Developer(s) | Zillions Development Corp. |
---|---|
Stable release | 2.0.1 / 2003 |
Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
Type | General game playing |
Website | www |
Zillions of Games [1] [2] is a commercial general game playing system developed by Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler in 1998. [3] The game rules are specified with S-expressions, Zillions rule language. It was designed to handle mostly abstract strategy board games or puzzles. [4] After parsing the rules of the game, the system's artificial intelligence can automatically play one or more players. It treats puzzles as solitaire games and its AI can be used to solve them.
The scripting language of Zillions-of-Games uses S-expressions. The rules are stored in a text file with the extension ".zrf" (Zillions rules file). The users can create their own ZRF-files and make the AI of Zillions-of-Games play their newly created game. The definition of games usually contains the following pattern: [5]
Zillions of Games is so called because of its potential to play a very large number of user-programmed games. The system is shipped with over 300 games and puzzles. These include a lot of popular board games, such as Alquerque , Fox and geese , Go , Gomoku , Jungle , Halma , Nim , Nine men's morris , Reversi , Tafl and Tic-tac-toe . The package includes many checkers variants, for example Russian and Turkish Checkers . Besides standard FIDE chess, Zillions of Games contains many national chess variants such as shogi, xiangqi, janggi, as well as a number of popular chess variants like Ultima, Extinction chess, Losing Chess, shatranj, Berolina chess, Grand Chess and others. It also include some puzzles, such as 15-Puzzle, Towers of Hanoi, eight queens, and a variety of Solitaires.
Not long after it came to market in late 1998, users of Zillions of Games began to program new games and puzzles for it, creating many of them themselves. Two large collections of Zillions Rules Files (ZRFs) soon began to appear. One was at the Zillions-of-Games website, and the other was at the Chess Variant Pages website. [6] The former collected together every kind of ZRF, whereas the latter focused on ZRFs for chess variants. As of November 2017, the ZILLIONS interface had 2,577 ZRF's, created by 462 ZRF authors, [7] and the Chess Variant Pages collection had 794 ZRF's of chess variants.
The games programmed by the users include such games as 4D Tic-Tac-Toe, FreeCell, Rubik's Cube, Teeko, Mancala, Alice Chess, Chess960, Hexagonal chess, Star Trek Tri-Dimensional Chess and Sokoban. Besides various games and puzzles, there are also educational ZRFs, such as the cellular automata Game of Life, a calculator, and some Turing machine simulations.
Zillions of Games can be used for the following:
Zillions represents boards and pieces with bitmap images; these can be remapped by the user. The boards may be arbitrary directed graphs, but standard grid-like boards are easier to produce and have built-in support for detecting collinearity. The available win, loss, and draw conditions include checkmate, stalemate, repetition, piece capture, absolute configuration, relative configuration, and various types of piece count. These allow the creation of a variety of different games and puzzles.
Besides defining how pieces move, Zillions can define how pieces may be dropped. This is for introducing new pieces into a game. It is not useful for shogi, which "drops" captured pieces stored on the sides of the board. It is for games like Go, Reversi, and Tic-Tac-Toe, which routinely allow users to add new pieces to the board. As with piece movement, this is defined algorithmically, and it can be something as simple as letting a new piece drop only on an empty space or follow more complex rules.
Since version 2.0, Zillions has had the additional ability to enforce maximal capturing rules (used in some versions of Checkers) and a full-featured Go-playing engine.
Zillions includes a "random player" which selects from its available moves at random; this can be used to simulate dice in race games and Backgammon relatives. [4]
The standard AI engine can, if need be, be replaced with user-created engines. These engines can then use opening books or other features unavailable to the standard AI. [8]
Despite its versatility, Zillions of Games has a number of non-trivial limitations:
Many of these limitations can be bypassed using extensions such as Axiom Development Kit. [9]
Shogi, also known as Japanese chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, and janggi. Shōgi means general's board game.
Checkers, also known as draughts, is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".
Three-dimensional chess is any chess variant that replaces the two-dimensional board with a three-dimensional array of cells between which the pieces can move. In practice, this is usually achieved by boards representing different layers being laid out next to each other. Three-dimensional chess has often appeared in science fiction—the Star Trek franchise in particular—contributing to the game's familiarity.
XBoard is a graphical user interface chessboard for chess engines under the X Window System. It is developed and maintained as free software by the GNU project. WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Microsoft Windows.
Grand Chess is a large-board chess variant invented by Dutch games designer Christian Freeling in 1984. It is played on a 10×10 board, with each side having two additional pawns and two new pieces: the marshal and the cardinal.
A fairy chess piece, variant chess piece, unorthodox chess piece, or heterodox chess piece is a chess piece not used in conventional chess but incorporated into certain chess variants and some chess problems. Compared to conventional pieces, fairy pieces vary mostly in the way they move, but they may also follow special rules for capturing, promotions, etc. Because of the distributed and uncoordinated nature of unorthodox chess development, the same piece can have different names, and different pieces can have the same name in various contexts as it can be noted in the list of fairy chess pieces.
Sittuyin, also known as Burmese chess, is a strategy board game created in Myanmar. It is a direct offspring of the Indian game of chaturanga, which arrived in Myanmar in the 8th century thus it is part of the same family of games such as chess, and shogi. Sit is the modern Burmese word for "army" or "war"; the word sittuyin can be translated as "representation of the four characteristics of army"—chariot, elephant, cavalry and infantry.
Crazyhouse is a chess variant in which captured enemy pieces can be reintroduced, or dropped, into the game as one's own. It was derived as a two-player, single-board variant of bughouse chess.
In chess, promotion is the replacement of a pawn with a new piece when the pawn is moved to its last rank. The player replaces the pawn immediately with a queen, rook, bishop, or knight of the same color. The new piece does not have to be a previously captured piece. Promotion is mandatory when moving to the last rank; the pawn cannot remain as a pawn.
Chu shogi is a strategy board game native to Japan. It is similar to modern shogi in its rules and gameplay. Its name means "mid-sized shogi", from a time when there were three sizes of shogi variants that were regularly being played. Chu shogi seems to have been developed in the early 14th century as a derivative of dai shogi. There are earlier references, but it is not clear that they refer to the game as we now know it.
Tai shogi is a large board variant of shogi. The game dates to the 15th century and is based on earlier large-board shogi games. Before the discovery of taikyoku shogi in 1997, tai shogi was believed to be the largest playable chess variant, if not board game, ever. One game may be played over several long sessions and require each player to make over a thousand moves. It was never a popular game; indeed, a single production of six game sets in the early 17th century was a notable event.
Whale Shogi is a modern variant of shogi. It is not, however, Japanese: it was invented by R. Wayne Schmittberger of the United States in 1981. The game is similar to Judkins shogi, but with more pieces, and the pieces are named after types of whale.
Dai shogi or Kamakura dai shogi (鎌倉大将棋) is a board game native to Japan. It derived from Heian era shogi, and is similar to standard shogi in its rules and game play. Dai shogi is only one of several large board shogi variants. Its name means large shogi, from a time when there were three sizes of shogi games. Early versions of dai shogi can be traced back to the Kamakura period, from about AD 1230. It was the historical basis for the later, much more popular variant chu shogi, which shrinks the board and removes the weakest pieces.
Minichess is a family of chess variants played with regular chess pieces and standard rules, but on a smaller board. The motivation for these variants is to make the game simpler and shorter than standard chess. The first chess-like game implemented on a computer was the 6×6 chess variant Los Alamos chess. The low memory capacity of early computers meant that a reduced board size and a smaller number of pieces were required for the game to be implementable on a computer.
Three-player chess is a family of chess variants specially designed for three players. Many variations of three-player chess have been devised. They usually use a non-standard board, for example, a hexagonal or three-sided board that connects the center cells in a special way. The three armies are differentiated usually by color, with White, Black, and Red serving as the most common color combination.
Ploy is an abstract strategy board game for two or four players, played on a 9x9 board with a set of 15 pieces (2-handed) or 9 pieces per player. Pieces have various horizontal, vertical or diagonal moves somewhat like chess pieces, except directions of movement are limited; pieces change directions of movement by "rotating". Object of the game is to capture the opponent's Commander, or all of his other pieces.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
Dragonfly is a chess variant invented by Christian Freeling in 1983. There are no queens, and a captured bishop, knight, or rook becomes the property of the capturer, who may play it as their own on a turn to any open square. The board is 7×7 squares, or alternatively a 61-cell hexagon with two additional pawns per side.
A chess variant is a game related to, derived from, or inspired by chess. Such variants can differ from chess in many different ways.