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Tandem-Pawn Chess. Pawns are tandems of two pawns, which can move or capture as a unit, or decouple into two pawns. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
George Duke wrote on Sat, Jan 5, 2013 04:44 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
This is a novel Mutator, but so many as 16 pawns would need a board adjustment. The rules carefully remove all ambiguities unlike 90% of first-draft CVs. Where piece atoms of Augsburg Chess, Augsburg, and on-site later Fusion and other simlarly-conceived can re-unite, de-coupled Tandem Pawns do not re-unite. Strategically, advantage in staying coupled longer is not inconsiderably mobility per se, the way other cvs have transporter cells or pieces: Jacks & Witches, Gridlock, Conveyor, or Novo's railroad.

💡📝Kenneth Regan wrote on Fri, Jan 4, 2013 05:39 AM UTC:
Thanks for feedback.  To answer George Duke, the main distinction I see from the "modest" and other variants is that mine aims most to lengthen the horizon of planning in the middlegame.  I contributed a comment in the "Future" thread about the influence of the depth of search on the complexity, compared to the branching factor.  

To be sure, I haven't played a game of this to check it out.  Basically I'm doubling down on Philidor's dictum "Pawns are the soul of chess", and figuring that having twice as many souls lessens the influence of soul-less computers :-).

I like "T" for "tandem", though in algebraic one could also capitalize the file of a source square, thus E4 D5 Exd5 Qxd5 for the "tandemized" Scandinavian.  (Note that without the rule that a tandem cannot use just one pawn to take a tandem, ...D5?? would be a blunder.)  For diagrams I would use a pawn printed double with a slight horizontal displacement---for Black you need just the silhouette, while for White you could print one over the other or have one shade the other for some 3D texture.  This should be hackable for existing chess-TeX packages.  

The idea of using checker pieces is also neat, and would work for magnetic sets with button-style pieces.  Another idea is to put a fat ring around the neck of a pawn to make a tandem, though this needs a separate supply of pawns when they decouple.

George Duke wrote on Thu, Jan 3, 2013 06:31 PM UTC:
This modest CV says ''give humans a chance against computers.'' Here's an old discussion of that: Future_chess_computer-human, ''old'' because the last comment was Lavieri's April 2005.

Charles Gilman's modest cvs are one venue for minor pawn changes ramifying largely, Modest_Pawns, similar in style to this Tandem Pawn. Below 21st Century is chosen because of its own sort of ''tandem pawn'' in the Jester, different from present new cv Tandem-Pawn Chess.

Of course, from Fischer Random to Twenty-first Century Chess, 21st_Chess, it is standard plug-in either introductory or concluding, many hundreds of the over 5000 cvs known to exist to say, this will be hard for computers. 21st's particular take concludes in that regard ''beat Deep Blue.'' Many other cvs would also be found stating to comparable effect: dispense with opening theory, beat computers, level the playing field.

Then too there's the poem eleven years ago, Dialogue, ridiculing computers as ''stopgap laptop'' and ''mainframe lamebrain'' because it's back to square one across the board. Yelling_the_answer.


(zzo38) A. Black wrote on Wed, Jan 2, 2013 02:51 AM UTC:Good ★★★★

I like this idea of this kind of game, and I like these rules.

But what is notation of the tandems (on a ASCII diagram, FEN, etc)? Perhaps it should be "T"? Could it work with TeX chess? What icon (such as, can you write a METAFONT program for it)?

You might also use flat checkers pieces for the pawn so that you can make it double or single easily.


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