Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.
Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!)
I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump
Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces
Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that.
When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it),
I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!
This is pretty cool, I haven't looked into it much but I would appreciate if you can tell me what is the best playing strategy according to the fairy stockfish?
I think it's too early for that. There's still some edge-case issues in Belzedar's code, then it would need a specific NNUE for optimal play, because of the high branching factor.
I've heard this referred to as either Placement Chess or Bronstein's Chess (after the GM who reportedly suggested it). It's available to play on https://pychess.org, where it's called Placement Chess.
Lichess also includes a piece set similar to this, although with the notable difference that the Knight is shaped like a greater-than symbol and the pawn is a small square.
For those interested in playing and learning Shogi, take a look over at the great site https://lishogi.org -- a fork of LiChess for Shogi that includes real-time and correspondence play, AI opponents, analysis, puzzles and more. One of my favorite variants, Kyoto Shogi, is also available. The website https://pychess.org also has a ton of interesting and unique variants both traditional (Makruk) and modern (Chennis!).
If you want to play chess-meets-shogi, try the 'Crazyhouse' variant on lichess. I'm often fighting anonymous bullet games while waiting for CI pipelines to finish..
Crazyhouse is a fun game, but I find it inferior to both chess and shogi. Shogi without drop moves would be rather dull. The board is too big, and the pieces too slow-moving. Chess with drop moves (i.e. Crazyhouse) is too chaotic; drops make the already powerful pieces overpowered on such a small board. Chess and shogi are both nicely balanced games, Crazyhouse is not.
Another problem with Crazyhouse is that you can’t easily play it with a physical chess set. You can only play online, which some of us find hard to enjoy.
Absolutely! And I'm one of them :) Check out the Shogi Harbor community[1] and their Discord[2]. There's a lot of discussion there and they're very friendly.
The kanji on the pieces adds a significant potential barrier. I started with the piece set that had little directional pips on them and different colors to help (it's the twelfth set in the piece set list when you go to the settings gear on Lishogi).
This is a little surprising since MNRAS's niche has been that it had no page charges. So if one was short on grant money then you went with monthly notices. That's pretty nice if (a) you have zero grant funding available or (b) want to prioritize conference travel for students/postdocs.
MNRAS is one of the three "main" journals for astronomy along with Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) and the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ and AJ). A&A is mainly Europe and ApJ is more mixed but with more North America. Along with Nature and Science for high-impact things and regional journals for Japan, Australia, and the US (PASP).
This is an implementation of a neat pencil-and-paper game from the 1980's in Eastern Europe called Virus Wars or Klopodavka (bedbugs).
In this variant of Klopodavka, players can add a bug or squish an opponent's along cells adjacent to a path of friendly cells connected to the player's base. Players get six actions per turn and a player loses when no more valid moves are available. Although the AI is limited, it's an interesting game of territory and thinking about how one's own bugs will be used against oneself.
The code can be found at https://github.com/ptupitsyn/klopodavka-rs and was developed by Pavel Tupitsyn, who is also the maintainer of Apache Ignite according to his GitHub bio.
I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive.
What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.
And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.
I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.
My understanding is that the first conclusive proof that the Earth rotates was the astronomical observation of the aberration of starlight[1] in ~1730. The rotation of the Earth causes about 20 arcseconds of deflection from a stars known position, which is pretty large. The phenomena itself is due to relativistic beaming, and lead to one of the first measurements of the speed of light along with Roemer's earlier work using the moons of Jupiter as a clock in ~1680.
I think the 20 arc second deviation is caused by Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun. Did you intend that instead of rotation? The latter causes less than 1 arc second deviation.
Just changing my search habits helped a lot in in finding results quickly and managing the SEO spam for both DDG and Google.
I'm using Julia for a project right now, and answers are almost always found in either the Julia Discourse forum or Stack Overflow. By just searching either of those directly (plus more carefully reading the official documentation) I have found what I'm looking for much more easily.
The situation is more difficult with Python because the community aspect is more dispersed. But because my questions almost always have to do with using the standard library of external libraries, I've found devdocs.io to the be much simpler and more direct, especially because it runs offline. It covers >90% of cases for me with the docs for numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, and base Python.
Maybe SEO spam forcing us back to RTFM will actually be a force for good?
Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.