Jesus Christ if you're going to reference a wikipedia article just post the link.
Shogi or Japanese chess
I wrote a computer program to play it, and as a consequence watched a lot of games between computer programs. It seemed looks a very exciting game, even better than Chess. Once you get rid of the Japanese influences, of course; the traditional material for playing it is absolutely awful. With a western representation it becomes strangely familiar.

I wrote a computer program to play it, and as a consequence watched a lot of games between computer programs. It seemed looks a very exciting game, even better than Chess. Once you get rid of the Japanese influences, of course; the traditional material for playing it is absolutely awful. With a western representation it becomes strangely familiar.
How are Japanese influences awful?

And if you want to play Shogi against other people, sign up to PlayOk.com. There, you can play all kinds of board games against other people, like chess, Shogi, Xiang Qi, Go, etc.
I wrote a computer program to play it, and as a consequence watched a lot of games between computer programs. It seemed looks a very exciting game, even better than Chess. Once you get rid of the Japanese influences, of course; the traditional material for playing it is absolutely awful. With a western representation it becomes strangely familiar.
How are Japanese influences awful?
I suspect he means the traditional Kanji characters on the pieces. If you don't read Japanese, it makes the game rather difficult.
The Elephant Chess Club sells "westernized" boards for both Shogi and Xiangqi that have pictures instead of Kanji characters on them. The sets are reasonably priced and available via amazon.com.
Anybody experience with Japanese chess? http://www.shogi.net/arc/shogi-l/shogi_rules.txt