Rated Comments for a Single Item

Holly crap I've never been to a site with so much info on chess....i mean wow this is a really good site and im a huge chess fan

This site is o.k. but you should let people play chess on it!

i dont really like this site sorry!

I think this is a great site. :-) I was interested at the remarkably direct connection across disparate cultures; and remember that chess is a game of intellect and skill...a really deep thought, eh?

No history.Bad for school kids.doesn't give you inside info.The info on SHogi(or whatever it is is good.Not Bad all up!

Provided the info I wanted, and more. Gracias.

I liked this page because it gave me good imformation on my school project and it was interesting too.

This page doesn't tell you one thing that would help you on any project. And also I have a very old encyclopeida which told me that when ever a pawn got to the end of the board it had to be promoted into a queen, which could only move one spot diagonally. Also you do not tell me how this connects to chiness chess in anyway. For example, how did the chiness come up with a cannon piece if it was based off of this game. Also many historyians have said that all types of chess were based off of chiness chess. In other words, you need more information and resource that would prove what you have just put down on your website.

Murray's notion that 2-sided Chatrang predates the 4-sided Chaturanga is totally wrong. Where is some evidence? What about previous chess historian Prof Duncan Forbes proof for the priority of the 4-sided game? No mention of Stuart Cullen either. An appalling summary of Chaturanga that should be removed from the web! www.chaturanga.com

Honestly! See Jean-Louis Cazaux's page on the relative ages of 2-handed and 4-handed Chaturanga. It can be found at: <ul> <li><a href='http://www.chez.com/cazaux/chaturanga.htm'>http://www.chez.com/cazaux/chaturanga.htm</a> </ul> Neither Forbes nor Cullen are considered exactly up-to-date sources, you know.

I like the information that was added in, but can we really prove that this game came before chinese chess?

The black pawn that moves to, let us say b8, will get promoted to a knight. But what if it moved diagonally to b8 from a7 (by capturing)? Does it become a rook or knight? Please email me at [email protected] or [email protected]

your history is an error.(even though, i do give you credit for trying!) however, you said nothing about current chess that is played in tournaments and such. if you added this info., then you be improving greatly.

This is the only reference that I have seen to the rule that pawns must promote to the piece on whose square they promote, which I suspect may have been a variation to the usual rules. In fact the rule could be adapted as a minor variation to most kinds of chess, although it would not suit Shogi. My one reservation is the problem of the king's square, which I feel should be treated as its symmetric neighbour (counsellor or queen) for this purpose.

The page itself and the resource is just wonderful, as always. The explanation of Chaturanga is definitely useful and playable. The history may be in error; see <A HREF='http://www.samsloan.com/origin.htm'>http://www.samsloan.com/origin.htm</A> for a detailed discussion of the origin of chess. Hans, you may wish to include a link to this discussion and/or some of the content in your pages!

1. Elephants were indeed present in China at the time of invention of Chinese Chess (203BC), as were horsemen and chariots, as demonstrated in David Li's book The Origins of Chess (<a href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0963785222/104-4808093-237594 3?vi=glance'>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0963785222/104-4808093-237594 3?vi=glance</a>). For example, Sun Tzu's The Art of War mentions chariots and recommends that they be positioned at the sides for a real army, hence their positions in the game that mimicks a real army. <br><br> As a side note, Murray's research is incomplete because he did not have proficiency in the Chinese language and did his best with documents of Indian origin. <br><br> 2. It is more likely that the Chinese had the pieces on the points in the tradition of Wei Qi (Go), also invented in China even earlier than Chinese Chess, and that their Indian discoverers, not knowing that the pieces belong on the points, decided to put them within the squares instead. It is equally likely that the Indian discoverers gave the game a name that they were more familiar with (Chaturanga, for example) since they did not understand the Chinese name for it (Xiang Qi, pronounced Shang chi). <br><br> 3. For the differentiated pieces in Chinese Chess, David Li's response: 'As noted in my book, proto-chess (the earliest form of chess of any kind, the forerunner of Xiangqi) was invented in 203 BCE by Han Xin, the commander-in-chief of Han, during the period of Chu-Han Conflict, where Chu was a border-state whose language was different from Han's. Incidentally, the color of Han's flag was red; that of Chu, black. Thus, in Xiangqi, the color of the two sides are red and black, with red considered the superior force. <br><br> The reason for the slight differences in characters is, again, to convey the superiority of red pieces. Generally, as to the chariot, the red piece has 'man' as the radical, while the black piece has none -- this is to suggest that the black chariot is unmanned (the man/men occupying the chariot had fled); ditto for the horse (manned in red and unmanned in black). The word for the black pawn has, as one of its many meanings, dead, thereby conveying similar meanings of red's superiority.' <br><br> The idea is to imply that the side of the army that the inventor was commanding was superior.