Comments by nelk114

Giving the opponent two moves, knowing that he has those, is too costly, though. In the opening you might get away with it, but in a typical middle-game position the opponent would use those to make a hit-and-run capture.

To be fair, Fergus' solution to that issue is quite elegant imo, and even just restricting two consecutive moves by a single piece alleviates hit‐and‐runs per se. It may be getting away from the intended point of this variant to introduce a whole nother idea but it seems like a usable way of introducing multi‐moves into a mostly‐single‐move game without breaking things too much

Ski‐ is a nice prefix for general use (though compared to Grant Acedrex's Ski‑manticore, the Tiger Chess astrologer is perhaps less obvious as a ski‐ piece since it arguably jumps over two squares — in the same way the osprey is arguably a ski‑‘2.manticore’, to use Aurelian's term for lack of anything better), but it does make sense imo to have separate words for the simplest ski‐ pieces; Bicycle/‐reme/‐plane are nice enough in that they extrapolate easily for longer initial leaps (tricycle, pentareme, ⁊c., practical utility aside).

Fwiw, I tend to agree with Gilman's conflation of jumping ski‐bishop with Tamerlane's non‐jumping Talia/Vanguard/Scout/Picket (he selects the latter term), on the grounds that they reach the same squares, like leaping and non‐leaping elephants; the leaping is then distinguished by a prefixed word (that said, I would tend to similiarly conflate normal and contra‐gryphons and Renn cavaliers for the same reason, so I suppose that can be taken with a pinch of salt given general tastes here). Fwiw he also has an ‘‐on’ suffix for extending a radial leap into a subsequent slide (such that ski‐bishop/picket ≡ ‘elephon’, ‘trilbon’ ≡ notional ‘tri‐plane’, and things like Sowons (per Long‐Nosed Generals) are possible) — though he doesn't touch oblique‐starting pieces.

As regards atomic names, his ski‐queen ≡ Fagin avoids clashing initials, albeit being a bit of a specific reference; Picket and Pocket (≡ ski‐bishop/‐rook) have no such luck, though Picket is always substitutable as above (and both T and V are relatively uncommon initials for CV pieces) (and also, Bat does in fact have a prior usage, as does Quetzal)

The obvious remaining reason to favour static images over the interactive diagram is that the latter only works with Javascript enabled. I suppose the obvious(?) way around that would be to also have the design wizard generate a link to a Diagram‐Designer‐ or Scalable‐Diagram‐Editor‐generated (if the latter gets installed?) image and wrap it in <noscript> tags?

P.S. There is something very strange with the title of your posting, which is not equal to the title of the subject thread.

The same is true for the first two comments to be moved to this thread, when viewed through the main comments page (EDIT: and apparently this comment too; the comment editing form has the following warning above it: The ItemID 836609b4fd3c40eb no longer matches any item in the Item table.)

At the maximum

If we're extrapolating already, why stop there? You could always get the 3rd and 6th ranks involved too, maybe even the 2nd and 7th if you don't mind the pawns starting on switches…

And/or you could have some more switches of the Chess 69 variety along the top and bottom if that's not enough strange topological shenanigans.

Perhaps points accumulate from one turn to the next?

A potentially interesting idea, though I haven't had the chance to play it

But the first example is misanalysed: Bf3 is not Stalemate, but rather illegal as it equalises the number of pieces on the e file, allowing the black queen to move and give check to white.

The assertion about the e file wrt the f4 pawn is presumably a typo.

It's ‘outward’ in the same sense that the Shōgi Knight moves ‘forward’; only the most outward of the directions counts.

Arguably could be specified more clearly, but the diagram does imo clarify sufficiently which sense is meant

Fergus asked some time ago whether a piece covering the same squares as a zB but alternating between the move's arms (for which he suggested the name ‘Helical Bishop’ on account of the path's resemblance to a DNA‐style Double Helix) had already been invented. It seems we can now answer that in the affirmative: it's mentioned twice on this page, as the Zigzag Bishop. Betza also posits what Gilman would go on to call a Bruegel (t[Wzt[FAA]]; for which I initially mistook Fergus' description), as well as a piece (the t[FzDD]) ‘dual’ (in the Gilman sense) to the Harvestman of Seenschach which seems to go curiously unnamed in M&B.

He [i.e. the king] is royal, but can't be captured by displacement, he simply must avoid check.

Presumably this precludes Qe8; as I understand it, the proposed defense thus prevent capture of the defending piece on e7 (which could also be a knight) by having the square after it not be vacant (it's occupied by the king) whilst blocking the check (which is “as in chess”) as a Chess rook would be unable to capture the king.

Iow one can't ‘displacement‐capture the king’ (for the purposes of calculating Check) and capture anything else in the same move (except with a knight).

This whole checking‐differently‐from‐capture business is rather confusing

The ‘castling out of check’ case suggests to me another definition again: if we consider the restriction on castling out of check to be an extension of the restriction on moving through check — in effect that the K can be captured en‐passant on its starting square, upon having decided to move — then check for castling purposes would always be calculated with an effetive K move for the joker. Iow the move of the J, and whether it gives check, is defined at ‘touch move’ time.

For the case of determining checkmate or stalemate, that would mean that the J would give check with the intersection of the moves of all pieces able to move pseudo‐legally. As such KJK would still lead to checkmate, but with most other combinations of material the J would not give passive check at all. But in e.g. KJKQ the J would give passive check as a K. With more complex pieces (esp. those that can be blocked — particularly the Vulture of the large Apothecary games) this would potentially be position dependent. (And I think it's a little subtler yet in the hypothetical case of a game with both a joker and two royals with disjoint movesets)

Ofc this is probably horribly inefficient to program, provided it's even deemed to make sense (I like it for castling‐out‐of‐check restrictions, but I'm ambivalent between it and Option 2 (by Greg's numbering) for check‐/stalemate — it avoids the surprising(?) behaviour of HG's example where the J checks as a piece that's no longer on‐board, in exchange for arguably slightly greater opaciity of definition), so take it or leave it :‌)

This is very true, though a bit out of scope for M&B; while 3D boards seemingly fascinated him, Gilman apparently had no interest whatsoëver in 4D games as they are too far removed from human experience

Fwiw it's not only the Rumbaba (and ofc the Dicorn, Rumchick, extra Generals, ⁊c) that turns up on a Tesseract‐cell board: some of the (in 2‐ and 3D) hex‐specific leapers like the (1,1,1,2) Sennight (or perhaps it's a Foal? here with 64 directions) do too, though I think the likes of the (1,1,2,2) leaper might've needed a new name

The KAD goes back at least as far as the Pasha of Paulovits' game, and also appears as a Mastodon in Mats Winter's games and as Joe Joyce's Jumping General (How's that for alliteration?(!) )

The Queen burns like a Fire Demon here

Did you mean including passive burning as well? Only active burning is working for me (though Adam's Tenjiku diagram seems to implement passive burning too so clearly it's implementable as you described)

Playing about with this diagram I did seem to have run into some strange bugs:

• Passive burning works correctly, but not when the promotion dialogue turns up. E.g. Rook General g4xg13 from the opening setup survives even though it lands next to the Fire Demon. If I promote it then move it next to the FD again it's burned as expected
• Under certain conditions (it seems to be contingent on whether it's a piece's first move), promotion seems to become corrupted: it gives me the promotion dialogue, but doesn't promote it regardless of which option I select. Subsequent moves allowing promotion (into/within/out of the promo zone) likewise ask but don't react, and the move seems to permute surrounding pieces in an unpredictable way, often with the same highlighting as for burn victims, though sometimes on squares with pieces still (or newly) on them. I think this is contingent on whether it's a piece's first move:
  • 1. RGg4xg13=GG works (besides the above bug allowing it to survive)
  • 1. Pg5–4 Pg12–g11 2. RGg4xg13 similarly works
  • 1. Pg5–4 Pg12–g11 2. RGg4–g5 Pg11–g10 3. RGg4xg13 triggers the bug

The two bugs together also mean that a piece subject to the second bug can never be passively burned within the promotion zone

the knights cannot reach the centermost square

Afaict the second part of the N's move is optional here, so it may make one‐step orthogonal moves and thus access the central square if needed. So it's more a Rhino than a traditional Knight