grenv: Absolutely not!

It is vital that players be allowed to double whenever the rules permit it. If a means is provided to forgo the opportunity, that's fine, but the system must not prevent doubling.

It is not all that uncommon that a player may wish to double while stuck on the bar -- maybe he has borne off all but one checker and his opponent has a closed board. In a situation like this you would require him to double at the first opportunity or not at all? But what if he decides not to double at first, or rolls without thinking about doubling, and then later decides he wants to double?

It is not the server's job to assess when someone's position has "improved", or whether doubling would be a good move. It is the server's job to enforce the rules of backgammon.

Furthermore, it is not necessary for one's position to improve in order for doubling to become correct. In the situation I described above, the player may choose not to double because he has gammon chances. After he dances a few times, those gammon chances will be reduced, and he will want to double. He must be allowed to do so.

Harassed: 1 and 3, then 4.

Actually, rather than showing race pieces as a different type of piece on the bar, I think it would be better to show them as standard pieces in another location, such as an extra column to one side of the board. But in any case there needs to be some way to distinguish them.

Fencer: I don't care what color. Any color.

You say "people" complained, but as far as I can tell there was only one: Walter Montego. I agree with him, by the way, that the best solution would be to let each user choose a color for each game type.

In the absence of user-configurable colors, I think it's best to have a different color for each game with nonstandard rules or objectives.

It's true that we could function without any colored borders, by taking the extra half-second to look at the game name. But the current situation, in which almost every nonstandard game has its own color but one does not, is the worst system I can think of. The colored borders used for Berolina Chess, Ambiguous Chess, Loop Chess, etc., lead one to expect that any game without such a border is played with standard rules and objectives. And while it only takes half a second to glance at the game name, one has to make a conscious effort to do this.

I'd like to repeat the frequent request for a colored border for Extinction Chess.

furbster: Quarto is a wonderful game, but apparently Gigamic won't allow Fencer to implement it. (See here and here.)

jurek: No, I haven't proposed any change to the scoring rules, only to the criteria used for determining when the game ends. Nevertheless, after thinking about it some more, I've realized that the two issues are not independent. My proposal is not suitable for use with BrainKing's Japanese-style rules, as it would have made joshi tm the loser when he clearly deserves the victory. I could say more about rules and scoring, but this is the wrong board.

I withdraw my specific proposal, but I agree with joshi tm and others that this problem needs to be fixed. Arbitration is not a perfect solution, but it would be far better than nothing.

jurek: Actually, under AGA rules, the two scoring methods are equivalent, and either can be used. Is the scoring method relevant to the current topic?

joshi tm: Certainly this problem needs to be fixed, and having an arbitrator would be one way to fix it, assuming that someone can be found who has the knowledge and the time and wants the job.

But there is a very simple solution that doesn't require any human intervention (except for a one-time bit of coding on Fencer's part). The rules of the American Go Association specify that when both players pass, fail to agree on the status of stones, and both pass again without placing more stones, the game ends immediately and all stones on the board are counted as alive. I can't think of any reason why something similar shouldn't be implemented here.

Walter Montego: I hope we'll have the option of using either kanji or directionally marked pieces. I personally prefer the kanji; they take a little while to learn, but before long they seem perfectly natural. In fact (and I know this sounds weird) I find it more difficult to play Shogi with the directionally marked pieces.

Of course different players will have different preferences. The directionally marked pieces will probably be easier for most newcomers to the game, while many experienced players (and a few oddballs like me) will prefer the kanji. So I hope we'll have both options, just as we currently do for Shogi.

Fencer: True, that may be a good reason.

Okay, how about Snakes and Ladders and Chu Shogi? ;)

Isn't Ludo luck-based enough? Do we really need a game in which neither player can ever have a choice of moves? Wouldn't it be more efficient to sit at home tossing coins all day?

Mr. Shumway: Yes, there are Very Fast Fischer's Stairs, but, as advertised, they are Very Fast. The only reason I haven't switched from Standard to VFF Stairs is that I can't be sure of maintaining an average pace of one move every 3 hours.

Fischer's clock would solve most of the time-related complaints I hear on BrainKing, if people would only use it. But a preference for Fischer's clock doesn't imply a preference for Very Fast time controls.

I'd like to request one or more sets of stairs that use Fischer's clock with somewhat longer time controls -- perhaps somewhere between 3/1/7 and 7/3/15.

headius: The advantage does not necessarily belong to the first player, although it generally does. In a game like Reversi, I suspect that parity considerations may be important enough that the second player has an advantage.

But the main point is correct: the only way to ensure that a game is perfectly balanced is to have perfect symmetry between the two players at the start of the game. Of the games on this site, only Backgammon and its variants have this property.

Anyway, this being the Feature Requests board, I'd like to say that I wholeheartedly support both volant's and Mr. Shumway's proposals. I've wished for such a feature for a while, but have had to settle for 2-game matches.

mctrivia: You've correctly pointed out a weakness of the Elo rating system, which is used here and in many other places. This system treats all players' ratings as equally precise, even though some have played many games and others have played few.

The Glicko rating system addresses this issue by introducing a ratings deviation (RD), which estimates the uncertainty in a player's rating. A very active player will have a very low RD, indicating that his rating is very reliable; someone who has played only a few games, or who has not played in a long time, will have a very high RD, indicating that very little is known about his true skill level. When new ratings are calculated after a game, both player's RDs are taken into account. If your RD is low and your opponent's is high, the change in your rating will be small.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Glicko system implemented here, as I believe it is superior to the Elo system. If other changes are made, I hope they are based on careful mathematical reasoning. Introducing ad hoc rules and drawing lines arbitrarily are, in my opinion, as likely to make the system worse as better.

Fencer: I realize that, and that's one of my reasons for not purchasing a membership.

Fencer: Thank you for the reply, which I take to mean that my feature request has been denied. Fair enough; it's your site.

Still, I find this change confusing. Yesterday, seeing smileys was a privilege reserved for paying members. Today, not seeing smileys is a privilege reserved for paying members. Why? This change affects only pawns, yet it was implemented suddenly at the request of a handful of rooks, and it remains undocumented here, here, and here.

To my knowledge the other advantages you refer to have not changed since yesterday. So if I have not yet purchased a paying membership, why would you expect me to do so now, simply for the right not to see smileys? There are easier and cheaper ways not to see smileys on BrainKing.

hexkid: I don't use Firefox, but I think I could do something similar in Opera. Your suggestion is much better than the others I've heard. Still, I'm nearly certain that I'm not the only pawn who prefers not to be deluged by smileys, so I think it would be good for BK to provide the option of disabling them.

mctrivia: No, I'm not kiding. I'm not kidding, either. And for me, at least, it's nothing to do with bandwidth; I simply dislike being distracted by all the colors and animations and assorted mayhem from the exchange of ideas which is the purpose of the discussion boards.

Now that smileys have been foisted on us pawns, can we have the option of disabling them? I'm not sure this site is worth it if I have to put up with all this visual nonsense.

Cartesian: I second that.

Nothingness: You're thinking of Bughouse. I'd like to see it here as well, but it may not be so easy to implement.

Also, I'd like to echo a recent request for Crazyhouse, which in my opinion is a better game than Loop Chess.

Fencer: Excellent. That's exactly what I hoped you'd say. ;)

Fencer: Fair enough. Certainly the code needs to be able to count territory if it's going to determine who is the winner. Identifying dead stones, though, is a separate issue, and counting all stones as alive doesn't necessarily break the game. But I'm sure you'll come up with a good system, and I can be patient. :)

One more question, and then I'll leave you alone:
Will Black play first, as is standard in Go?

Fencer: Go is coming! This is truly good news. Can you tell us which rule set (Japanese, Chinese, American,...) will be implemented?

Is it necessary to have the code detect live and dead groups? Even if all stones were counted as alive, in practice this would just require the players to contine playing until any dead stones were captured. Better yet, you could use the procedure recommended by the rules of the American Go Association, in which each player indicates which of his opponent's stones he believes are dead, and if they disagree, they play on.

BIG BAD WOLF: Suppose I like to use the word "euros" instead of "toothpicks". Does that mean I can send Fencer 280 toothpicks and become a Brain Rook for life?

BIG BAD WOLF: Surely the ancient Assyrians must have known the difference between a sphere and a torus.

Summertop: Those aren't ASCII characters. It's possible to use Unicode characters in a menu, but it might cause problems for users with older browsers.

mctrivia: PGN is human-readable, so one way to use it is simply to open the file in any text editor: you'll find some information identifying the game and a list of the moves in Standard Algebraic Notation. Also, most chess programs (e.g. XBoard/WinBoard) will let you view and save games as PGN.

I'm also in favor of Matarilevich's suggestion, especially since the PGN format allows one to store many games in a single file. Perhaps it would also be nice to be able to download all the games from a particular tournament at once.

While we're on the topic of PGN, I'd like to repeat my request that the PGN files for chess variants identify the variant being played by using the "Variant" tag (and in the case of games with different starting positions, the "SetUp" and "FEN" tags).

alanback: Ah, sorry to have misunderstood you. Perhaps you're right about the offtopicness of this thread; discussion of the "Sphere" Froglet name really belongs in the bug tracker rather than the feature requests board.

We understate our case, though, if we say it's only "for the sake of mathematical purity". It's as if we called a butterfly a giraffe and claimed that it didn't matter because the distinction was only zoological.

WhiteTower: Yes, the Earth is spherical in the relevant sense. But the point is that the playing area of the game called "Sphere" Froglet is not equivalent to a sphere. Look at a map of the Earth. Yes, the east and west edges should be joined together, but not the north and south edges. Or are you really suggesting that Greenland is adjacent to Antarctica?

Or look at it another way. Start with a rectangular piece of paper, and think of it as representing the board in the standard Froglet game. Now the rules for "Sphere" Froglet tell us that the left and right edges should be joined, and the top and bottom edges should be joined. So take the paper and first join the left and right edges. We now have a cylindrical tube. Then if we join the top and bottom edges (this may require the paper to be a bit stretchy) we have something in the shape of a doughnut, which is called a torus. The name is not what's important here, and in my view Doughnut Froglet would be as good a name as Torus Froglet. The point is that it is in no way equivalent to a sphere, and hence "Sphere" Froglet is a misnomer.

alanback: You and others have used the phrase "mathematical correctness" (or "mathematically correct") as if the word "mathematical" somehow means that correctness is of no importance. It seems to me that when we have a choice between correctness and incorrectness, we should choose correctness. Why should it matter whether it's mathematical, topological, topographical, geographical, geological, biological, anthropological, etymological, or entomological?

plaintiger: Again, that would be Torus Anti-Froglet.

Also, PGN files for games on boards other than 8x8, such as Los Alamos Chess, should probably have the starting position specified using the FEN tag.

It would be nice if the PGN files for chess variants included a tag identifying the variant being played. For example, the PGN file for a game of Berolina Chess should include the line [Variant "Berolina Chess"].

Shogi variants would be great. Tori shogi would be a good one to start with, as it's small enough that the piece movements can be learned quickly. Another one to consider might be Minishogi, which looks like the Los Alamos Chess of the shogi world: standard pieces and rules on a 5x5 board.