Wildebeest Chess moves and captures as a camel and a chess knight. Normal conventions apply when castling, with the only difference that the castling player can choose to slide his king "one", "two", "three", or "four" squares. As in chess, the castling rook finishes on the opposite side of the king on the square adjacent. Bibliography Wildebeest Chess Wildebeest Chess is a chess variant created by R. Wayne Schmittberger in 1987. The Wildebeest board is 11×10 squares. Besides the standard chess pieces, each side has two camels and one wildebeest. The inventor's intent is "to balance the number of 'riders'—pieces that move
Null-move heuristic to guess cutoffs with less effort than would otherwise be required, whilst retaining a reasonable level of accuracy. The null-move heuristic is based on the fact that most reasonable chess moves improve the position for the side that played them. So, if the player whose turn it is to move can forfeit the right to move (or make a null move - an illegal action in chess) and still have a position strong enough to produce a cutoff, then the current position would almost certainly produce a cutoff if the current player actually moved. In employing the null-move heuristic, the