New Update - March 2024

Hello everyone, I got another update here, so let's go through what's new.

Insights

Who doesn't like some graphs or charts. Well now you can easily find a lot of information about how you play from insights.

There are 6 different tabs, each focused on a different theme:

• Outcomes: Win rate and game terminations.
• Moves: Number of moves and details on pieces moved, dropped, captured, etc.
• Times: How long it took you to think of a move, how long you spent thinking in total and more...
• Opponents: Average opponent rating/rating difference and win rates against most played opponents.
• Analysis: Summarized data from analyzed games.
• Custom: Information that didn't fit elsewhere, there is an option to group by information obtained from games or individual moves, more might be added here.

You can also filter games to see only the statistics you are interested in.

All insights are private by default, but in privacy setting you can choose to make them public.

This being the first version a lot might change. So if there's something specific you'd like to see that's not available right now, feel free to let me know on GitHub., I might be able to add it.

Source code of the server providing this data can be found here.

Lobby

I made few changes to the lobby, so let's go through them.

Presets

Creating a game with all the options that are presented in the game creation menu might be a little too overwhelming, especially for new players. So I decided to add presets as an option to easily create new games.

First two rows are reserved for real time games against human players. The whole third row is reserved for games against AI. The middle AI level corresponds to the highest engine level you defeated so far (starting this update, since engine levels were tweaked a bit, more on that later) and on the last row you can find two presets for correspondence games. These presets might be changed based on your feedback later.

You might notice the small check marks in the top right corner of some presets. This icon symbolizes that said game is "Ready to play" . For real time games this means that someone has already clicked on said preset and is now waiting for an opponent.

This isn't a separate pooling system from the lobby. After clicking on any of the presets, entry in the lobby will be automatically created for you. If the game with the same time control already exists, you will be taken to the game, otherwise you will be redirected to the relevant tab. Obviously you can still use the Create a game button like you are used to, if you want some other time control.

Real time lobby

The only bigger difference in the real time lobby is that registered users can now also see game hooks from anonymous players, anonymous players can still see only hooks of other anonymous players. Registered users won't be autojoined with the anonymous players. An option was also added to filter to not show anonymous players in the lobby.

Correspondence lobby

You might also notice many changes in the correspondence tab. Entries for variant games are now in a separate section, you can sort by rating and time control, use filter to see only the games you want and chart view is now also available.

Another change is that you won't now be automatically matched with players you're already playing the same variant correspondence game with.

And last thing worth mentioning is that entries in the lobby seeking correspondence games are now automatically deleted after 14 days if no one joins them.

Layout

It feels like every update blog post there is a section about layout changes. Anyways, layout has been rewritten again. This allowed me to fix the board overflowing the screen on some screen sizes, pieces on the board and in hand for smaller variants now match in size and many other smaller changes. Most importantly it makes the layout much more easily maintainable in the long run.

Side layout has been removed as promised. I've received some comments about this. I tried to address them, so no one misses the side layout too much. Most importantly I removed the gaps around the Chu shogi board in the default layout and I added an option to preferences to have a smaller moves list - you will find it under Game board layout. There is also already an option in preferences to have background behind hand pieces.

Editor

I rewrote how the editor looks way too many times, but I was never really happy with it. So I took another shot at it.

The board is now bigger, the pieces in hand and spare pieces match the size of the pieces on the board, the layout matches the rest of the site and everything important fits on the screen without the need to scroll.

Some features were also added. Most notably KIF and CSA import/export fields and you can now also go back and forth between position using arrow keys.

AI - Shoginet

Many changes were made that involve Shoginet, which is responsible for AI play and game analysis, if you are running an instance of Shoginet, please update, YaneuraOu engine also needs to be rebuilt.

Puzzles

Analyzed games are now automatically checked for possible puzzle positions, these positions are then added to a queue, that is handled by shoginet. Shoginet checks whether a unique solution exists or not. If it does it's time for final verification handled by a separate server.

I want to make sure this is done correctly so I will be manually looking at the first few probably hundred generated puzzles, so it will still take some time before first new puzzles appear, but it's coming! I hope this will result in a continuous addition of new puzzles.

I also added an option to submit your own puzzles, so if you found an interesting puzzle position and want to share it with others, you can now submit it in Puzzle dashboard. These puzzles will go through the same process as the puzzles from the analyzed games, so they also won't appear immediately and need to be verified. I don't expect this to be a significant source of new puzzles, but it still might prove useful. If you have a larger collection of shogi puzzles you want to share, it's still better to open an issue on GitHub.

AI difficulty

AI level 1 was stronger than intended, therefore the difficulties were adjusted a little. Level 1 is now played by Fairy-Stockfish, which allows to limit the strength better. The previous level 1 now corresponds to level 3, level 8 stays the same and the levels in between were shifted a little to a higher difficulty.

Analysis

Evaluation of repeated positions in YaneuraOu is now handled how lishogi expects, therefore incorrect jumps to 0 or +/-31111 in analysis should now be resolved (details). Local WASM binary was also updated.

Adjourning games

Real time Chu shogi games can take many hours, it's unreasonably to expect players to finish these games in one sitting. As a solution to this I added an option to pause and later resume these games. It works like this:

• Player A offers adjournment.
• Player B accepts adjournment offer.
• Player whose turn it is, makes a sealed move.
• Clocks stops.

Sealed move is a move that will not be revealed to the opponent and will be played only after the game is resumed. This is done so that neither player knows what will the position on their turn be after the resumption. It's important to not forget to make the sealed move, since the clock continues to run until then.

To resume the game, both players need to be present and confirm they wish to resume.

Adjournment is currently available only for real time Chu shogi games with minimum 15 minutes initial time or 30 seconds byoyomi and adjournment can be offered only after 20 moves were played. I'm considering adding the same option for correspondence Chu shogi games and perhaps even standard shogi, depending on the feedback.

Also keep in mind, that if your opponent is losing, they might not be very motivated to resume the game again. Adjourned games will be left for now, but depending on how it goes, I will probably set 3 to 12 months limit, after which the game is abandoned.

Checkshogi

And there is a new variant. This one is very simple to explain: It's just like standard shogi, but you win if you put your opponent in check.

Future variants

Here's a list of variants that have been suggested so far. I believe the list is rather extensive now, so if you see a variant you would like to see implemented there, comment on it or like it, so I know which one I should work on.

That being said I want to focus on standard shogi and general features the most right now, almost over 91% percent of games finished in the last 6 months were standard shogi, so while I enjoy working on new variants, the most important thing remains standard shogi.

Piece sets and board theme

Many new piece sets were added, thanks to everyone who submitted them.

• Chu shogi piece set - Eigetsu Gyoryu - with 2 kanji by CouchTomato!
• Chu shogi piece set - Czech - with arrows how each piece moves by Eventlesstew
• Standard piece set - Czech - same as the Chu shogi set, but for standard shogi by Eventlesstew
• Standard piece set - Pixel - pixelated version of shogi pieces by HansAldiChristian
• Kyoto shogi piece set - Joyful - same design that is already available for standard shogi by Rechefiltr-is-Fire

Also one new board theme was added.

• Wood alternative by Olekaze

Other changes

• In local evaluation you can now choose whether to consider impasse. Since we allow playing past impasse in local. analysis, it makes sense to allow analyzing such games.
• Highest defeated AI level is now listed on your profile page (starting from now).
• All games with less (or equal) material than standard position material are now handled by YaneuraOu
• Fixed importing end status of a game from KIF/CSA in studies.
• Fixed links for creating games from custom positions.
• Fixed premoves in correspondence games from position.
• Added Galego language - thanks for the translations!
• Fixed evaluation cache for variants.
• Desktop Firefox now supports CORP 'credentialles', so custom backgrounds will work on pages with local analysis.
• Remove views from forum topic.
• Changed standard shogi icon to 本.
• Acceptable leaderbord rating derivation was increased, making it possible to get sooner on the leaderboard.
• Too many CSS tweaks to list them all and many other smaller fixes
• Many backend changes, that you shouldn't notice, unless I did something wrong.

With new features come new bugs, so if you spot anything please report in on GitHub.

What's next?

I really want to get the mobile app done, so I will be focusing more on that.

I'm also planning to remove the beta tag next to the lishogi.org title. But I want to resolve as many issues that are currently open on GitHub as possible before doing that, so if you have anything that you think should be resolved before that is done please let me know.

Other than that I plan to add an option to create broadcasts of games from external sources and look into different tournament formats.

And that's it.

THANKS to everyone who donated to the site, you make it possible for lishogi to exists, so thank YOU, I really appreciate it!

Wanderer

[Cover image by andsproject]