New Wa-Shogi AI

[H.G. Muller]

For those interested in Wa Shogi with drops:

I developed an AI for playing chess variants with piece drops, large
enough to handle the board and number of piece types of Wa Shogi. I
casted it in the form of an engine for the WinBoard/XBoard graphical
user interface. It is called CrazyWa, and apart from Wa Shogi with drops
it can also play regular Shogi, mini-Shogi, Judkins'Shogi, Tori Shogi
and Crazyhouse (= international Chess with drops). For the latter games
there already existed (often stronger) engines, however.

I prepared a package with WinBoard and CrazyWa (as well as some other
engines for non-Shogi variants), which can be dowloaded from
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-AA.zip . You can select CrazyWa as engine
from the startup dialog, and then 'crazywa' (short for 'Wa Shogi with
drops'), or one of the other variants you want to play, from the New
Variant menu dialog.

Note that this WinBoard version uses western-style pictograms for
displaying pieces; I currently do not have any bitmap images of Wa
pieces that WinBoard could use as external bitmaps.

Have fun!

[Roger Hare]

On Sunday, 1 January 2017 13:52:40 UTC, H.G.Muller wrote:

For those interested in Wa Shogi with drops...

Is this the same package as the one which includes Shogi, Chu Shogi,
Sho Shogi, Dai Shogi, Tori Shogi, Judkins Shogi, Mini-Shogi and Heian
Shogi?

Thank you.

RH

[H.G. Muller]

Op 1/1/2017 om 5:35 PM schreef 'Roger Hare' via SHOGI-L:

Is this the same package as the one which includes Shogi, Chu Shogi,

Sho Shogi, Dai Shogi, Tori Shogi, Judkins Shogi, Mini-Shogi and Heian
Shogi?

No, it is not. In fact it uses a different version of the WinBoard interface. The older package
used a specially adapted version of WinBoard, which has the rules (and kanji) for the
Shogi variants built in. It did not have Wa Shogi as a pre-defined variant, however.

The new package uses the latest 'official' WinBoard, which knows no kanji, and only the
rules of regular and Chu Shogi. But it is a much more recent version, which can do all kinds
of wonderful things. One of which is receive a game definition from the engine to become
fully aware of the rules of games it did not know itself. This means it was easy to use it as
an interface for Wa Shogi: I just have CrazyWa send it the Wa definition at startup.

The old WinBoard version knows the kanji for Chu, Dai, Dai Dai, Maka Dai Dai, Tai and Tenjiku,
but it is very troublesome in many other respects. For one, all this Shogi support is built in
the platform-dependent part of the code, meaning it only works under Windows (WinBoard)
and not under Linux (XBoard). Furthermore, game notation is totally defective for the larger
variants (with more than 26 piece types), so it cannot store or read back games for those.

The past years I have been busy transferring much of the functionality of the old
WinBoard version to the standard WinBoard/XBoard, implemented in a different way.
I think that the latest version (included in the new package) actually should be able to handle
the Shogi variants larger than Tenjiku (with the aid of an engine that tells it the rules), as I
recently implemented triple capture (for Lion Dog / Teaching King). It cannot do Fire-Demon
burning or jumping generals for Tejiku yet, though. (But I have no engine for Tenjiku yet anyway.)
But rendering kanji is so far only possible in XBoard (on Linux or Mac). When I have solved that,
the packages can be merged into one, based on the latest WinBoard.

Thank you.

RH

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[H.G. Muller]

One caveat:

WinBoard supports 18 board sizes, but the package contains only a
complete set of piece images for three of those: the sizes 'bulky',
'middling', and 'petite'. I configured WinBoard to start in size
'middling', but it is rather easy to change the size (e.g. by dragging
the window edges or corners). This then can make all pieces except those
for orthodox Chess diappear.

To recover from this, use the View -> Colors menu dialog to select size
bulky, middling or petite again.