Julia's Fairies

9th of June, 2013

News about WFCC website

By Harry Fougiaxis, President of the WFCC:

Dear colleagues,

In March Hannu Harkola informed the presidium that he would like to step down from the post of the webmaster after nearly 15 years of hard work with the site. Hannu started the site back in 1999, and we truly realised the immense effort he had invested on it when we had to migrate it to the new server!

Hannu, on behalf of our federation, I should like to express my warmest thanks!

We approached several candidates and we eventually decided that Julia Vysotska from Latvia will be the new webmaster. I guess you are familiar with her own site www.juliasfairies.com featuring a wealth of articles, originals, comments, short discussions and news on fairy chess (and not only…)

Julia started the migration in early May and, as it usually happens, various technical issues had to be resolved. She was always eager to sort them out by learning new things, installing a plugin, proposing some new layout, and so on. I have been working with her for only a month and it was a real delight. I am confident that she will keep working on the site with the same enthusiasm and devotion.

The new site is available at www.wfcc.ch If your browser still points to the old site, clear your browsing history (or write wfcc.ch in the address bar of your browser and hit Ctrl+Enter).

Warm regards,
Harry Fougiaxis
President of the WFCC

I’d like to tell thanks a lot to Harry Fougiaxis for so kind words! For me these about 1,5 months of work under WFCC website were full of new experiences, and the most great experience was a joint work we had. Harry himself put so much of efforts into the project, testing hundreds of pages, fixing broken links, correcting materials, creating working lists for me! Every day I felt I’m not alone here and it motivated and helped a lot!
I also was amazed by the amount of work done by Hannu Harkola! – about 500 web pages of information and so many of them with a huge tables! So many years Hannu took care of this site! 
I’m also thankful to Thomas Maeder, who was very helpful in the final steps of launching the site. It was about domain name, account for the site, setup of name servers etc. – the things I had known almost nothing about, but was finally taught!

For me the invitation to do this work is a great honor! I’ll try to do my best to  meet your expectations! Thank you! /Julia

WinChloe 3.24 – June’s update!

A new version of WinChloe solving program is just released – WinChloe 3.24 is available from the 8th of June, 2013! Features added or corrected:

3.24 (juin 13)

The link “Help guide for English users (by Reb Orrell)” is active again,
Reb having transfered the files to a new site: http://rebschess.com/winchloe/

New conditions programmed:
Retour
Réflexe puis Minimum noir
Réflexe puis Minimum blanc
Circé maléfique clône
Growing men blanc
Growing men noir
Promotions en Caméléon autorisées

Myself I’d like to comment 2 conditions:

• Retour – this is a “Back-home” condition described by its inventor, Nicolas Dupont, in just published article The “back-home” fairy condition – Nicolas Dupont;
• Promotions en Caméléon autorisées – “Promotion to chameleon allowed” – this condition was used in a joint problem No.326 by Michel Caillaud & Julia Vysotska. The problem was shown as C-, but now it can be changed to C+!

As always its a pleasure for me to say “Thank you very much!” to Christian Poisson for his work!

The back-home fairy condition

Nicolas Dupont

I got the back-home idea several years ago and, after having composed an educational example, I felt such a fairy condition could be of great interest. I sent the back-home rules together with this illustration to Mario Richter, who was able to show its correctness via a partial programming of the condition, mainly for proof games.

Then came the Trillon Memorial Tournament, asking for fairy proof games. The Director, Laurent Riguet, kindly accepted back-home entries although this fairy condition wasn’t officially defined. But the judgment took a long time and hence “squeezed” back-home: it was impossible for me to publish the rules otherwise my entries for the Trillon would have been no more anonymous.

The goal of this article is, finally, to officially define back-home (section 1), as well as to provide illustrative examples. The rules seem easy to understand but lead to practical difficulties, so I will begin with two 0-positions (section 2) in order to get started. Two educational examples will follow (section 3) and, lastly, three “real” problems (section 4).

I thank Christian Poisson for his great programming of back-home (condition “Retour” under WinChloe 3.24) and his help for achieving a correct understanding of it. I also thank the composers and friends from the FranceEchecs website, the place where most of the problems presented here were constructed, as well as my co-authors during the Trillon, Michel Caillaud and Mario Richter.

Finally my gratitude goes to Julia, for having accepted to publish this article on her excellent website!

→See the whole article!