From: ATKINSON%VAXROM.decnet.CERN CERNVAX BITNET Date: 26 jul 1990 Subject: No Subject comments on having read old logs except no 6 (won't let me have that cos I have used up my ration for today, it seems) 1) What on earth having people been saying in CHESS-L that is so cruel? 2) What other things like this are there? Is there a PBM list ( in the sense of Starweb, Empyrean Challenge, Fleet Maneuvers etc)? If so, how do I get onto them? 3) Wrt the psycho item: One of the less pleasing aspects of the SHOGI magazine that Hodges produced was the way the references to Chess were worded. I don't see that insulting players of other games helps anyone. Before coming to Rome, I frequented an 'Anything goes' style games club where anything was welcome - you go along with the rules for a 12th-century Tibetan game you found in a book somewhere, and people will try it. Chinese Chess, Shogi, Go, games from "Winning Ways", Civilisation, even Bridge (!). I am happy to play anything, and often do. Yet when I go to chess circles to look for people inclined to play abstract games (as good a place to start as any) they seem to think I am saying Shogi is better. Hodges often DID say that. The problem is that that will just get people's backs up. Shogi is different, and that is all there is to it. There is a body of knowledge devoted to it, so it is better off than recently-invented Chess variants in that there are experts etc. Some people seem to think Shogi is a "Chess variant" but it isn't - they (and Chinese Chess and makrook etc etc) probably all come from the same original game several centuries ago. I have heard this week "Go away. We play _intellectual_ games here." and "We don't play draughts at this club, we only play _Chess_" in very snooty tones. I don't play Go because I don't understand it, but I have nothing against it. Chess players are easy to find, Shogi players rather less so, so I spend more effort looking for them. Sorry if this is irrelevant - this is my first time on a BB that covers more than one machine. How worthwhile are the Nihon Shogi Renmei magazines for people who don't read Japanese? Are there enough gamescores and Tsume-Shogi for it to be worth getting the magazines just for those? An important thing to emphasise in the rules file is that you can promote when LEAVING the zone. This is already stated, but I have met people who learned the rules from "Games from everywhere in the local galactic cluster"-style books, and the most common error in those is "Pieces promote when they reach the last 3 rows". Leaving is not reaching, of course. Leggett's mistake also should be explicitly contradicted, for the sake of people who have copies of Leggett. Someone asked if drops were the thing that made Shogi hard to program, and yes they are. (I suppose this has already been said). The existence of drops makes the possible number of moves absolutely vast, making game trees (absolutely vast)**n if you want to look ahead n moves. Othello is relatively easy to program, as with alpha-beta and pre- sorting and so on you can end up with an effective branching factor of about 8 or less, I think. Go obviously has a branching factor in the "rather high" region. Symmetry could reduce this quite a bit. The distance you would need to look ahead to play Go tactically by computer would be unreal, and I am told that strategic play is a pattern-recognition thing that is hard to program. Computers are totally dire at Go, I am told. Looking ahead only 8 moves in Go helps you not at all, especially as you need a decent evaluation function of the position 8 moves ahead or you might as well not bother generating the position at all. Sorry, I'm talking nonsense. I'll shut up now.