Elephant are important, they guard the general against the cannon, especially the back ranks. They (elephant) also important in the endgame, the elephant can aid an attack, in the middlegame and endgame.
which is more complex,chess or xiangqi(chinese chess)?
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Enough of this.
Elephants do not guard against the cannon because the cannon is a jumping piece. Elephants cannot aid in an attack because they cannot cross the river. I detect intense sarcasm, yureesystem.
Once again I will state it: the best strategy I have seen is to sacrifice the elephants ruthlessly for a pawn majority on the right hand side of the board.
No sarcasm there, he's right on all counts. Having 2 elephants and 2 advisors is very helpful in defending; the trick is to know how to position them relative to which files the opponent is sending his chariots and cannons. Good defence allows you more time to attack effectively.
In fact in many a (master) game a cannon or horse is sacrificed for the elephants to help break down the defences. The back rank, centre file and "palace roof" are weakened greatly by the loss of one elephant.
And on top of that (but admittedly far more rarely) the elephants are used as an offensive piece in endgames to provide something for your cannon to jump over. This does happen more frequently in problems, though.
If you are losing to a pawn storm, I will say two things. One, something is going very, very wrong if you allow your opponent's pawns to be faster than your own attack with pieces. Two, pawns are ridiculously overpowered pieces and are my favourite unit in any kind of chess... if you can find them the time and space needed to saunter across the board.
Remellion wrote:
No sarcasm there, he's right on all counts. Having 2 elephants and 2 advisors is very helpful in defending; the trick is to know how to position them relative to which files the opponent is sending his chariots and cannons. Good defence allows you more time to attack effectively.
In fact in many a (master) game a cannon or horse is sacrificed for the elephants to help break down the defences. The back rank, centre file and "palace roof" are weakened greatly by the loss of one elephant.
And on top of that (but admittedly far more rarely) the elephants are used as an offensive piece in endgames to provide something for your cannon to jump over.
Remellion, I hear you saying elephants and cannons work well together.
It is tragic that cannons are nearly extinct.
Western chess (the mad queen game chess like chinese know) have more strategy opening studies and logical .Xiangqi is more tactical with fast attack to the castle of the king, it have many exception rules.
Mathematically speaking Chinese has more possible games. But Western chess has more subtlety
Either way, game tree complexity is pretty meaningless after the first billion or so. What does it matter if a game has 97 trillion trillion quadrillion possible moves, or 99 trillion trillion qudrillion possible moves? Either is PLENTY to keep a player occupied in one lifetime!
I never understood Xiangqi.
They always talk about horses, rabbits, elephants
Never understood. It must be an interesting game though. If they have it filled with animal's
Try playing Havannah. It is very complicated
MelvinDoucet wrote:
WTF. Uno is the most complex.
Dude. You forgot tic tac toe.
Chinese Chess is a lot harder, it is more difficult to draw, there is no stalemate, you cannot chase any piece no more than three times, there is no perpetual checks, in the endgame you can win with slightest and minimum pieces and pawns don't interlock they capture forward and when they pass the river, the pawn can move horizontal (left or right) or forward. The board is more open and that give more possibilities: it is more tactical than chess.
yureesystem escribió:
Chinese Chess is a lot harder, it is more difficult to draw, there is no stalemate, you cannot chase any piece no more than three times, there is no perpetual checks, in the endgame you can win with slightest and minimum pieces and pawns don't interlock they capture forward and when they pass the river, the pawn can move horizontal (left or right) or forward. The board is more open and that give more possibilities: it is more tactical than chess.
Yes, is harder tactic than western chess, fast attacks,less strategy, i play in the web playok xiangqi with western pieces(setup) .http://www.playok.com/en/xiangqi/
Remellion wrote:
Don't forget Singapore!
Complexity can be defined in several ways. If we just talk about legal board positions, xiangqi has about 10 times that of chess. But because the board is larger, game tree complexity of xiangqi beats that of chess by 37 orders of magnitude.
From personal (patzer) experience of both, chess seems more complex but xiangqi is way harder. Chess has many principles, such as pawn structure, endgame conversions, endgame breakthrough techniques, opening ideas etc. A larger variety of piece moves, the ability to castle, en passant and promotion increase possibilities and make the game more complex.
Xiangqi's "positional play" is very vague and much harder to evaluate, as it is mainly about piece mobility and attack potential, rather than pawn structure. The endgames in xiangqi are very technically demanding (单马胜单士，双兵对双士 for example) and usually it's easier to win in the middlegame than an endgame. Not to mention that tactics and attacks feature heavily at every move in the game, almost more so than material concerns. The ideas in xiangqi are simpler (not quite "sac, sac, mate" but close) but much harder to execute.
but 单马胜单士,双兵对双士 is easy endgames in xiangqi.
difficulty:
easy:单马胜单士,单车胜马双士,etc.
normal:炮兵单缺仕胜士象全,车相胜马炮,马兵胜炮相,etc.
hard:马底兵胜单士象,车炮仕胜车双象,etc.
extreamly hard:车马双仕胜车炮,车炮双仕胜车马,车马双仕胜车单缺士,炮兵仕相胜士象全,双炮单缺士胜炮双象,双炮仕相胜马单缺士,etc.
abrahampenrose wrote:
1 State-space Complexity: the maximum number of possible positions in the game. It is also possible to calculate an upper bound for state-space complexity which includes illegal positions as well. The upper bound is generally speaking much easier to calculate than the exact value, which is often only given as an accurate estimation.
It is generally calculated that the state-space complexity of Chess is around 10^50 (10 to the power of 50, or 1 with 50 zeros after it, or one hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion different positions), while the state-space complexity of Xiangqi is around 10^48, 100 times less than that of Chess. This is because despite a larger board (9 times 10 vs. 8 times 8), Xiangqi pieces are generally speaking less powerful than their Chess equivalents and for many pieces the space over which it can potentially move is severely restricted. In Chess, the King, Queen, Rook and Knight can potentially move to every square on the board, the Pawn can potentially reach more than 6/8th of all the squares (though unlikely to move that much in a real game), and even the Bishop can reach half of all the squares. In Xiangqi the General can only stay inside the Palace and move to 9 different intersections, the Advisor can only move to 5 different intersections and the Elephant only to 7 different intersections.
Another factor is that the Xiangqi board, having 9 files instead of Chess's 8, is symmetrical in the left-right direction. This means the left and right hand sides in Xiangqi are essentially the same, so different board positions may just be a trivial reflection of the other. This decreases the effective state-space complexity of Xiangqi by a factor of 2. In Chess on the other hand, the Kingside and the Queenside are not just a trivial reflection of each other since the distance the King has to the edge of the board is different for the left and right hand sides.
Therefore despite having 90 intersections on the Xiangqi board vs. only 64 squares for Chess, the total number of possible positions is around 100 times more in Chess than Xiangqi, 10^50 vs. 10^48. -quoted from another online debate
Sep 13, 2015
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#95
Not to bump old topics. But...
The number "2^155 legal positions, about 10^47" and the Shannon number "10 to the power 120" that people keep referring to is outdated and totally incorrect. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number )
I refer also to this video where they accounted for the rules of chess (50 move rule, repetition of position) which seems to be closer to the truth. 10 to the power 10 to the power 50 (dunno know how to type superscript in here) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km024eldY1A )
It's even much higher since they didn't take into consideration the en passant and castling rules.
For instance white pawn is on d5, black plays e5 (white can take en passant) s, 1..., e5 2. Nb1-c3, Nb8-c6 3. Nc3-b1, Nc6-b8 is NOT the same position, Same goes for castling rights.
I'm working on a definite number. Check back with me in a year... 
Wooohoooooo!!! Nobodyreally is back!!!
And speaking something similar to English, as usual.
Yeah, I love it!
Note that this symmetry argument is largely nonsense. Chess positions also come in pairs that flip left and right. Only castling rights break this symmetry, but only in a very tiny fraction of Chess positions castling rights still exist. E.g. for white to have K-side castling rights the King would have to be on e1 and the Rook on h1, (1 possibility) while in general they could be anywhere (64 x 63 possibilities ~4000). So some 0.1% of all positions have castling rights, which has no impact at all on course estimates like we are dealing with here.
In XQ it is possible to have positions that are their own mirror image, because of the odd board width. But this requires all pieces not on the central file to be positioned symetrically with respect to it, which happens in only an astronomically small fraction of all positions.
My brother and I have taken to remarking "the elephant is relevant!" every time it actually makes a difference on the board (not often), but it still guards your center from invasion, and that's SOMETHING.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call "irrelephant!"
My opponent's elephants never influence the game. He wins with a pawn majority on the right hand side of the board, and when our generals are on the same line, the line curves.