Comments by MarkThompson

> My intention was that castling, championing and centauring would be as
near as possible in meaning to castling in ordinary chess...

The hardest thing about coding the rules for castling etc. in Zillions is
the stipulation not found in ordinary chess, 'that the king has not been
checked at any previous time in that game.'

There are a lot of promising games in this contest. Would anyone like to
play some of them by e-mail? If there are Zillions implementations, we
could even arrange a time to play online in real-time, assuming the
players aren't behind firewalls that prevent Zillions from connecting. I
was able to use Zillions last I checked, though I recently got DSL and
don't know whether that will affect it.

The judges will have plenty of work ahead of them to give adequate
play-testing to all of these. If a lot of us volunteered to play the
judges in e-mail games, would that be permissible and helpful? I'm
assuming that none of us who entered games would be playing our own
entries, and that we would all be good enough sportsmen to play seriously
in whatever games we were assigned. Also I'm assuming that there would be
at least 5-10 contestants participating in such a program, besides others,
so that each judge would have several opponents in any game.

This is very similar to Milennium Chess, a commercial variant played on a
15x8 board with only one Rook in the middle of the lineup. I've played it
and found it good, and have communicated with the author (whose name I've
forgotten). He said he had tried 16x8 with two Rooks in the middle but
felt that the two Rooks in the center of the board were too powerful.

Re: Nightriders, it occurs to me you could also create a piece that you
might call an Asterisk, which can move as a Nightrider left and right
(that is, 2 steps along the rank and 1 step along the file, but not vice
versa), or a Rook along the files: so it would have six lines of motion.

This game is played not by individuals, but by two competing monasteries,
deep in the Pazomian hills, where monks devote their lives to the study 
of Shogi and its variants. The first (and so far, the only) game was
started over 600 years ago, and each monastery has been making two moves a
year (with interruptions for crises such as famines and wars); one delivers
its moves on the equinoxes, the other, on the solstices. Books have been
written analyzing the status of the game; novices study the thinking of 
the players who have gone before them for years before their opinions are
sought for current moves. Most experts feel that they are nearly finished
with the opening now.

Anyway, it's a nice legend, I think. Course, I did make it up myself.

If the width of the board is even, can Black always make the mirror-image
of White's previous move, where the line dividing the board into two
halves lengthwise is the axis of symmetry? If so, then Black will always
win this way (on a board of even width). Unless there's something I'm
missing, I think Black could do that.

I've been thinking lately that the 84-cell tetrahedral board might adapt
better to a 3D Shogi. My reasoning is that Shogi pieces are less powerful
than Chess pieces, getting much of their value from being parachutable
once captured, and the difficulty of visualizing moves on this board might
be lessened for less powerful pieces. I'm considering replacing the Rooks
with Lances that can only move orthogonally 'forward', the Dabbabantes
with some kind of Silvers and Golds that can only move to a subset of the
adjacent cells, and having a Horse (a Knight, but only with its
forwardmost moves) that automatically drops into the King's starting
square whenever the King first vacates it. I don't think I'd include any
pieces like the Shogi Bishop or Rook. The board's colors could be reduced
to two. Pawns might move to the forward cells of the same color, or of
opposite color, or there might be two kinds of Pawn. A Silver and Gold
would move to any of the four forward cells, or to the adjacent lateral or
rear cells that are the opposite color (Silver) or the same color (Gold,
considering the same-levels cells 'diagonally' adjacent as adjacent for
this purpose).

It appeals to me that the board is also nearly the same size as a
conventional Shogi board. These armies would be a bit smaller, but I think
they're also a bit stronger.

Encryption is plenty strong enough to keep the move-explanation secure --
after all, we even use it to send credit card numbers over the internet,
and there are more people willing to spend more time to get credit card
numbers than there are people who want to find out why you made a certain
move in a game. The objection you and other players have to recording
their reasoning is more potent. Personally I'd be glad to write
explanations of my moves, even for the sake of making sure I remember why
I made them when I return to an e-mail game, sometimes several days later;
and I often wish the great players in tournaments would make such notes
and share them after the game is finished.

But it still wouldn't prevent cheating: I've seen programs that will
provide reasoning behind the moves they make. It would be very good for
new and exotic games to have some system that would prevent this kind of
cheating, because it would make it possible to hold a 'high-stakes'
tournament with a cash prize (maybe $100) and attract larger numbers of
serious players, and so getting more games that worthy of serious study.
But tournaments with prizes would also encourage cheaters to Zillionize
the game in hope of winning through brute-force computation rather than by
gaining a real understanding of how the game should be played.

So I applaud the effort to find such a cheat-proof e-play system, but I
don't see much hope for it myself.

'Wouldn't it be, in fact, impossible to move the rook 'through' an
attacked position? Since the only position the rook goes 'through' is
the one position where the King is going to end up.'

Not when you're castling Queenside. Then the King ends the move on square
c1, the Rook on d1. The Rook passes over b1 and the King does not. The
King always moves two squares when castling to either side.

Personally, I prefer names that are 'real' nouns, but chosen with as much
logic as possible. For instance, a Queen isn't called a Rook-Bishop, so I
feel a Marshall shouldn't be called a Rook-Knight. The room this leaves
for logic isn't very great, but I'd be inclined to give, for instance,
names suggesting greater importance, authority, or strength to pieces that
are more powerful: for example, 'Empress' would be a reasonable name for
Q+N, but not for (say) B+N. I would give clerical names to pieces whose
chief move is diagonal, such as 'Priest' to a one-step diagonal mover
(um, that's a Ferz? or an Alfil? I can never remember). I like Cardinal
for B+N, and would use Archbishop for a Bishop with a one-step orthogonal
move. Animal names are well reserved for leaping pieces like Knights,
Camels, Zebras, etc.

But the problem with all this is that there seems to be no way to get
everyone to agree to use the same terms, and some pieces already have
several different names that each have considerable tradition behind them.

'It is also problematic to qualify Catholic for the Pope's followers.
Calling them Roman is inaccurate as there is now complete separation
between the Vatican, a political entity independent of all others, and
Rome, the capital of an Italy with no established religion.'

Nevertheless, we call ourselves Roman Catholics. It is inaccurate to call
England 'England' since its inhabitants are no longer exclusively
Angles. It is inaccurate to call French Fries French since the dish
originated in Belgium. Etc., etc., but none of this matters, because
derivation is one thing and meaning is another. I am a Roman Catholic,
thank you very much, and I would prefer to go on describing my religion by
the term that everyone in Christendom already knows.

The PBM system seems to have a bug in the routines that color the board.
When I try to change the colors in the preset for Hexagonal Chess from
magenta, yellow, and cyan to orange, olivedrab, yellow, the colors that
show up on the board are instead three shades of green; and there are blue
patches all around the board's border, as if they landed one tile away
from where they should have landed. Here's the URL it gave me for
accessing my board:

 play.php?game%3DGlinski%27s+Hexagonal+Chess%26set%3Dsmall%26patt
erns%3D%3A+%2A%26hexcolors%3Dorange+olivedrab+yellow%26cols%3D11%
26code%3D1prnqb%2F2p2bk%2F3p1b1n%2F4p3r%2F5ppppp%2F11%2F-PPPPP5%2
F--R3P4%2F---N1B1P3%2F----QB2P2%2F-----BKNRP1%26rules%3D%2Fhexago
nal.dir%2Fhexagonal.html%26board%3D201.012.120.%26shape%3Dvhex

My two cents' worth is that 'orthogonal' (as used in game rules) and
'triagonal' are 'terms of art,' useful in descriptions of game rules
and hardly anywhere else, and therefore known to people interested in
games but not to most others (including lexicographers). I'm mildly
interested to learn from the discussion here that their derivations are
probably based on confusions, but this doesn't diminish them in my
regard. Lots of good words were originally coined ineptly. Any attempt to
replace 'orthogonal' with 'lateral,' or 'triagonal' with
'vertexal,' or with any other new coinages, is more likely to create
confusion than remove it.

No, the first-move doublestep option is only for non-capturing moves. So a
pawn that begins on g2 can only move to g3 or g4 (if not obstructed) or
capture on f3 or h3 (if an enemy piece is there).

Your idea might make an interesting chess variant, though.

Jared, I believe the cells of the board shown here are topologically
connected in the same way as the rhombic dodecahedron tiling you mention.
Only the topological form of the board is relevant to play, so I wouldn't
think that the translated rules would be enlightening ... if I'm
visualizing correctly what you have in mind, I think it would be far
harder to understand what the game is about. The trouble is that in any
diagram I can imagine, you can only see a cross-section of each level,
which prevents the full geometric form of the 3D cell from being seen. If
you have 3D raytracer software you might be able to demonstrate it. I'd
be interested in seeing that too. The ideal thing would be a virtual
reality board, that players would see by donning those goggles that
present stereoscopic 3D images that you can see all sides of by moving
your head. When those become commonplace I predict a lot of wonderful 3D
games will get implemented on them. I still haven't seen that technology,
but I hope someday to use them to play Renju on a 'tetrahedral' board of
order 13 or so.

Charles, I'm reading your post for about the tenth time and am starting
to figure out what you're talking about. You say 'square roots' but I
believe you mean 'squares.' The base 36 business was confusing to me but
you're really just doing it for compactness, so you can indicate each
distance (or its square root) by a single character. And your use of
'coprime' doesn't seem to match the meaning I understand by that word.
But I'm interested to see that the cells to which a knight at your origin
can move are all labelled as distance sqrt(3) from the origin - well, that
would make sense, just as a FIDE knight's moves are all sqrt(5) in
length. Okay, I'm starting to follow your arithmetic - and I'm
surprised, I wouldn't have guessed that the centers of cells in a rhombic
dodecahedral grid would have distances whose squares are integers - though
now that you point it out, I don't see why not.

I'm not sure how playable your proposals for Unicorns and Nightriders
would be on this grid -- it seems to me that to give them sufficient scope
to practice their powers the board would have to be considerably larger
and so have a huge number of cells, and a IMO game whose board has too
many cells becomes too complicated to be interesting, because the moves
have so many consequences no human player can foresee them; hence, it
turns into a game of chance rather than skill. However, many people
disagree with me, and I would be glad to see other game developers try
their hand at this grid. If you're inspired, go for it!

People like chess variants for lots of reasons, and some prefer the more
exotic variants that depart from usual chess with unusual pieces or rules:
you don't find that in Millennium Chess. But, without diminishing the
exotics, I like the more modest variants also. I've played this one and
found it to be pretty good. And yes, it did seem to improve my skills at
usual chess, at least temporarily -- or at least my confidence level. When
you come back to 8x8 after a few games you have this strange feeling:
'Why, this game will be SIMPLE!' 

I haven't tried the other variants that are approximately double width
and so I can't opine on how this one compares with them. I once
communicated briefly with the inventor, who said that while developing
M.C. he tried other versions (among them, 8x16) and rejected them. He says
having two rooks in the center of the board is too much power there. I
expect the choice among wide chesses will also come down to personal
tastes.

Seems like this idea of formulaic evaluation of CV's should be written up
on a page of its own. A thorough investigation of how the various popular
CV's fare under different formulas, and hence of how the formulas ought
to be interpreted, would take a lot more exposition than could be done in
comments.

The challenge is to come up with formulas that will not only 'predict the
past', by telling us what we expect them to tell us about well-known
variants, but that will also provide useful insights into new games. It's
far from obvious that such formulas could be found, but it would be quite
a discovery if they were.

Perhaps the number mentioned is the rating assigned by a computer opponent
that evaluates the player, achieved without playing in tournaments against
human beings?

If so, I'd recommend along with Gary Gifford that the player take part in
a tournament at his earliest convenience. News of a chess prodigy would
help to promote the game. And I don't think it would be at all bad for
the youngster's chess career to come forth and be recognized at that
point.

'The two players have different goals, so Knight Moves is probably an
unbalanced game,' said Ned. 'And Black, who plays defense, moves first:
that must mean that the offense has the natural advantage in this game.'

Ted said, 'Well, since you're a beginner, I'll let you play White, and
I'll even give you the advantage of the first move.'

'Don't be too cocky, I'm pretty good at games like this,' said Ned.
But Ted proceeded to beat him three games in a row. Catching the Black
Knight was infernally difficult, even with the advantage of the first
move.

Then, as they were about to begin the fourth game, Ned suddenly said,
'Hey -- WAIT a minute!' And Ted broke out laughing.

What had Ned realized?

I've been thinking of a variant expanding on the Bughouse concept that I
call Team Chess (or Team Shogi). I'm envisioning six players on a team,
and games taking place between two opposing teams. Two team members play a
small variant, two play usual chess, and one plays a large variant; the
sixth team member is the captain. All three chess variants being played
should use similar armies and rules, so that it won't cause confusion if
a piece gets transferred to another board -- perhaps Quickchess, usual
chess, and Grand Chess. The winner of the large variant game determines
the winning team. When a piece is captured, the capturing team's captain
takes it in hand (it changes color) and delivers it to one of his team's
five players (captain's choice) to drop at will. The captain can watch
all five of the games, but no other communication takes place between the
team members once play has begun. 

I haven't decided what should happen when one of the smaller games ends;
should the captain receive all the pieces of the conquered army? None of
them? Perhaps just a Prince (non-royal King)?

I like the way this game addresses the problem of the too-powerful royal
piece (which can make it hard to win the game) by the rule that the queen
cannot slide through check. That seems original and yet chesslike, and
sounds likely to do the trick. The explanation on this page was a little
hard for me to decipher, however: I'd suggest rephrasing somehow to
remove the reference to queens capturing other queens. Is 'cover' as you
use it here a standard chess term? I hadn't run across it yet.

I wish the board had a fourth color, so that each dragon would be
restricted to squares of one color. 

Shouldn't there be a piece for Ireland? A Harp, perhaps? No idea what it
would do, though.

'There must be dozens of possible names that would suit it better and
have the advantage of being offensive.' Surely Charles simply forgot to
type the word 'not' in this sentence.

'the three heraldic-based pieces could be considered 'brutish'.' I
imagine Charles G's use of 'brutish' harks back to the use of 'brute'
to mean 'beast,' which is comprehensible enough. The idea that a CV
inventor's choice of a name should be second-guessed at length is
certainly odd, though.

The basic idea of the game is that, as there are two simple sliders (B, R)
and one combination slider (B+R=Q), so in Wildebeest Chess there are also
two simple jumpers (Knight = (1,2) jumper and Camel = (1,3) jumper), and
one combined jumper (Wildebeest = N+C). I wonder how well the idea would
work instead with Knights and Zebras ((2,3) jumpers), and a combination
N+Z piece?

There is the idea that, as one of the sliders is color-bound, so perhaps
one of the jumpers ought to be also, hence the Camel. But it's not
obvious to me that rule makes for the best game. I'd be interesting in
knowing whether Wayne Schmittberger or anyone else has tried it. 

Actually, since the preset to enforce the rules has not been written for
this game yet, it would be possible to try playing this way, simply
entering Zebra moves for Camels and Knight/Zebra moves for the Wildebeest.

If this is the square you're proposing the white King to move to, I don't
see how the move puts him in check.

[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][p][ ]
[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]     Caps are black, lowercase are white
[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][P]
[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
[p][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
[k][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][K][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Tony, that sounds like a good idea. Something like 'the World against
Kasparov.' Maybe the winner of the CV tournament could play one side and
'the world' could play the other? Or, just 'the world against the
world.'

I've suggested in the forum that the Games Courier might implement a 'The
World Against ...' system, whereby a champion at some variant would play
White and everyone else plays Black. 'The World' can use a public forum
to discus possible lines of play and could vote (in a strict time-span) on
which move to make. 

Grand Chess would be a good game to investigate this way, because
Mindsports Arena has held tournaments some years back, so it has
recognized champions: Wayne Schmittberger and John Vehre. Either 'The
World Against Vehre' or 'The World Against Schmittberger' would be
great fun, I think, if either party could be enlisted for it.

Robert Abbott now has a set of Ultima puzzles on his website!

http://www.logicmazes.com/games/puz1to4.html

If Japan and the US have an extradition treaty, does anyone know why
Fischer is still in Japan? Are they refusing to extradite him for some
reason?

Here's that page I couldn't find before, that describes how to make fairy
chessmen out of regular Staunton pieces:

http://www.chessvariants.org/crafts.dir/fairy-chess-pieces.html

It's listed in the alphabetical index under 'How to make ...', but I think 
it would be better to list it in the index page of the Crafts section:

http://www.chessvariants.org/crafts.dir/index.html

As I say, I've used the technique described to make a Marshall and
Cardinal, though I haven't followed the full instructions for
dismembering a whole chess set to make the full range of pieces the author
shows. But I have enough to make an attractive set for Grotesque Chess.

Touche! :-)

I wrote that years ago and have forgotten the wording enough that when I
reread it nowadays I keep thinking, criminy, what pompous a$$ wrote this
stuff?

If you really want to go for the ultimate in symmetry, I would suggest we
need to do away with the notion of a square board. A square has only eight
symmetries: reflection NS or EW, 180 degree rotation, or any (or no)
combination of these. Indeed, the ultimate in symmetry would be to do away
with the board's edges: the board should be infinite, hence giving it
translational as well as reflectional symmetry. And we should do away with
the notion of cells within the board: the most symmetrical 2-dimensional
object being the entire Euclidean plane, in which any point is equivalent
to any other. Then we have complete rotational symmetry, about any point,
as well as translations and reflections.

But since we're pursuing symmetry as the ultimate goal here, we need to
embolden ourselves to take the next vital step as well. To do away with
the last vestiges of ugly asymmetry, we must also abolish the pieces: for
once pieces are introduced into our pristine continuum, they render the
game asymmetrical again, by causing some points and directions to have
more importance than others: in particular, the points pieces occupy, and
the directions they would need to move to attack other pieces, would have
special importance. Our ultimate, perfectly symmetrical chess must
therefore consist of an infinite plane with NO PIECES AT ALL.

It might be objected that without pieces it will be difficult to state
rules of movement, capture, initial setup, and object. But clearly, since
we desire a perfectly symmetrical game, we must abolish these notions as
well: because the perfectly symmetrical chess game must be symmetrical in
time as well as in space, and therefore it must have no beginning, no end,
and no change: the state of the game at any point must be the same as its
state at any other point. 

And so, at last, we have our perfectly symmetrical game: no cells, no
pieces, no goal, no players: is not its perfect, chaste serenity a thing
of beauty? Have we not achieved true theoretical perfection? And can we
not get back to discussing real chess games now?

Does anyone have any quantitative information about the advantage White has
over Black? The kind of thing I'd like to know is: supposing two
experienced, average rated players, with equal ratings, play many games
against each other until 100 games have ended decisively (not in draws),
how many should we expect to have been won by White? Is it 55-45, or
60-40, or what? Supposing our pair of equal players were more skilled than
average, does that make it closer or farther to 50-50?

Another thing that would be of interest: supposing we experiment with
matching many pairs of unequally-rated players, with the stronger player
playing Black, until we find pairs in which the White-win, Black-win ratio
is 50-50: will we find any consistency in the number of rating points that
separate the two players? Does playing White worth 20 points to your
rating? 40 points? 100 points??

Greg Strong wrote: 'When exact refutations to every single opening can be
calculated, and are published, then professional Chess will no longer be a
game of Chess skill, but rather just a game of memorization. Ok, you could
still try to substitute Chess skill, but a person with a fantastic memory
will probalby clean your clock.'

Indeed, I feel we have already witnessed the Scrabble-ization of Chess:
the step from amateur to tournament player already requires loads of rote
memorization. However, if we switch to Grand Chess the number of openings
will be far greater and hence harder to learn, for any human being
(without cyborg cortical implants); if we switch to any variant with a
large number of variable opening setups, I think it will be impossible. 

The objection someone made to Mercenary Chess that whatever makes the
'best' army and opening setup would be soon discovered misses one of the
points: the best army and opening setup for White would depend on the army
and opening setup Black is using, and vice versa; hence if they choose
them one piece at a time it would be unlikely that the same one would
always be used. Also, remember that there's a 'catalog' of pieces with
prices: I should have stipulated that the catalog offerings and prices
would continually be reviewed by the World Mercenary Chess Federation,
which would periodically raise the prices of pieces in the greatest demand
and lower the prices of pieces no one wants to hire. Also the WMCF might
introduce new pieces from time to time. Hence, I don't believe exhaustion
could ever happen.

Computers may play better than humans. But we're still a long way from
building a machine that can enjoy the game as much as we can.

One possible drawback to playing any CV with a wagering system based on
putting a price on each piece is that it seems it would make the game more
materialistic. One of the endearing features of Chess is that its focus on
the Kings makes spectacular sacrifices for the sake of achieving checkmate
worthwhile. But if the point of the game is to end with the greatest value
of pieces still on the board, I think this aspect will be lost. A player
who hopes to win would play conservatively, trying to keep his own pieces
on the board rather than let their value fall into the hands of his
opponent, while a player who fears losing would try to make exchanges,
thereby reducing the value of the ultimate prize for the winner.

For whatever it's worth, I proposed a variant called 'Contract Jetan'
in a letter to a 2001 issue of Abstract Games magazine, which went about
like this: In Contract Jetan, a player could propose in mid-game some rule
change that would make it more difficult for his opponent to win,
accompanied by a 'proffer' of some tokens that would be added to the
ante if the opponent accepts the dare. Such a proposal would probably be
made by the player in a weaker position. For example, 'You must win in
the next 15 moves or forfeit,' or 'My Thoat can only be captured by your
Warrior', etc. If the opponent accepts the rule change, the proffer is
added to the ante and the rule change is in effect. If the opponent
refuses, then the player who offered it has the option of 'buying out the
contract' as follows: from the proffer he removes a number of tokens equal
to the excess of value of the other player's army over his own, plus his
own Chief's value, and gives that to his opponent; then he adds the rest
of the proffer to the ante, and rotates the board half a turn. Then they
play on, but having reversed their roles, and with the proposed rule
change in effect.

This variant is played in an unpublished work that ERB left unfinished,
'Corporate Lawyers of Mars.'

I've read that the USA has an extradition treaty with Iceland also.