Comments by joejoyce
Joe Joyce wrote on Wed, Nov 1, 2017 04:02 PM UTC:Apparently the "kibbitz" line on this menu does not update. It shows the last kibbitz as 91 days ago, and there have been 2 more recent ones.
Joe Joyce wrote on Tue, Aug 8, 2017 07:59 PM UTC:Thank you *so* much. I can't tell you how many posts I've lost over the years. Your change here makes this site much better!
Chess and a Half. Game with extra leapers.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Joe Joyce wrote on Wed, Jul 19, 2017 11:37 PM UTC:To V. Reinhart: I would be interested in the details of how you got your guard value.
Kevin Pacey, might I have your thoughts about the value of the king on a 144 square board. Is 1.77 a reasonable value for the king here? How does this contrast with the knight values on 64 and 144 square boards?
Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, May 29, 2017 05:07 AM UTC:My mother-in-law passed away 2 months ago, after a long series of major illnesses. She would have been 100 in a couple more weeks. My wife, her brother, and I have been her primary caretakers for years and this absorbed most of our time recently. I did not disappear from most of my activities by choice. Just kinda got too worn down to think. Interestingly, I still could and did comment on politics, which demonstrates again that politics is essentially emotional, not intellectual. But I played progressively lousier chess and finally lost most games by running out of time. Didn’t have the energy to work on design/development or rehab my shoulder. Until now.
Wife and I need some time to decompress. I just bought a kayak at Paddlefest, in Old Forge on Saturday, and put it in the water Tuesday in Alexandrea Bay. My wife is looking for dog-friendly rentals in areas where we’d consider living. We’ve started thinking about our interests again. My wife is thinking about a boat and some waterfront. I’ve got a game or two to put together. And some fences to mend for disappearing.
Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Mar 13, 2017 06:27 AM UTC:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091726.htm
4D Hexagonal Chess. 4D analogue of Glinski's Hexagonal Chess based on Hyperchess4. (5x(5x(5x5)), Cells: 361) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Feb 27, 2017 09:21 PM UTC:I like this idea. It's a natural extension of the easy version of 4D (said very tongue in cheek.) This does imply that with a little work the game is playable, and probably won't exhibit chaotic behavior, unplayability, generally through chaos, being the bane of many 4D efforts.
I'm guessing the knight will not be as relatively powerful in this as in H4 because the board is a bit tight for knight moves. But the knight is the only fully 4D piece in either game, so I think it gets a significant boost in power from that, compared to FIDE. Conversely, the bishops lose some power, I believe, since they are now restricted to 1/3 of the board, rather than 1/2. And yes, I know they aren't really restricted, but for each move, they hit proportionally less of the entire board.
Finally, the pawns. In H4 they are forward-sideways wazirs, which effectively makes them (very) minor pieces. I'm not familiar with Glinski's pawns, though I prefer them (and thus the board grain orientation) to other versions. The board orientation and pawn moves seem to cry out for Glinski's interpretation. But this means the pawns cannot get to the outside columns of big hexes without capture. And that means they can be (and are in some sense?) flanked without the pawns having any preventive recourse.
All in all, I like the idea, but suspect it could use playtesting to work out the rough edges. The designer in me wants to increase the size of at least the 3 central coulums of big hexes, and spread pieces as well as pawns across the backs of the 3 central big hexes. Or mess with the knight's move, making it 2 ortho moves and a diagonal out finish (or the diagonal part first, and then finish on the same hexes "from the other side".) Or even add a row of 5 big hexes across the middle of the board, and keep everything else the same. While 2 of the 3 increase the pawn distance, they might mitigate enough other things to be worth looking at.
Hyperchess4
. Hyperchess updated: changed rules, discussion, sample game, etc.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Feb 13, 2017 06:46 AM UTC:Hey, Kevin, we're saying the same thing about the N move, although I said it rather clumsily, an occupational hazard when I'm very short on sleep. Let me phrase it this way:
The board is too small if the knight cannot make a complete tour on any and every individual 2D board section presented in the game without ever leaving that 2D section until the tour is complete.
Heh, saying the N could make the tour 'comfortably' was probably not as precise as I would have liked. But however you cut it, I think your minimum 2D level size is not 19 but 37, giving 1369 locations. The only game software I know that would handle that size is Vassal. But it should handle it very easily.
💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Sun, Feb 12, 2017 10:39 PM UTC:Hi, Kevin.
It's taken me a while to get back to this, but the problem is that there is no knight's tour of your proposed board. The absolute center hex is unreachable from any other hes on the board, which you can check by putting the knight on that center hex, and seeing it has no legal moves from there, on your proposed board size. You must up the size of the board, both the size and number of 2D levels, until the tour is doable within any given 2D level from any hex in that level. Then your board is big enough. Barely.
💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Feb 6, 2017 08:43 AM UTC:The first problem with 4D is that there are far too many crazy diagonals. People cannot come close to visualizing them all. The second is forcing mate. There are too many ways to escape in 4D so that there need to be ways of restricting that 4D freedom to corral and mate a king. This is also a problem in 2D, but not as serious. However, on an infinite board, how many pieces are needed to mate a lone king? You need at least the king and a pair of rooks, the extra rook to provide the effect of a board edge.
I've dabbled in 3D, but find it vastly confusing, and harder to play than Hype. I don't know what the minimum requirement for forced mate is, nor what it takes to force mate on an infinite 3D board. The mating player has to attack 27 squares on 3 adjacent 2D boards with every attacker being defended or out of the king's capture range. For a fully 4D king, 81 squares in a 3x3 array of 2D boards have to be attacked with every attacker being defended or out of the king's capture range.
There seem to be only 2 options, restrict the king, and/or make other pieces powerful enough to capture a 3D or 4D king. Super-powered pieces bring problems of their own, especially in higher-D chess. They are impossible to guard against unless you clog the board with blocking pieces. And pieces with broad movement ability promote chaos in higher-D games. You essentially cannot predict the game state even a couple turns hence. Since the very powerful pieces act like missiles dropping out of the sky onto the target, you need area defense pieces, the equivalent of anti-missile batteries, much shorter range than the missile pieces, but invulnerable to missiles and able to shield neighbors, too. The "Missile Command" comment I made a while back discusses the idea. You'd need something to block the unblockable, a Neutralizer piece. Grin, I think I'd rather work out those ideas on a large 2D board!
The other way is to restrict the pieces in some significant way(s) without totally nerfing the 4D effects. That's basically the way I went here in Hype, along with the tiny board. But the held king rules allow the individual 2D boards to be any size - specifically longer than 5 squares/side - and still allow forced mate with K + 2 of the bishops and/or queen(s) against the lone king. Even on an infinite 2D board, you wouldn't need to add another rook to mate.
It’s a lot later than I wish it was, so I’ll just ask what your general goals are. Your 361 cell board should be big enough, but hex boards limit the number of simple pieces you can have. And my brain just stopped working here. grin, I guess that makes this a cliffhanger.
💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Feb 4, 2017 09:57 PM UTC:Geometry was what got me into chess variants, specifically trying to understand 4D for a math course. The connectivity of 4D gives remarkable freedom to the 'normal' chess pieces, and encourages higher-D analogs of the standard pieces, so the "balloon" is a 4D 'bishop'. The 4D 'queen' is often a monster, attacking around a quarter of the 4x4x4x4 board. The knight is the one piece that has a "standard" move in 4D, on square boards. Visualization of moves and counter-moves is something of a problem. (Btw, thanks, you are right about the minimum queen move in hype being 18 squares. Nice catch, sorry 'bout the typo.)
Taking it to hex boards... well, consider that a 4x4x4x4 square board is the smallest one where the knight has freedom/ability to move in all 4 directions from every square on the board. What is the analogous hex board size/shape? To an extent, this depends on the pieces you are using, and their hex footprints. What do you want to achieve?
💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Feb 2, 2017 05:44 AM UTC:Piece values. Something I was always terrible at. Experience with Hype will let me argue some qualitative values. Pawns can move to 6 squares max, min 4, 7 - 6 on the initial move Rooks always move to 12. I'd argue rooks are worth roughly twice what pawns are. Bishops (B+W) are 18 max, 10 min, and 2 can mate, with king. Queens are 22 max, 16 min, and 2 can mate, with king. Or Q + B + K can mate. Rooks and knights don't have the proper footprint to force mate from anywhere on an open board. Knights, however, have a rather amazing mobility on a 4x4x4x4 board. The N has a min if 12 squares, and a max of 24 squares, and can deliver some nasty forks. I see it as clearly more valuable than a bishop, and while its minimum is less than the queen's, is maximum is greater. I'd put it closer to the queen than to the bishop in value, and it must certainly be considered a major piece despite not being able to force mate with a pair.
Rules of Chess: Check, Mate, and Stalemate. Answers to frequently asked questions.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Feb 2, 2017 01:22 AM UTC:To Bill Nye. It is illegal to leave your king in check. When an illegal move is noticed, the rules require all subsequent moves to be retracted and re-done.
Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Jan 28, 2017 12:24 AM UTC:|
My father was born almost 100 years ago, on 19 March 1917. I miss him a lot. Unfortunately I cannot tell him how much I love him, but, with your help, I can help more people read about his life and his accomplishments as a Chess player.
There is a Wikipedia page about him in English and in 17 other languages:
Some of these articles have a page or two of content, others only a few lines. The English version has some nice text though as I can see the Spanish and French versions have more information. The Dutch version has a nice chess board. The Hungarian version also has a table of his participation on the Olympic games. The Russian version has a list of other results as well.
100 translations
I'd like to ask for your help updating the existing pages and translating them to other languages. It would be really nice if we could have it in 100 languages with substantial content for his 100s birthday! Published on 2017-01-27 by Gabor Szabo |
Modern Shatranj. A bridge between modern chess and the historic game of Shatranj. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Fri, Jan 27, 2017 08:45 PM UTC:Since stalemate was sometimes a win for the stalemated side, and "bare king" is immediately obvious to everyone, I lean strongly toward the bare king rule winning out. Your argument, Kevin, cements my position.
Now, who's got stuff hanging? Contact me.
Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Jan 26, 2017 06:16 PM UTC:Will the author of The Royal Chess (not to be confused with Royal Chess) please contact me here or at my email addres? Your post is hanging for a couple of reasons that can be corrected.
Modern Shatranj. A bridge between modern chess and the historic game of Shatranj. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Wed, Jan 25, 2017 06:59 PM UTC:Good question, Kevin, and as far as I can see or find (so far), the answer is undetermined. There was little standardization of stalemate rules until a couple hundred years ago. Different areas did different things, and I suspect that in the situation diagrammed, all 3 possible outcomes were, at some place and time, accepted.
With rook-level pieces, in the spirit of shatranj, I find the knightrider stylistically wrong. Of course, I find the NN an awkward piece, and I am terrible with awkward pieces. To me, ches should be fighting with your opponent, not fighting with your own pieces. That being said, the NN is a limited piece, far more in keeping with the limited pieces of ancient chess than the modern versions of strong pieces. I see it as a sort of limited missile, able to strike across the board, but with restricted targeting. It seems like a piece for a very large board with lots of pieces worth a range of values.
At this point, the hero ands shaman pieces (D+W) & (A+F), or the bent versions (D+/-W) & (A+/-F), while more powerful, or possibly the Oliphaunt (AF+AF) or Lightningwarmachine (DW+DW) seem to me to be the best fits, being very roughly worth around 5 or so pawns and short ranged. Pieces like the half duck (HFD) or scout or other such pieces seem more awkward, to me. ... Hm, I guess there's a giant shatranj variant lurking somewhere in my head.
💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Tue, Jan 17, 2017 07:10 PM UTC:Thank you for the comment and rating, Kevin. Regardless of the exact value of the "minor" pieces, they are all within a point of each other, allowing fairly free exchanges among the pieces, and sometimes giving the end of the game a "different armies" feel, where a pair of elephants face a knight and general, for example.
In shatranj, there are 3 "levels" of even exchange, between pawns, between minor pieces, and between rooks. Modern chess adds the queen exchange for a 4th level. There are several "queen-level" pieces, from the R+N minister to the B+K dragon bishop of shogi. What are decent rook-level pieces? DO they need to be short range, more "area-effect" pieces to keep them rook level?
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Joe Joyce wrote on Fri, Jan 6, 2017 08:26 PM UTC:Fergus, I'm just doing it manually through each person's ID page. So far, once I've changed a password, the user has no more problem logging in.
Joe Joyce wrote on Fri, Jan 6, 2017 12:48 PM UTC:I gave 3 or 4 people new passwords recently because they had the same problem as HG Muller. Their new passwords work just fine. It's either quite a coincidence or an odd little problem cropped up. To those whose passwords I changed in the past few weeks, has anybody tried to change the new password?
Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Dec 12, 2016 06:27 PM UTC:Once again I find myself with a game that needs to be posted, and this one isn't even my style. Most commenters and players here seem to like very powerful long-range pieces on boards no bigger than 10x10. In particular over the years, Carlos Cetina and Jeremy Good have pushed me in that direction more than anyone else. A couple days ago, I was looking over Kevin Pacey's movement diagram for the Flying Dragon in Butterfly Chess:
If you push this idea to the limit, you get a white "bishop" that hits every single white square every single turn, and if you make it unblockable, you have a white missile. You can't make it completely unblockable, because on a FIDE board, 1. f1-e8 checkmate! And that board is still a bit small. So use Grand Chess as the vehicle. All the pieces keep their moves, though they may not start on the same squares. All the pieces get an extra power.
(pardon for the clumsy pix - modern tech and I fight...)
Clearly you have to restrict the missiles. Let the rooks be anti-missile batteries. No missile may land within 2 squares of a friendly rook. Add this power to the queen, chancellor, and archbishop, also.
Restricting missiles further, bishops may only be used as missiles from their original squares. They may move off and back on again, and still fire.
A bishop fired as a missile is destroyed on impact, and a new bishop/missile is placed on the original bishop's square. While each side may only ever have 1 bishop of each color on the board at any time, there is no limit to the number of missiles that can be fired and replaced.
Now missiles are too powerful, so they are restricted again. A missile must be fired by one of the 3 major pieces, Q, A, or C, which must be directly behind the bishop to fire and replace it.
Now the initial set-up is shifted slightly by moving 2 of the major pieces directly behind the 2 bishops, sliding the kings 1 square right in the above diagram, and placing the 3rd major piece on the vacated king's square.
Now we mess with the knights. In addition to their standard move, they gain the cannon attack. They may move any number of squares orthogonally, jump over a piece, and capture the next piece along that file or rank.
This is as far as I've gotten. The defense for 1. Nb2-a4 is to drop a missile on the knight. Note missiles can only hit pawns, knights, bishops, and kings, and none of the major pieces, the ones that can force mate with the king, at this point. Comments? Suggestions?
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Thank you. Great to see the site getting updated!