Brian H. Liou

Active projectmistboard.com A platform for original chess, xiangqi, shogi, and strategy-board variants, built around fair rules, serious online play, and strong engines for every supported game. Visit mistboard.com →

Recent writing

• Solving Tic Tac Chec (1998)Tic Tac Chec is strongly solved under its original 1998 rules: a draw from the empty board, backed by a 2.48-billion-position tablebase.Jul 14, 2026
• Building a Flip Jungle EngineA Flip Jungle engine build report: the search, the exact endgame tablebases, the skill ladder, and what a near-perfect engine says about the game's skill ceiling.Jul 2, 2026
• Building a Dou Shou Qi EngineA Dou Shou Qi engine build report: the ruleset, the open-source benchmark, the measured search gains, the tablebase frontier, and why the obvious neural and AlphaZero-style upgrades are still open work.Jun 27, 2026
• One Word Can Point at Six Cards, Not NineA single clue word pins down all nine of your cards on only 0.286% of boards. The embedding geometry permits the separation; no common word realizes it. And the clues a similarity decoder does accept still fail on a real reader.Jun 22, 2026
• Building a Banqi EngineA Banqi engine build report: the rules, the benchmark, the evaluation fixes, two pathologies with interactive replays, and the AlphaZero climb I have not paid for yet.Jun 19, 2026
• Solving Six Men's MorrisSix men's morris is strongly solved: a draw over all 42,372,745 reachable positions, the first published solution.Jun 19, 2026
• Solving Three-Player Chinese CheckersAn exact tablebase for the smallest nontrivial three-player Chinese Checkers board, where the opening is a pure kingmaker position and draws appear only deeper in the game.Jun 15, 2026
• Toward Solving Micro ShogiA 64 GB cloud solve of the K+P+G rung, a dense-rank rerun that cut memory 8.8x, and the current cost model for a complete Micro Shogi tablebase.Jun 12, 2026
• Toward Solving Shogi4 (4×4 Shogi)Recovered rules, a validated solver, a 2.1-billion-position closed subgame, and a costed full solve left unrun.Jun 8, 2026
• Solving Dōbutsu ShōgiDōbutsu shōgi, a children's shogi variant, is strongly solved: the second player wins in 78 plies. The results of the solve, and why one rule makes a tiny board so deep.Jun 4, 2026