H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Sep 11, 2016 05:46 AM EDT:
Indeed, the latter is correct. A 14x12 board would leave only two 'guard files', and Camels/Zebras can jump over such a barrier.
I guess it would be possible to rework the code of Fairy-Max for rotating the board, so that the limitation would be on the number of ranks, rather than the number offiles. 'Landscape' boards are much more common than 'portrait' boards. (Xiangqi is the oly variant I know with a portrait board.) This is not totally impossible now that promotion information from Pawns is taken from a board-size table, rather than derived in a tricky way from the bit pattern of the square numbers. (Thisis the reason Fairy-Max now can domore than 8 files in the first place.) One could just initialize the table in a rotated way as well. It would also affect the code for printing and reading moves, and code for Pawn evaluation. So all in all it might still be a lot of work, and it is questionable whether it will be worth it.
Indeed, the latter is correct. A 14x12 board would leave only two 'guard files', and Camels/Zebras can jump over such a barrier.
I guess it would be possible to rework the code of Fairy-Max for rotating the board, so that the limitation would be on the number of ranks, rather than the number offiles. 'Landscape' boards are much more common than 'portrait' boards. (Xiangqi is the oly variant I know with a portrait board.) This is not totally impossible now that promotion information from Pawns is taken from a board-size table, rather than derived in a tricky way from the bit pattern of the square numbers. (Thisis the reason Fairy-Max now can domore than 8 files in the first place.) One could just initialize the table in a rotated way as well. It would also affect the code for printing and reading moves, and code for Pawn evaluation. So all in all it might still be a lot of work, and it is questionable whether it will be worth it.