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H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Dec 23, 2017 10:47 AM UTC:

Having different ideas is good; agreeing from the start would have no added value. What I am afraid of with the game-definition format it to fall victim of the "maximum-flexibility-minmum-usefulness principle". The overwhelming number of Chess variants and fairy pieces are very simple, and it would be a pity to force an enormously complex description system on the user to describe these, just so that it would also be possible to describe something very complex that they are never going to need.

Note that the Betza notation used by XBoard can describe Chess and a Half, although the side-effect captures of Cat and Star Cat no longer qualify as user-friendly. But a system that allows chaining of steps belonging to different Betza atoms, somewhat like the Betza 2.0 that I once proposed, would be a lot more user-friendly. Odin's Runes also doesn't seem to be out of the question. E.g. the Forest Ox just does igui + a Knight jump, which would be cK-bK-N, and that doesn't look very complex. In XBetza it becomes complex, because it forces all steps to be described by the same atom, which makes the Knight jump cumbersome (cabampafsK, where mpafsK is a kludgy way to express N in terms of two K steps, the first step made insensitive to blocking by allowing it to hop as well as move). So that is awfull, but the Betza 2.0 format seems acceptible. Activation by a friendly piece, like used for King, is already implemented in the Betza dialect used by the interactive diagram, as a move with a special 'x' mode of the activating piece, and would only have to be limited to a specified piece type (King). For which a general mechanism could be used, like I already did suggest for Betza 2.0. These are all things that are almost never needed, for which it thus doesn't matter so much that they are a bit complex.

And it is always possible to use a basically simple format, like Betza, but define some 'escape' symbol that allows you to use a Turing-complete programming language to define what you want.


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