Comments by GregoryStrong

This is similar to Brickchucking Chess except that pieces aren't allowed to move sideways either. Also, in Brickchucking Chess, when a pawn promotes, it is oriented to move in the other direction. In this game, a pawn that promotes is forever stuck, and would be useless except for it's ability to check backwards.

Probably. The antelope and giraffe aren't adding any new directions but the camel and zebra are.

You can recover from this entry on archive.org, there wasn't much ...

This is a nice guide, and will be helpful.

I have one markdown question.  Is there a standard way to force a line break?  If I just put a single return, it is ignored.  If I add two returns, I get a blank line between the two.  I suppose I can just use the HTML <BR> tag but is there a markdown-specific way to do this?  I do this for things like:

Thanks,
Greg

I think we should keep the current WYSIWYG editor unless we find a better one. It is what I generally use. For quoting people and typing responses, often with formatting, I think it's the easiest and most intuitive of the methods. Mangling whitespace is a potential issue, but it doesn't seem to manifest much in practice.

How does the colourbound pieces bonus/penalty work when more pairs of colourbound pieces are involved?

The current approach is pretty simple.  First, it only applies to pieces that split the board into two regions.  Pieces with higher-order colorbindings, like Dabbabahs, are not considered for colorbound bonus/penalty at all.  A player is given a half-pawn bonus for having at least one colorbound piece on each "color" (see note below) and given a significant penalty for having two pieces on the same color with nothing on the other.

Note: All pieces with bindings that split the board in two are considered equivalent.  This is not ideal.  It is possible to have two different types of pieces that have two different "color" bindings that are not the same.  This happens in Alice Chess for example.  In Alice, both the Bishops and the Knights can only see half the boards, but they are not the same bindings!  (Any pair of bishop and knight will be on the same squares on one board and on opposite squares on the other.  The current strategy isn't smart enough to account for this.)

Does the endgame value of a piece influence opening exchanges, or is it just the middlegame value?

Endgame value will have no influence.  The evaluation of a position is interpolated between the midgame and endgame values based on the amount of material remaining.  It does not even start sliding from midgame to endgame until 20% of the starting material has been captured.

I have seen that you have programmed beautiful sun chess. Why not Xiangqi also?

The issue with Xiangqi is the very complicated and hard-to-implement repetition/anti-chasing rules.  I'm not even sure I understand them, much less know how to implement them (although I haven't really spent time on it.)

The page for Tigrey has now been published

This is a technical follow-up to recent discussion in other threads.  Overview: there are cases where whether a move is legal depends on what other moves are available.  These follow the general pattern where a certain class of moves are only legal if there is nothing else that is legal, in which case this class of moves all become legal.

I originally raised this in response to the Golem Chess rule that "a Golem or Half-Golem may not capture an opposing Golem or Half-Golem if the opposing Golem or Half-Golem is two squares away and defended by a piece on its own side" ... UNLESS there is no other legal move.  I then realised this was similar to the Losing/Giveaway Chess rule that non-capturing moves are only legal if there are no captures.  We discussed a plan for implementation, which I have started implementing.  While doing this, I found a place in ChessV where I had already encountered this problem and "hacked" it in a less general way and forgot about it ...  That is the Jumping Chess rule that if there is a piece on an edge square that can make a capture, the player must make one of those moves (their choice) but nothing else is legal.  Having come up with these three cases already, I must assume there are more.  So, on to how these can be solved in a universal chess engine ...

Typically, moves are either legal or not.  It is true that a move generator generates so-called "pseduo-legal" moves they might turn out not to be legal when made (if, for example, they expose your King to check or leave him in check.)  But when these pseudo-legal moves that are not really legal are actually made, it is detected that they aren't actually legal and they are skipped.  Details of how this happens varies but it doesn't really matter.  This is simple and doesn't depend on any other moves.  ChessV handles it like this: whenever a move is made, a MoveBeingMade message is routed to every Rule in the Game that receives that message.  The rule can then return an IllegalMove result code to rule the move illegal.  Besides exposing your King to check, other reasons exist such as a LocationRestrictionRule stopping your King from leaving the castle or your Elephant from crossing the river, or the TradePreventionRule making Lion "iron" by preventing captures after you've captured the opponent's Lion.  (As an irrelevant aside, MoveBeingMade messages are also handled just for the purpose of updating game state - such as the EnPassantRule determing when a pawn push creates the possibility of an en passant capture.)

But now we have pseudo-legal moves who's legality depends on what other legal moves exist.  This presents a new challenge.  The general idea is this: allow the MoveBeingMade function to return a new code, which I originally called IllegalUnlessOnly but am now calling FallbackLegality.  Moves of FallbackLegality are all legal if and only if all pseudo-legal moves are either FallbackLegaltity or IllegalMove.  These moves could be temporarily set aside and tried again later if appropriate, or, if appropriate, a new node could be launched with tail recursion wherein FallbackLegality moves would be accepted.  For purposes of this discussion, the implemention details don't matter.

So now that I'm actually implementing this, of course I've found an issue - which is the reason for this post.  What we have so far is straight-forward ... until we get to Quiescent Search.  I won't define QSeach in detail since I've explained it several times before, and since this conversation is only really of interest to implementers of chess variant engines who should know this anyway.  But in qsearch we only try captures so we don't actually know what all the legal moves are.  For purposes of determining the impact of this issue, a quick revisit of the three known use cases of FallbackLegality:

1. Losing/Giveaway Chess: If a player can make a capture, he must (although he can choose which).  So all moves which are not captures are FallbackLegality.

2. Jumping Chess: If a player can make a capture with a piece that is on a boarder square, he must (although he can choose which).  So all moves which are not captures of a pice on a border square are FallbackLegality.

3. Golem Chess: a Golem or Half-Golem may not capture an opposing Golem or Half-Golem if the opposing Golem or Half-Golem is two squares away and defended unless there is no other legal move.

Impact on qsearch?  For cases 1 and 2, I think there is no impact.  These rules already consider everything that is not a capture to be of FallbackLegality.  Easy peasy.  But #3 is a problem.  Here a capture can be ruled illegal if there is a legal non-capture, which we won't know in quiescent search.  We could generate and test them all, but that would be way, way too expensive.  (Something like 90% of nodes are qsearch nodes.)  So, if we treat this case like 1 and 2 and sweep it under the rug, we can consider a golem capture of the enemy golum legal when it is not.  This could have a dramatic impact on the score.  So I think we should not consider this capture in qsearch, since the circumstances where it would be legal are quite rare.

We could rule out all FallbackLegality moves in qsearch ... That would not affect case #1 at all and it is what we want in case #3, but it would be bad in case #2.  In case #2, we want to do exactly what we normally do - generate all captures and use our normal rules for FallbackLegality.

I think this is solved by adding another Game variable.  As I have variables for things like whether Static Exchange Evaluation should be enabled, I plan to add a Game variable called "ConsiderFallbackLegalityMovesInQSearch" to control whether normal rules for FallbackLegality should be applied in qsearch or if we should just rule all these moves out.  In case #1, the setting wouldn't matter.  In case #2, we would want the setting to be true.  In case #3, we would want the setting to be false. (This will result in an incorrect evaluation on occasion, but qsearch isn't perfect.  This is the lesser of the two evils.)

The idea of an infinite dimension on the board is interesting in my opinion.

That may be, but that is not what is described here.

Ridiculous means deserving mockery or being absurd. It is none of them.

Even the author disgrees with you.  The page is entitled "Chess On A Ridiculously Long Board".

The game we have here is not good as only Rooks and Queens can cross it

I would consider that a pretty significant problem.  I agree with Fergus' conclusion.  There are already at least two viable infinte variants on this site, and there may be room for the invention of others, but this page - as it stands - will not be published.

I agree with these comments. There are at least two areas of concern why this page should not be published in its current state: the writing and the graphics.

The bad writing is a straight-forward issue. The author may not be a native English speaker or may just not be good at technical writing. That's ok - that's why we have editors. But editors should not publish something without doing the (sometimes significant) work of rewriting. And content submitters should not be surprised if no editor chooses to take the time to perform the editing - particularly if the content needs a lot of work and/or the idea isn't that good to begin with. The editors are volunteers and choose to work on what they consider to be valuable. I can say that for me, personally, how much work I am willing to put into bringing a page up to publication standards is directly proportional to how valuable I think the content is to begin with. Given that there are now thousands of Chess variants currently, it should be no surprise that, as time goes on, it is harder and harder to develop something new that is noteworthy to the community at large. This website is not a dumping ground for random ideas.

The graphics are another issue, but one that is less clear. I don't like the Galactic graphics but there have been valued members (e.g., Roberto Lavieri) who have chosen to use them as their preferred piece set. I think there is room for debate about what we should ask of submissions in this regard. There are trade-offs. But as I see it, this page has two main graphics problems: (1) There are two completely different sets, neither one of which is standard or recognizable, and (2) GIANT pointless images. This page is an extreme example, but there are lots of otherwise very good pages where the graphics are much larger than they probably should be.

In my view this page should be unpublished unless/until an editor takes the time to correct these issues.

Thank you for making the diagram so we can test. Unless I'm missing something, it looks like white wins in 3 moves.

It’s not ready, it’s list, as notation, and for likers. This notation is used in my games.

On a page for a game you can say what letter you want for each piece in that game, but the list will not have a page of its own.    This page will not be published.

Ok, thanks. I was not aware of Sjeng. Open source too!

This game makes little sense to me.  You can capture a king by going through him, but this is not check?  And you can check a king with a piece that CANNOT capture him?

And if you can only capture by going through, the pieces on the back rank cannot be captured at all unless one of them moves.  A piece in the corner can not be captured except by a knight and only if one of the other pieces by him has already moved.

Finally, I will say this idea is not new and has been done better.  For example, see Jumping Chess.

You have many games waiting to be published, but the writing is very bad, so they would require a lot of editing.  And I am doubtful that the ideas are worth publishing anyway.

@H.G.,

In another comment you said "Actually it is Suicide/Giveaway that has no checking. In Losing Chess the checking rule does apply, and you lose by checkmating or baring the opponent."  This page is titled Losing Chess but says that other names are equivalent: Suicide Chess, Giveaway Chess, Killer Chess or Take-all Chess.  (The filename of the HTML page is giveaway.html)

According to this page, there is no check/checkmate but the rules for stalemate vary.  According to the Wikipedia page for Losing Chess, the "main variant" also has no royal king and a pawn may be promoted to a king.  But it also lists variant #3 with a royal king, which is also mentioned as a variant in Pritchard.

The page for the XBoard chess engine communication protocol lists:

So, I guess we had a number of variants that were collectively known under a variety of names, and someone gave specific names to the specific variants?  Which is a logical thing to do.  This page should probably be updated, but it would be good to know more about how this happened.

I have to agree with Fergus. You've created an interesting geometry, but then decided not to honor it.

I don't see this as a feature dedicated to a single variant, but as a general mechanism to switch off certain rules in the 'only-move' case

Certainly.  I'd imagine there are other cases that will turn up.

Actually, this could also be used for Losing Chess, where you can only make a non-capture if there are no captures.  So all non-captures could be IllegalUnlessOnlys.  Although this would be an inefficient way to do it since it's likely to happen a lot.  A more efficient way would be to have the losing rule listen for both MoveBeingGenerated and MoveBeingMade messages.  In MoveBeingGenerated it just needs to make note of whether any capture was generated.  This wouldn't work if we had to worry about pseudo-legal moves, but Losing Chess has no check/checkmate so I don't think that's a concern.

The description of the King's Flight is not clear on whether the King can leap over another pieces. It cannot, based on the Zillions ZRF also by Sidney LeVasseur. I will update this page to clarify.

Unfortunately, there is no way to do this at present. ChessV can be used to test changes to its parameters by playing against another engine, but as far as I know there are no other engines capable of playing your games. You certainly could run two instances of ChessV but they won't talk to each other.

I need to separate the game representation used in thinking from the one in the GUI. This would not only allow testing of different parameters but would also make multi-threaded thinking possible.

This has been published. I have edited the text to improve the grammar and clarity. It could still be better, but is acceptable. Thank you for your patience.

I don't have anything to release at this time

EDIT: I had posted a question about piece values, but I now noticed you already address this at the end.

There is much about this I don't understand, but let's start here:

The capture of opponent's pieces take place. The captured pieces start again from their base position on the baseline.

So let's say the first move a a1-a7, capturing the opponent's rook.  What happens?  Its start square is not vacant.

The piece you captured is called Hand piece, and the hand piece is placed on a Piece stand(the square plate on which you place the captured piece).

Does this mean you can only have one hand peice?  Or can you hold many, like in Shogi?

I wouldn't get your hopes up for anything that sophisticated. It will be basic, whenever I get to it. The Joker is not something I am interested in spending a lot of time on.

There are a couple of issues that have been raised in previous comments but haven't been addressed. It looks like Mats is still active, so it would be nice if they were addressed. If this idea has value, we should make a game page. Otherwise, this page should be hidden. (The GC games and presets would still exist.)

How do I delete a color scheme?

I guess I should add an option for that.  Presently, you'd need to remove it from the registry...   Run Registry Editor, go to  Computer > HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > ChessV > Color Schemes.  Then delete the key for the scheme you want to delete.

Is there a possibility to have a time handicap against the computer?

Probably.  I'm dreading doing any modifications to that dialog box - it was tricky getting it to look and work correctly.  Maybe I'll add the ability to change the clocks from within the came.

Is there a possibility of defining a color scheme with the script editor?

Sort of.  You can set custom colors for a game but it won't be saved as a named scheme that you can apply to other games unless you save it.  The include file for Palace Ninja Guards sets the square and border colors.  You can also set Player1Color and Player2Color in the same way.  NOTE: This is only setting the defaults for a game.  Any game you have already played already has your color choices saved in the registry so this won't change anything.  But you can delete the registry key for the game if you want and then it will reset to the defaults specified in your include file next time you open the game.  Computer > HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > ChessV > Games.

Yep, that did it

I believe this is possible. It would be helpful if you posted the link to the page you want reverted.

I'm not sure if I have the current build.

The latest is what I recently posted on the Avatar Chess page.

Add an adjudication coefficient with a default of say 10 pawns

This would definitely be useful

In the save file add the end add the total score

You mean at the end of the tournament, list the total win counts?

So this game begins with the trapped rooks getting slaughtered by aviators? That doesn't seem like very good design

The rules don't really say if the royal Queen can slide across squares that are attacked. I'm assuming they cannot.

Right. The first command adds the Massai to the list of types that resets the counter. The second command limits it so only moves in the specified direction reset the counter.

Under the "Modes and Other" section:

m ('move') can move to empty square
c can capture enemy piece
p can hop over an occupied square (the 'mount') in its path

I believe the "can" in each of these should be "must".  (May apply in other places too)

Helping to test game design is certainly an intended purpose. But do you need a new build just to correct this one issue? For test purposes, I wouldn't think allowing 2 jokers or not allowing promotion to joker at all would change very much.

I will need to do this game in C#. Because of the piece shuffle it cannot be done in an include file. But, in general, you would set the en passant givers and receivers in an include file like this:

FindRule( EnPassantRule ).AttackerTypes = { Pawn, Maasai };
FindRule( EnPassantRule ).VictimTypes = { Pawn, Maasai, Prince };

Is it possible to get the graphics in their original form?

Actually, please disregard.  I found the original SVGs in the PyChess source code.

Yes, Berolina pawns have additional complications

I just stumbled on a similar idea in Pritchard's Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. "Cataclysmo" by Bruce Trone, 1991. A piece's movements depends on the square it occupies. On even numbered ranks, a piece moves as a pawn. On odd numbered ranks, it moves as the standard piece that normally starts on that file (rooks on a and h, knights on b and g, etc.)

No mention of any special treatment for the king. Also no clarification of whether "even" and "odd" is in an absolute sense, or relative to the player but I think it must be relative -- that way, each piece moves from its initial position as it would in Chess. And nothing about castling, extended pawn move, or en passant.

This is an interesting game and I like the custom graphics. Is it possible to get the graphics in their original form? I'd like to make this available in the next version of ChessV and would like the graphics to look as good as possible.

I'm not really concerned about backwards compatibility, but on further consideration it is probably not worth modifying the program for this. It would make the program more complicated for very little gain. It is a very unusual use case, and there will always be some games that its not going to accommodate (Alice Chess, Backlash, Viking Chess, Marseillais, etc.) And since you mention Omega, yes, it has even stranger square naming. The four extra "Wizard squares" are annotated w1, w2, w3, and w4.

Hopefully one has still the right to have a different opinion

Of course.  What you say is your opinion, and what I said is my opinion.  Did I tell you what you can or can't say?  No.  It is just a discussion.  So your response is surprising to me.

It is the first time I hear that there is a minimum of games required. Counter-examples are many. In fact most of fairy pieces have been named by problemists on their very first use.

This response is also very odd.  Maybe we are talking about different things.  If you want to use these pieces in your game, name them whatever you want.  It seems to me you are saying that they should have universal names.  That is something very different.  And yes, you can have whatever opinion you want about that also, but do not be surprised when people disagree with you.  On multiple occasions, you have become very opinionated about how other people have chosen to name pieces in their games.

I do think they are worth of special attention, again is my opinion. I respect yours, respect mine.

Yes, I do.  I thought we all were having a discussion here.  Apparently, in your mind, something else is going on. Did I say someting intolerant or disrespectful?

But 'x' would not be acceptable, as it would make the SAN notation ambiguous: the is also used as a capture indicator.

This is an excellent point.  ChessV doesn't use SAN at all and I'm not really familiar with it so this didn't occur to me.  Probably best that I change the extra files to 'y' and 'z'.

I am not in favor of attempting any "standard" names for ski pieces unless they prove themselves to be popular. Right now, how many games have any of these pieces? Two? So I think a prefix is far more appropriate than trying to find new "standard" names for three new pieces. There are an almost infinite number of possible chess variant pieces, most of which are not worth using in most games. If you attempt to name them all, you end up with Man & Beast. Why are these pieces worth of special attention? They have not proven themselves with any popularity whatsoever.

the options to color the squares and use arbitrary sets of piece images has been there from the very beginning

Ok, sorry.  Not surprising that my memory is inaccurate ...

Anyway, it should be easy to implement an option 'fileLabels' that would override normal labeling.

That would be great, it its not too difficult.  Admittedly this is pretty unusual, but in the case of Brouhaha, I think it makes sense.  Games will often open with the usual moves and I like the fact that they are still "e4 e5 Nf3" ...

Regarding the array FEN, no, I am not asking the interactive diagram to generate it.  If I could add custom text under the list or under the board that would do it.  My appologies if this is already possible - it may well be.

There is something very strange with the title of your posting, which is not equal to the title of the subject thread.

Yes, my post was a standard reply.  Don't know what happened here, but probably another glitch of the site move.

Hmmm... You have a point, but I think "diagonally forward or orthogonally" is awkward. I think a comma clears it up: "Gold: steps one square orthogonally, or diagonally forward". Or if you want to be certain, at the cost of some redundancy "Gold: steps one square orthogonally, or one suqare diagonally forward". Your wording is also clear, but sounds awkward to me, although I'm not exactly sure why.

The what's new still shows negative seconds for anything within the last 4 hours. I suspect that it is a time zone issue since it starts at exactly 4 hours worth of seconds in the negative.

For those interested in testing out this unusual game, I have a new build of ChessV that plays it. Everything is supported except the rule where pawn moves to the last rank give you another avatar to drop.

http://chessv.org/downloads/ChessV2_Avatar.zip

NOTE: You may need to copy that link and paste it into your browser. Since my site is not HTTPS, some browsers will not follow the link.

Extract the zip somewhere, run ChessV.exe, and double-click on Avatar Chess from the games index.

They hop over the first square

How should the pieces in this game be annotated? Eagle and Elephant both begin with 'E' and Camel and Cannon both begin with 'C'. The Game Courier preset has the eagle as 'G' (since it is usually called a Gryphon) and the camel as 'M' (don't know why). Is this what you would like for the "official" notations?

I like the abstract pieces a lot and I use them when playing Gross Chess. But the farther you go from the standard types, the less well I think it works. In this game, you have Dragon King, Dragon Horse, and Amazon, and I don't think the abstract pieces are particularly effective.

I am disappointed to hear that Fergus requested you to use his graphics. I think it's fair to say that, while they may be good, they are decidedly non-standard. I do not think it helps our cause, (encouraging Chess enthusiasts to explore Chess variants), to make things appear more alien. Personally, I consider the standard for this site to be the Alfaerie graphics. Each contributor can, of course, choose whatever they like to represent their game.

What I think would be nice is to have buttons over the graphic which switch all page graphics between the options. I think H.G. has done this on some of his pages, but I don't know how it works. If it is not hard to do, I may start updating pages. OTOH, an argument can be made that the main diagram should be one of his interactive diagrams. Personally, I prefer to put the interactive diagram down in the "Computer Play" section, as I have done here,  But that may be because of my own biases.  The way I have the "Setup" section on that page is how I like to do it, largely because that's how it has been done here for a very long time (although I added the Initial Setup FEN.)

Thanks, Fredrik. I have reclassified this as a book and published the entry. Congratulations on writing a formal book about Jetan. I look forward to reading it.

You can play this with the latest ChessV release candidate: ChessV 2.3 RC2

Just unzip and run the EXE.

You could just use O-O for everything along with the king's destination square, like O-O b1

You could.  But, at that point, I would ask what value the "O-O" is bringing.  Wouldn't the more standard "e1b1" also accomplish that?  Although, I guess this would address the issue with (e.g., Wildebeest Chess) where the King can move a single space and still castle.  Perhaps if either "O-O" or "O-O-O" is followed by the notation of a square, it would mean castling to that square (and there would be no difference between "O-O" and "O-O-O")

By the way, details about programming are not clear for most people. How to deal with it?

I don't think there is any "fix" to this issue.  I am not sure there is any issue at all.  Some conversations are going to involve things other people don't understand.  That said, the talkchess forums are the usual place for these kinds of discussions, but I am happy to have some discussion here as well.  Some people who are not chess programmers may still be interested in whether the new neural-network techniques being applied to orthodox chess can be applied to chess variants.

It already is: https://www.chessvariants.com/play/enhanced-courier-chess

With a game as unusual as this, it's difficult to say without playing it, which I'm not able to do at present. My guess is that it would be difficult to see more than a move or two ahead with the pieces changing types on almost every move. Also, in chess the slow-moving interconnected pawn chains create a kind of terrain the pieces must move around. In this game, as soon as a pawn moves it's no longer a pawn, so the center of the board will be a free-for-all of powerful pieces. Still, it might be fun.

You do not need to get too caught up in the details. As I understand it, you are simply looking to make sure the game makes some progress and the person will eventually lose if they quit playing. "Correspondence -- Leisurely" will meet those needs. If you want to make sure a general pace of at least a few moves a week, with the possibility of a week or two off for vacation, then use "Correspondence -- Tournament".

Fergus, I'm stuck in our game. When I try to take the lance I get the error message "You may not promote your D Dragon_King to a +R Dragon_King"

I have published both and removed the page for the old preset.

Shatranj with Different Armies. Possibly a worthwhile idea... Only possibly, since Shatranj is such a bad game. I will digest this more and post further thoughts, but my first observation is that "The Japanese Jostlers" show a different icon for the Pawn, although the text claims it isn't a Shogi Pawn. Please clarify. Furthermore, I think Shatranj with Different Armies should follow CwDA in the core tenant that the Pawns and Kings don't change between armies. If you have armies with wild pawns, to me that is not "Shatranj with Different Armies" but something else.

It would be worth it to apply this in normal Shogi, to create a variant 'Impasseless Shogi'.

I would definitely be interested in testing out this idea.

@Daniel,

Now there's an interesting idea!

I will also note that some people would have religious objections to pieces with demonic names. When Hans was running this site, he would not allow some Shogi variants that included demon pieces. While I don't share his religious beliefs, and I assume Japanese demons are not quite the same thing as Christian demons, I see more of a problem with a game that allows for summoning demons in the more usual western sense. I will also point out that the pieces called Demon and Demoness are more commonly known as Dragon King and Dragon Horse, these being the names they have in Shogi.

I am a Christian but I see no real problem with these names.  I do think Dragon King and Dragon Horse are better names, both because they are established and because they are less likely to offend, but if the author wants to stay with Demon and Demoness, I don't personally think that is a sufficient issue to veto publication.  It is, after all, a game.  (And one of my own inventions would be problematic!  I now notice that page doesn't have the introduction where I described the origin of the name and the theme of the game -- an M. C. Escher drawing called Circle Limit IV -- I was working on that game and apparently never finished the rewrite...)

@Fergus,

I verified Máté's email address and set emailVerified in the database to 1 but I'm told he is still getting messages from Game Courier when making moves that his address is not verified. What am I missing?

Thanks, Sam. This is not too bad... I gather my algorithm was correct, but I assumed that the positions would be numbered 1-960 (as people count), not 0-959 (as programmers count). In fact, it looks like I just add one at the end after placing the pieces. Not sure where I got that - it's unlikely I just made it up, but it does seem that the consensus is to number the positions starting at 0. Anyway, easy fix.

Pythia is good. Pythoness sounds like a female python (a type of snake). I realize that's not what is meant but I think most English speakers will know of python but not this word so they will think of a snake.

Valkyrie is a good name. Heroine is not a bad name but unfortunately is also the name of a dangerous drug and that usage is probably more common.