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Dimachaer ChessA game information page . Introducing the Dimachaer, a bifurcation piece that always lands on the diagonal second leg (zrf available).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 10, 2009 12:39 PM UTC:
Well, I play them in pairs, so that doubles the advantage in the starting position to 1/3 of a Pawn. And Pawn odds is a pretty large advantage in normal Chess: it creates a score of about 68%. The white advantage has been estblished (from statistics of Grand Master games) to create an advantage of 53-54%, which is about 1/6 of a Pawn.

I guess the reason the Dimachaer is worth nearly a Knight is because in the early game phase when the board is still densely populated it has a very good forward forking ability, while every non-Pawn is a potential target. So it is almost always possible to force trading it for at least a Knight. I could run another experiment programming the value to between Knight and Bishop. This would already cause a major strategy change in the handling of the Dimachaer, as the program would not spontaneously rade it for a Knight anymore, but would wait for a chance to trade it for a Bishop. If this is good strategy, the value might go up to being close to a Bishop. OTOH, it might on average not be able to force such a trade, and then it would be stuck with a worthless Dimachaer in the end-game so often that it hurts more than it helps. The fact that it tests less valuable than a Knight now already suggest that it is already inferior to a Knight in the early middle game, as even when it could always be traded succesfully before th end-game, it is present for at last part of the game in every game, and does not seem to be able to creat an advantage during that time (e.g. by gaining Pawns).

I guess that pieces dependent on sceens and platforms only start to suffer when the population density starts to fall as low as about one piece per rank or line. Before that they will virtually always find a platform on their path, and it does not help much if there are two or three on their path: they can only use the first one. In fact the Colliding Bifurcation pieces, which do not only need a screen, but need a distant screen, might start to suffer again if the population density gets really high, because they can be blocked.