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Now that there is talk about how to attract more attention for Chess
Variants, perhaps the following is an idea as well. It could be
implemented next to, and independently from organizing matches with GMs.

We could put some pages on this website where there is live broadcasting
of automated games of a few selected CVs between computer programs, say at
10 or 5 min/game, so that people can watch and get an idea of how the game
is played. To get an impression of what I am thinking of, see 
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/goths.html .

In my experience, people that say they are not interested in Chess variants
change their opinion quite easily if they actually see the variants in
action. Watching Chess-like blitz games has a hypnotic and adictive effect
effect on people anyway, they can't help but being curious at what will
happen next.

The demo above is just replaying a game I uploaded to the website at my
provider's server, and there is no game going on at the moment, so the
moves are not updated. If I would post the same page on my PC at home,
where I have a game running, anyone clicking a link to the viewer page
would get to see the game in progress being replayed at 1 move/sec, until
it reaches the current position. From then on it would wait for the
playing engines to append their moves to the file 'moves.txt'. The
viewer periodically polls this page, and if there are new moves, it
updates the display. The play can be fully automated, a new game starting
as soon as the previous finishes, between the same engines, or in a
round-robin tournament of many engines. In the latter case people would be
able to request the current standings and cross table of the tourney.

I have already run such tournaments for several 10x8 Capablanca
sub-variants and for Knightmate, and currently am preparing one for
'Nightrider Chess' (a variant that is not even in this pages, but which
some existing Chess engines do support, identical to FIDE Chess except
that the Knights are replaced by Nightriders).

So my idea would be to put a link in a prominent place on the
chessvariants.com home page to a 'gallery of demo games'. This would
lead to a page with some explanation of what people are going to see, and
a bunch of links to computers of people willing to run the games, each a
different CV. When people would click such a link, they would get a game
viewer page like the demo above, displayed in their browser. This
javascript-driven page, and the file with moves to broadcast the game,
would be fetched directly from the gaming PC. (An alternative would be to
install the viewer pages on the chessvariants.com server, and have the
computers that play the games upload a new moves.txt file each time a move
is played. This would require some alteration of the software, though.)

Good candidate CVs for live demo games would be:
* 10x8 Capablanca variants
* 10x8 Falcon Chess
* Knightmate
* Shatranj
* Courier
* Nightrider Chess


What do you think of this idea?