Talk:Generate Chess960 starting position

clarifying wording

In the first rule, the wording states   ··· all eight pawns must be placed on the second rank.

There are sixteen pawns.

How about   A player's eight pawns must be ···   or something similar. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 04:53, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that's necessary. There are also two queens, two kings, four rooks and so on. I think it's obvious enough that we're talking about the placing of the pieces for each camp.--Grondilu (talk) 05:52, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter for this task (since we only display pieces for the first rank, for one player). Hypothetically speaking, though, each player could be thought of as having a second rank, which would allow all 16 pawns to be placed. --Rdm (talk) 05:54, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

random starting position

A trivial REXX program (of two statements): <lang rexx>if random(0,1) then say 'NBQRBKNR'

               else say 'QBNRBKNR'</lang>

would, in the strictest sense, fullfill a random Chess960 starting position   (albeit only two random positions).

However, I believe the spirit of the requirement of random be that the random position would produce any of the 960 possible starting positions. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 04:53, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

relevant :-) --Grondilu (talk) 05:49, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Excellent!     :-)

To this end, I wrote a REXX program (2^nd programming entry) that randomly generates all possible unique 960 Chess960 starting positions and it shows a log of the results (unique starting positions) after each one-thousand generations.

This would make a good extension to the requirements to verify that the programming examples being used to create a random Chess960 starting position do indeed produce all possible starting positions. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 05:42, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Modified task description to force entries to be able to produce one of the 960. --Paddy3118 (talk) 05:52, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

---

unviewable symbols

When I view the task page, the Chess symbols in Unicode appear as small square boxes with numbers in them (on Firefox Aurora), or empty boxes in Microsoft Internet Explorer, both under Windows/XP.   Is there something special that needs to be done to make them viewable? -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 06:21, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I also find them hard to see. Maybe increase the font size. Anyway that's why I also allowed to use roman letters.--Grondilu (talk) 06:27, 8 May 2014 (UTC)