Variant "nocastle" rules question

[Volker Pittlik]

I'm unsure about the tolerated opening position in the nocastle variant. In FRC they are some imitations and the have to be identical for white and black.

Is this true for the shuffle variants as well? Or is this a valid startposition:

Code: Select all

[Event "Computer Chess Game"]
[Site "vpittlik"]
[Date "2010.02.13"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Crafty-23.1"]
[Black "volker"]
[Result "1-0"]
[TimeControl "900+1"]
[FEN "qbbrnnrk/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RRKNBQBN w - - 0 1"]
[SetUp "1"]

{--------------
q b b r n n r k
p p p p p p p p
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
P P P P P P P P
R R K N B Q B N
white to play
--------------}

Shouldn't not all engines with the "setboard" option be able to play this?

vp

[Reinhard Scharnagl]

It is not understandable to me, where a problem should be. What could be expressed by FEN (or X-FEN ) should be supported by any modern engine.

[Volker Pittlik]

It is not understandable to me, where a problem should be. What could be expressed by FEN (or X-FEN ) should be supported by any modern engine.

The help pages on FICS haven't been so clear about it. I figured out how it should work.

There are in fact some problem for some engines in wild3 and wild4, because there is a different number of pieces than usual. It has nothing to do at all with the format of the game notation. More than one queen with all pawns in the initial position may be considered as illegal for example.

Meanwhile I have written some scripts to setup these positions correctly and can now play games in variants wild2 - wild4. If someone would like to have these bash scripts I can posts them here. Windows users need cygwin to use them. However, the results of the games are almost identical to those in normal chess.

vp