the elephant now becomes a full HAF. I rename this piece a "siege elephant" inspired by the Khmer unique unit in the Ages of Empires 2 rise of rajas expansion, and it features the elephant origin along with the siege (0,3) flavor. I'm not sure if thorough history elephants were actually used in sieges. It would not make much sens to me as the eat a lot and are unpredictable :)!

5. The knight in this game is the omega chess advanced knight and thus has besides regular knight powers zebra just move powers. In Betza NmZ (although according to Wikipedia zebra is J so it could be NmJ).

In apothecary 1:

1. I did not want to have the same knight in both games so here the knight has (3,0) and (2,2) jump just move powers instead of the zebra ones. In Betza: NmHmA. There is no H in this game and the alfil jump is a nice addition as that square is difficult to reach by regular knight jumps. And the diagonal jump seems better to me than a dababah addition as there is already an orthogonal jump :)!

In both games

1. The joker insert rule does not seem to make much difference so I've decided to reduce the max dropping turn for white to 8 and for black to 14.

2. A player may promote a pawn to joker at the 9th or 10th rank if he does not already own one. Meaning a maximum of 1 joker/side on the board :)!

Yes, of course, use them just changing their Settings Name.

Welcome back and good luck in your aim!

@Carlos Cetina

Is it ok if I use your apothecary presets in order to write the enforcement rules for the apothecary games, as I don't seem to be able to find mine?

Thanks!

A personal note.

The crux of this post is that I was busy with my real world life the past three months and I got lazy about writing the game courier reinforcement rules for my two apothecary chess games, as I promised in early May. More details below.

Most of the month of May and early June I worked at an Romanian stock market trading company with Kazakh capital. I was unhappy that they did not provided the challenges I was promissed and the were unhappy because I am seemingly a slow programmer, so we've soon parted ways.

After that I had to interrupt the treatment for my mental illness that meant two difficult weeks.

After this I got employed at an medium american electronics company in Bucharest as an neural networks programmer. After two weeks I've decided to tell them that I used to be mentally ill, just in case the worse comes to pass. They have told me that I should have informed them on that since the interview and fired me oficially with no reason (as you can do that for the first 90 days according to Romanian law.).

So I don't have happy thougths to share but I'm back to the chess variants world, that's definetly a plus. First things first I will start enforcing rules for the apothecary games!

I hear your criticism though!

Greg, you may takeback until move 12. This rule is made too balance the advantage of white.

If the player forgets to place his fool he then forfeits the possibility. The problem with the loading has been taken care of in the proper save, it's just that i have not made public that one!

I didn't even notice the limit on droping the Joker.  These games have way, way too many rules, and many of them seem totally arbitrary.

It is very rare that anyone here at GC wants to play in private mode. All games in progress are public and you can access any of them from the main page: Game Courier Games Logs.

By the way, one question and one suggestion:

What happens if players forget to drop the Joker within the established period? Is there any kind of penalty?

At your presets you should check the "Exclude Pieces not in Setup" box, since [as Greg said] "otherwise, every time the page loads, it loads hundreds of pictures". Don't forget to SAVE the action immediately.

@Carlos Cetina &@ Greg Strog

Is there a way to watch from time to time your game, or is not public?

Enjoy your game guys!

OK... Great!

Sure, Carlos, sounds good.  I created an invitation.

Greg and Carlos,

Thanks for your help! I have a new job and I am caught now in new  things there. Also I moved to another city so my regular life it's all havoc now. But tonight I'm restarting my apothecary presets programming endeavors. So thanks and see you soon and updated.

OK, ready, I have just edited 2 new presets using the symbolic piece set.

These are theirs links:

Apothecary Chess 1

Apothecary Chess 2

The old ones using the "alfaeri many" set are these:

Apothecary Chess 1

Apothecary Chess 2

Thanks again, Greg. By the way, would you like to play a game of AC1 with me?

They don't have URLs, you just select them from the piece set list when editing a preset.  Pick the Apothecary Chess set group and then the two new piece sets will show up on the piece set drop-down.

Very good, Greg, thanks. What is the URL of said piece sets?