All About MiniChess
MiniChess is a cut-down variant of Speed Chess, designed to be extremely simple to learn, extremely quick for humans to play, and extremely easy for machines to play. How…extreme. This wiki is MiniChess central, and is intended to contain information on all things MiniChess.
Rules Of MiniChess
There are currently two variants of MiniChess. The rules for the current variant, MiniChess 2009, are given here.
An older variant, MiniChess 2007, is identical except that the bishop moves as a normal chess bishop. This makes the bishop fairly useless given the limited mobility of the MiniChess board and the two sides' bishops being stuck on opposite colors from each other and from the opposing king.
The standard time controls for MiniChess are 5 minutes per side per game.
Online Play
The Internet MiniChess Server (IMCS) is currently running on svcs.cs.pdx.edu port 3589. You can telnet there to play as a human, or have your program connect there to play; use the "help" command to find out how. This is all preliminary, primitive and potentially unreliable, and will be upgraded substantially over time.
IMCS is, of course, open source. See the IMCS page at BartForge for source code information.
An anonymous student has written a client wrapper script to make it easier to connect computer MiniChess clients to IMCS. See the skirmish page at BartForge for source code and instructions.
For logs of all games played on IMCS, please see http://wiki.cs.pdx.edu/minichess/logs.
History of MiniChess
MiniChess was created for Bart Massey's December 2006 short course on adversary search taught during International Week at FH Wurzburg-Schweinfurt in Germany, and was taught during Bart's Spring 2007 adversary search class at Portland State University, and again during the April 2009 FHWS International Week. It is currently being taught again during Bart's Spring 2009 adversary search course.
The students involved in all of these courses have had a major impact on MiniChess. There are too many to credit individually, but Bart is extremely grateful to all of them for their insights, improvements and hard work.
Computer MiniChess Tournaments
There have been three Computer MiniChess tournaments, a the end of each of the three course offerings described above. The contestants and winners will be listed here when Bart gets a few minutes to look everything up.
Computer Play Tutorial
Bart has written a tutorial on how to do adversary search, in the form of instructions on how to build a MiniChess player.
XBoard patches
Bart submitted patches to XBoard 4.2.7 to enable it for MiniChess 2007 and 2009. However, the XBoard folks are currently (May 2009) in the middle of a huge XBoard / Winboard merge and update. Once things settle down, Bart will probably try again.