Comments by GeorgeDuke

This book by Harry Bird in 1893 was put up by CVPage in 2002.  H.E. Bird (1830-1908) of course revived Carrera's Chess in the 1870s after 250 years, and Capablanca made his version 50 years later.  Capa gets the credit because doing more with it in public play and being GM too. Bird's meandering style and coverage of chess history must have influenced countryman H.J.R. Murray's 1913 'History of Chess'.

'gnohmon' is Ralph Betza nom de plume, and Betza weighs in on Bird in this comment under the Gutenburg book : 

gnohmon wrote on 2002-04-06 Excellent ★★★★★

'More than excellent, superb! Harry Bird is one of history's greatest non-GM chessplayers. His originality combined with his longevity (he played against Morphy, and he played against Lasker, maybe even against Vidmar, if I remember rightly) combined with his strength (not a world champion, but surely stronger than me) make him one of the more interesting personalities in modern chess history. I have often heard of this book, but was never fortunate enough to find a copy. Now I can read it at last. More than superb, optimal!'

Vidmar (1885-1962), mentioned by Betza above.

[ Use of "meandering" style of Bird and Murray reminds of why rivers meander by Albert Einstein in 1926: Meandering, off topic in that Einstein friend GM Lasker (1868-1941) competed with Capablanca so much -- including Capablanca Chess. Physicist Einstein and mathematician Lasker colleagues: Science/Chess. ]

ChessBase current series starts on early OrthoChess history and origins:  https://en.chessbase.com/post/on-the-origins-of-chess-1-5. 

It is better in principle to protect all Pawns in array.  Each of the 96 starting line-ups have a name, some offhandedly sprinkled around comments in several articles.  A dozen or two -- they have to be counted up again -- do have all guarded Pawns initially.  Of those some are nevertheless ugly with King and Queen in abc/hij files. The two most favored arrays Old-Standard RNBF and Sibahi RFNB do not do so.  The first is played 47 times in Game Courier now and second 12 times, and other arrays of the same game 3 more times, a total of 62.  However, I have played in all but few of those.

http://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=17706.   Following is reference to arrays that do protect all Pawns: 

Pawn_Protect. Somewhere we surveyed the large Chesses and found about 20% of 300 do not protect all Pawns, and am looking for that comment; if not found will cite several examples of respected games with incomplete array-coverage that way.

In "91.5 Trillion..." the goal was to avoid prolicificism and to generate millions/trillions of CVs formulaically. It is inelegant to deal in specific write-ups one by one. Many_CVs. There only one of the Mutators hinges on starting set-ups varying.

Themed CVs were further developed by Charles Gilman starting with also biologically inspired Great Herd in 2005.

Praying Mantis is D+A+F+W, only Mastodon replay.  Cockroach is N+W+F. Locust is D+A+Q, a piece-type about Amazon value. Those two Amazon and Locust would be interesting match-up in some Chess Different Armies version of Insect Chess.

Insects. Techies and game geeks in general are relatively unaware for well-educated of the ecological crisis not to say catastrophe under way: Trends.

Forces plan for next year's Chess Championship, Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, and even ten years ahead activity, speculative and problematic that they occur at all. In Tim Bostick's CV Insect, 'Monarch' would be better name and image for royal figure. Tarantula and Black Widow are arthropods but not insects, though can be thought of as "bugs" in rude vernacular.

Short-range. There could be up to a million short-range piece-types that comment claims, and a lot more CVs.

Next Chess has Bifurcators ranked number one.  They are the problem theme solution to the OrthoChess crisis in that they have mathematical appeal.  At our leisure Joe Joyce, myself, Jeremy Good have made successive nominations, and the target date is 2030.  The project for fun is unofficial informal series of threads started in 2008.  

#1 Bifurcators including Winther's 40 new ones would need more than Gustavian  board, at least 8x10.  #2 Great Shatranj actually has debt to Kozune where its compounds were already used and board size does improve to the 80 squares from Kozune's 9x9 attempt.  #4 Mastodon takes up with century-old Pasha, appealing short-ranger in being leaper without oblique direction.  #5 Three-Player dynamics are not so easily simplified as four-player implementations  of Chess.  

#6 Unicorn uses the conventional Nightrider together with the Carrera compounds that torture the Knight.  Schoolbook is the chosen variant at #10 for those very Carreran Bishop-N and Rook-N, the two most popular fairy pieces, because of Trenholme's detailed game annotations.  Big Board of 8-rank is the pre-placement game with all orthodox pieces of Shoenfelder.  

#11 Fischer Random, really almost 200 years old now as CV idea, is getting current revival with much chatter at ChessBase about singleminded Fischer himself.  #7 Sissa has unique solution in brand new type.  Eurasian #9 is perfect Western-pieces implementation of 100-year Dawson Canon, hopper to go with Chinese cannon. 

Time Travel #3 is promising wildcard like other 4- and more dimensional games that could be considered.  It probably belongs in Track Two with Rococo and Tetrahedral as forever to remain variant not Orthodox.

There are reams more nightriders mostly unutilized than the ordinary hack one developed by Dawson a century ago. So far they remain in problems and thought experiments.  Classic essay here proposes Straight Wide Crooked, Diagonal Narrow Crooked, Diagonal Wide Crooked, and Straight Narrow Crooked.  Best of all, the essential nightrider Quintessence.  Each one makes better more interesting play than Betzan-tagged 'NN'.  Play of that ordinary Dawson nightrider is inferior because it just duplicates successive Knight moves same direction.  It is no more interesting than "limited" pieces like an up-to-three-step Bishop or Chess Different Armies Short Rook.

Quintessence itself gets play in odd-shaped 84-square Quintessential Chess, adding also  Leeloo compound R + Quintessence.  

Quinquereme takes it up to 12x12 with the same Quintessence.  Each of the various nightriders in combinations, one and two of each together with some of the other 6 or 8 piece-types in the set, on different board sizes can create thousands, well millions easily, of individualized CVs.  Worth exploring in the abstract are the standard boards 9x9, 9x10, 10x10, 10x12, 12x12, 10x16.  All the large sizes should have a variant nightrider species for improved implementations. Even rudimentary Dawson NN of such wide appearance is superior to also-overused Carreran BN and RN, four hundred years beat to death.

Carlos Alberto Colodro's current article reprises symbolism of Lewis Caroll's contribution to Chess literature in fantasy and allegory of 'Through the Looking Glass'.  The first sentence mentions Borges: https://en.chessbase.com/post/lewis-carroll-y-su-alicia-jugando-al-ajedrez-por-sergio-negri-2018.  Jorge Luis Borges' "The Chess Player" introduces this Morality XI too.  Each piece of seven is associated in different moralities with, in turn, solar system bodies, animals, birds, days of week, metals, Wonders -- sets of 'seven' somehow being a popular way to organize the cosmos down through philosophy and religion.

Greek mythology has the Pleiades as daughters of Pleione and Atlas. Pleiades.

Here the seven sisters of mythology, Pleiades, conduct dialogue, each representing a Chess piece with unique perspective.  The actual stellar Pleiades of constellation Taurus have had their major stars named specifically after the same goddesses.   

The twenty Chess Moralities were half complete fifteen years ago this month 2003. CMX associates each basic Chess piece with corresponding utmost construction of Antiquity:

Falcon - Pyramid; Pawn - Temple Diana; Knight - Colossus Rhodes; Bishop - Lighthouse Alexandria; King - Statue Zeus; Queen - Gardens Babylon; Rook - Mausoleum. Falcon Chess was first played December 1992 when adding the option of "split block" two changes of direction to the piece.

A lead-in to this tenth Morality does quote Lewis Carroll, and current Chessbase article by Carlos Alberto Colodro  trenchantly places the same 'Through the Looking Glass' in Chess literature, focussing on the game Alice joins: https://en.chessbase.com/post/lewis-carroll-y-su-alicia-jugando-al-ajedrez-por-sergio-negri-2018. .

Last month was the eleventh anniversary of this the 19th and penultimate Chess Morality.  They celebrate that

there are four and only four fundamental Chess pieces.  I may do another series in the twenties upcoming.  The original Moralities 1200-1500 were by various authors, John of Waleys, Alexander of Hales, Jacobus de Cessolis.  They were based on all six regular pieces but Pawns were treated eightfold as farmer, sailor, smiths, merchants, taverners.  Each would actually have two or three tags: Pawn 2 for example "smythis and other werkers in yron and metall."

'The Innocent Morality' attained its final form amplified with other polemics only in 1429 -- and about 60 years later the across-the-board Bishop quickly became part of Chess, not just in the occasional variant where it birthed.  In IM, the predecessor "Aufins move and take obliquely because every bishop misused his office through cupidity," but that means only the well-known fixed two-step jump.  

11.November.07 here, exactly ten years ago,  I rated Pocket Mutation having played it twice in G. C.  It was described as below

poor, worse than poor then, so let's upgrade it to Poor now.  This type of CV of too much complexity in implementation is total waste of time. I like the streamlined one-idea concepts like top CV of the nineties decade Hostage Chess. Yet ironic  that

Hostage is hardly ever played.

The medieval Chess Moralities went on for thousands lines. Chess Morality I to XX here 2000-2007 add another 800. But iambic pentameter is intellectual for being a long thought per line, so am working on crisper version with seven beats for low attention spanners.

Things like: ..../King and Queen and Horse must move/ Each within established groove./Hours well spent and mind engaged,/ Checked and mated when outraged./ Pawns but move one step at time,/ Bishops vowed to turn on dime./ Rooks befall the straightest path/ And only Queen more power hath. ....

 

The Simpleminded Chess leading site touts a CV last week.  http://en.chessbase.com/post/nunn-again-victory-after-38-years.  The new piece, owned by both sides, Duck is a blocker like in Eight Stone -- repeating a concept used also in a few other CVs that have been around for decades. But let them of ChessBase think of it as new idea if they want.  The concept is related also to the Blue Queen chess forms in that both sides get to move the piece.  The best CV developer Parton is cited in the ChessBase article for CV proliferation, but anymore publication in monographs is not everything, so I think legitimately Charles Gilman is five or six times more prolific than V. R. Parton was with CVs of reasonably consistent good quality. Parton's Alice though certainly is one of about ten CVs that are standing the test of time.  Specific Duck Chess rates  '6' out of a 10. It would grow old quickly with not that much really exciting tactics, nothwithstanding the one good problem presented.  The exact Duck Chess embodiment is unique, since of course it takes minimal competence to tweak a rule, or throw together a new combination of pieces,  and call it a new CV of one's own invention. (See Aiken's Eight-Stone having several blockers at once not on small 64 squares, but average 72 as 8x9,  for more intriguing chess variant in the genre.)

No problem, sorry for the inconvenience that it was doing that. I (practically) never look that email, which is just for games here and Brainking.  I always just play in and out G.C.

Interesting, thanks for the links, but "Chess Variant amateur Pages" is just your amateur talk. We know how to change the rules with integrity every step even every five minutes so that nothing you ever develop cannot be smashed our best players.

By play here, Latrunculi by Jose and Symmetric by Carlos are way ahead of every other one by modern designers, looking at last year and other lengths. I don't think of Korea, Thai, Chinese, or Shogi as chess variants, because I've always known of them. So that even more puts  Latrunculi and Symmetric the top two. If you don't play it, don't rate it used to be the maxim, too.  Face it, that any newer CV has long odds to be played formally more than couple of times all of 2017, except by the inventor. There are not just the thousand Game Courier ones, but another 2-3 thousand without presets, and most of my recent 'excellent' to CVP games I notice have no Preset.  Then there are generic ways to generate thousands and even millions of CVs. For examples, "Polypiece" by Betza for millions and "91.5 Trillion" for...you guessed it. There are as many rules combinations as possible game scores -- or two different orders of infinity. 

In Bob versus Bo 1972, you know Fischer-Spassky Game 6, Spassky stood and joined the audience upon completion in applause it was supposedly so great a game.  Yet instead if 15 ...Rxc5, there are 1 0-0 Ra7 or 1 Rxc5 Qxc5 or 1 b4 Rxc1.  First impression proposals, correct them if they're wrong.  Annotations  never seem to have mentioned the obvious.  Where is the  fallacy that Black now stands better after Rxc5? I would look at programs for Bifurcators or Rococo or Eurasian or Three Player or Time Travel or Falcon Chess, when they exist, but not  for peewee famous Game 6 a la Fischer/Kasparov/Carlsen.  White's position is not so good and Black has to capitalize immediately.

  What do the engines say? Game Six 1972 is considered a top ten sort of game for OrthoChess: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1340520/10-greatest-chess-games-From-Kasporov-vs-Bobby-Fischers-victory.html.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1044366.  Throw out the frivolous ones K. versus world, C. versus world, Astronaut versus whomever, and the above is about the best game ever played, but it should never have reached the great finale.

There could be other sequences used for where a radial piece is allowed to stop. A compound piece of pentagonal, hexagonal, heptagonal and octagonal numbers can move: 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 18, 21, 22 or 28..., keeping to the lower lengths for 30x30 board. Aligning the primes and Fibonacci and Deficient and others pairwise, both orthogonally and diagonally, may discover hidden relationships just by tooling around, for applicability beyond the chessboards. For example, applying some Knights Tour like V. Reinhart mentions. Another piece can have numbers of distinct integral squares dividing a rectangle: 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18. Call that one Squarec, and it is good piece to cross quickly the boundaries of boards either 12x12 or 16x16. With 15 steps specifically allowed it traverses 16x16 diagonally, or orthogonally, all the way without being just plain Queen

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1340520/10-greatest-chess-games-From-Kasporov-vs-Bobby-Fischers-victory.html.

Game 6 routinely gets listed in top 5 or 10 all-time games, 1972 Fischer-Spassky. The position after 15 dxc5:

  But instead of Black taking with Pawn, 15 ...Rxc5 stands Black advantage, and nowhere found yet is this annotated (several versions checked back in 2012).  See what programs say since I have not bothered yet.  The 'Rxc5' was discovered when this thread reviewed all the games in 40-year anniversary 2012 as  the day they occurred. Game_6.  GMs have observed Spassky's supposed mistake 14 ...a6 instead of 14 ...Qb7, called ''correct."  Where is the fallacy?  No offense if someone can explain why Black does not easily at least equalize that way -- since we variantists are expert at dozens of games, not just the one peewee 64-version of Fischer/Kasparov/Carlsen.  Is there some sure attack against the unguarded Queen -- or Rook -- lurking, or something else?

The maximum number of pieces into which a pancake can be cut with n slices: 1 slice 2, 2 slices 4, 3 slices 7, 4-11, 5-16, 6-22, 7-29, 8-37....

The Lucky numbers in texts come about by striking out every other number, then from remaining 13579... strike out every third number, because that's the next one left. Then since '5' is stricken and what remains is 1,3,7,9,13,15,19..., now strike out every seventh number starting with 19. '1,3,7,9,13,15,21,25,31,33,37,43,49,51....' never get stricken and are Lucky. It's related to the Sieve of Erastosthenes to generate the prime numbers. A Lucky Chess Piece allowing one-step should be Bishop value on 10x10 and up.

 

 Looking back again ChessBase currently runs a 1972 interview before the two-month match.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/bobby-fischer-on-the-dick-cavett-show.  Fischer gives a quick television lesson right before the Fischer-Spassky Reykjavik match, "Lose the King, lose the game," but since you  cannot capture the King it almost suggests a CV.  He uses "straight" for Rook and may not have known the word 'orthogonal' as alternative. Queen "a very powerful piece." His describing Knight as two straight then one straight is inferior to perception of Knight to oblique nearest squares automatically.  This is really Chess for Dummies.  It is easier for us in wake of Gilman's so many non-radial long-range leapers and also oblique Falcon, claimed first of the four fundamental chess pieces.    Fischer says he actually dreams of detective mysteries not Chess.  He answers Ralph Nader presciently about Chess live tv events, saying just reduce time controls to avoid 3 hours. Also it is second nature to Fischer already 45 years ago that Chess is finite but "beyond the mind's comprehension," he means all at once.

There are other integer number sequences.  You could add diagonal directions and make these sliders too.  Then the board could be fixed at 30x30.  Huygens is orthogonal leaper but a variant piece would be Queenlike to the prime number squares five and over or more inclusively three and over. 

Then there are more pieces to expand the idea to other sequences.  Fibonacci moves Queenlike to 3,5,8,13, and 21 distance.  Triangular number piece moves along radial lines exactly 3,6,10,15, 21, or 28.  Square number piece to 4,9,16, and 25, a weak piece.  Deficient number sequence piece (since perfect numbers are so rare) is the strongest going to 4,5,7,8,9,10,11,13,14,15,16,17,19,21,22,23,25,26,27,29. Tetrahedral number 4,10,20, weak mover again.  Abundant number to 12,18,20,24 (keeping all these less than 30 to fit the board). Lucas to 3-distance, or 4, 7, 11,18 or 29.  Pawns should be Man to all eight directions one or two steps, squares which the mathematical pieces cannot any of them reach from the same starting square.

Lucky number unit can go radially 3 or 7 or 9  or 13 or 15 or 21 or 25 only.  Pancake number type moves 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, or 29.

However, never design a chess piece based on Weird Numbers. They are too few and too large.  '70' is the first weird number because it is abundant being less than (1+2+5+7+10+14+35, its factors), but no set of those divisors sum to 70 itself.  The only other less than 4-digit weird number  is 836, and the sequence 70, 836, 4030, 5830 is unsuitable -- except on that infinite board.

Bo the world champion couldn't find a move in a bucket. It was even worse: he couldn't make any move at all. This, though Bo holds rank number one and is defending the televised title. The Committee gave him another opportunity in overpowering forces: 3 Queens, 2 Marshalls(RN) and 2 Cardinals(BN) -- against the like of lower-value Flamingo and Sissa and Vao.

Nightrider(NN) is on h7. Flamingo(1,6) e8. Sissa b7. Wolf c7. Camel-rider g7. Canon a5 (Canon aka Vao, Arrow, Lion), Vao. Quintessence b5. Diagonal Narrow Crooked Nightrider(Knappen) j5, Nachtmahr. Cardinal d3. Alibaba d1.

If either Marshall-b4 or -c3 moves, Canon threatens (illegal). If Queen-c2 moves, Quintessence has pathway. If Cardinal-d3 moves Wolf has path. If Cardinal-e2 moves, Sissa can reach King. If Queen-f3 moves, Nightrider at h7 is opened up. If Queen-h4 moves, Diagonal Narrow Crooked Nightrider of j5 prohibits. If Pawn-f4, Camelrider gets the reach. King cannot move because of Flamingo.

"Whoa Bo, pick up the pace! What piece would you be picking up?" choruses the common Foot Soldier.

Before Fischer and Fischer Random Chess, GM Reshevsky endorsed this Zonal Chess. Larry Smith who designed forty CVs of his own in CVPage wrote this, as he did another article about Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Chess, and also history about medieval Rithmomachia.

ChessBase must be reading Chess Variant Page because instead of a "swink" it's a "swindle." April_1. After 12 or 15 years this is their first departure from fake news on Fools Day. (Actually, not having looked in detail yet, expect one of the puzzles to be rogue or insoluble.) Swink means to swindle in the midwest but it's not here: Swindle? Also appropriate is Liars_Chess.

Wait a minute, isn't this one fishy? F.I.D.E. Arguably also the three top world holidays recognized in the most countries are April 1, May 1, and January 1(near the solstice), since other religious holidays are regional.