Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Apr 20, 2009 11:08 AM EDT:Mats: 'But it's to few games. However, it could be a program problem. Maybe Zillions is intelligent enough to handle this piece well.' Well, 3.5-0.5 is indeed far to few games to conclude anything. It could easily occur in a match between two exactly equal opponents if one of them is slightly lucky (e.g. because his opponent blunders away a single win). I am at 366 games now, and the Guanacas lead by 57% over the Alpacas. When I reach 400 games there, I will delete the f-pawn of the Guanaca side, and see how they do then. (The Alpacas should win then by a similar amount.) Two Knights vs two Guanacos is at about 250 games now, and the Knights lead by 77%. Intelligence is usually not in the vocabulary of Chess programs. It is all brute search power, going through millions of positions with a very simplistic evaluation. (Counting wood or moves.) Especially for a generalist program like Zillions, that has no specific guidelines programmed in for the Guanaco for sure. I don't believe that handling Knights (or Alpacas, for that matter) requires less intelligence than handling Guanacas. I don't believe that Zillions would be any better at handling any specific piece than Fairy-Max. Fairy-Max is only a very simple Chess program, but despite its complete lack of programmed knowledge (except the piece values) it plays surprisingly strong in normal Chess, dominating over many engines that are stuffed with Chess-specific knowledge. Apparently it does not need any knowledge to handle its pieces intelligently enough to win; plain search is good enough, even in the end-game. From what people told me, I don't think Zillions would be a match for Fairy-Max in Chess variants with FIDE-like Pawns that they can both play. I have not tested this myself, of course, as Zillions is commercial software that I don't have. So it is just based on what people that do have Zillions told me. I understand that there is an adapter that allows WinBoard engines to play in the Zillions GUI. Isn't it possible to play Fairy-Max against Zillions automatically, that way? Then we could handicap one of them by time odds until they play equally strong in normall Chess, and then add or substitute Guanacas on both sides, to see if this breaks the equivalence because one side handles the Guanacas 'more intelligently' than the other. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID MatsNewPieces does not match any item.