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Betza notation (extended). The powerful XBetza extension to Betza's funny notation.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Kay wrote on Wed, Jun 15, 2022 07:01 PM UTC:

There's something a bit strange about the sandbox, and I'm not really understanding how it works. I wanted to try my hand at making a knight that takes 2 steps and bends 45° right after each move (sort of like a right-chiral Rose), and eventually what I ended up with is hlalfNhrarfN.

In other words, it's a knight that can either take a left-chiral step and bend to the left (???) or take a right-chiral step and bend to the right. Why do I have to specify that it continues left-forward? If you just look at hlalfN it behaves similarly to a rook that can only take 4 steps. But if it just took a left-chiral step and bends further to the left to take its next step, how does it end up back on the same rank or file that it started?

I can't make sense of why it works, or should work, like this. It seems arbitrary. A left-chiral version of this would look like hlarfNhralfN... so to specify a left-chiral one I need to go against the previous chirality and to specify a right-chiral one I need to use the same chirality?! There is no innate property of "right" and "left" that makes them unambiguously correspond to "same-chiral" and "opposite-chiral", so why is it implemented this way?