Comments by nelk114

Which of the two possible stepping Fortnights do you mean?

• The one taking one each of wazir, ferz, and viceroy steps? Given that Gilman starts from the various bent/crooked pieces which only have two kinds of step, this is probably a bit out of scope (corkscrew pieces with one kind of step aside).
• The one taking three Ferz steps, two in one direction and one at 60° (dual to the hex Shearwater)? That'd match the two‐of‐one‐and‐one‐of‐the‐other pattern of the Falcon, and arguably as a Shearwater extrapolation could be nameworthy (I'd've suggested Fulmar, a family of birds related to shearwaters beginning with the F of fortnight as shearwater begins with the S of sennight, but it's already taken (albeit with unclear etymology) for Zephyr+Lama; perhaps Petrel, the group including the fulmars and still beginning with a labial consonant, would suit it?), but presumably he either didn't consider two diagonal directions different enough without the AltOrth‐ness, or it just didn't occur to him. And there are also Nonstandard Diagonals at small enough angles (35°) for more Falcon‐like pieces there too

For a stepping‐Trison component I'd probably choose the former, but individually both are interesting enough imo. There's still a few bird‐of‐prey names unused I think so if one were keen to name them in Gilmanesque fashion all that'd remain would be finding a game to use them in…

Perhaps that's where Daniil Frolov got it from?

I've found a few other uses since writing this page (including one in JWB's Meta‐Chess) but haven't yet decided to update it; perhaps some time soon

If we're talking prior usage, it's worth mentioning that Valkyrie has at least three distinct usages already: A queen that can also relocate friendly pieces, Bishop capturing as Queen, and a 3D‐specific piece moving as Rook or jumping two steps on either kind of diagonal. Conversely Heroine (albeit perhaps due to potential Drug associations) is afaict only used by Gilman for a Hex‐prism‐specific compound

Fwiw, Gilman also uses Hero on that last page, and there's also a Hero in Hero Chess. Surprisingly, Gilman seems to lack names for the two pieces under discussion (Knight+Chatelaine/Primate, to use his terminology) though. I suppose one could suggest Catholicos for BWN, as a rank above cardinal that starts with Ca‐ (for the usual extrapolations: Zetholicos ⁊c), but besides the long and awkward Archchancellor (note the double ⟨ch⟩) idk what he'd've used for the RFN

Pythia seems to be unused (understandably, given its relative obscurity); arguably it falls afoul of Fergus' objection to multiple ‘popesses’, as there was only one Pythia at a time, but as Jean‐Louis notes, if we can have two Sissas…

Imo Popess feels a bit awkward as a word, and I share Jean‐Louis' reservations re unnecessary loanwords; Pythia, Valkyrie, Heroine, and Baroness all sound fine to me

As I understand it, Fergus has decided to program a variant based on yours, and given it a different name to signal that it's not the same game. As a game in itself yours remains intact (and probably eventually publishable too if and when the Editorship approves), just more difficult to program given the primitives that Game Courier provides.

This game differs from yours only in that both a4 and 4, or both 5 and h5, can be occupied/passed through simultaneously. As such those spaces connect to the rest of the board in the same way they do already, they just stop being a ‘switch’ in the railway sense (aka a ‘set of points’ in my native British English, or German ‘Weiche’ as used in your original German page) and become just an unusual topological/geometrical feature of the board.

I'll admit I find it a little odd that such conditionally untraversible squares should be so difficult to implement (couldn't it be done with uncapturable dummy pieces that appear and disappear as the other square is occupied and vacated?), but I'm not a programmer and I've never had a go at writing GAME Code, so…

I've thought of smaller tardises before too, and agree that for most games they'd probably be more practical. As for checkmating difficulty, it seems that Charles was probably relying on the fact that Kings are confined to them, and so presumably the idea (or at least one possible strat) is to get as many offensive forces inside the tardises as possible while the board is still full enough to prevent too much tardis movement (as in the opening setup) and then use that to attack where the king can't escape. And potentially keep the armies spread‐out enough to prevent too much possible movement.

I agree that stopping teleportation whilst in check (after all, The Doctor sticks around until the danger's gone…) looks like a viable option should this indeed be unwinnable in practice

Besides the points made about your other submission, some of which apply here too, I have one further main question about this: What exactly is a ‘connection’? The mention of ‘support’ in the rules section suggests that it means being defended by a friendly piece (and the diagrams seem to support this), but it could be stated more clearly.

Also a minor question: are Kings excluded from providing ‘connections’ (as they are excluded from the effects of your other game), or is it just the own‐side pawns?

It looks like ski-whatever is the only name anyone's used for these pieces.

Well… strictly speaking Gilman extended (in M&B06) the name Picket, as well as its orthogonal and 3D‐/hex‐diagonal counterparts (resp. Pocket and Packet) and their forward‐only counterparts (Piker/Poker/Paker) and compounds (typically with the suffix ⟨‐on⟩, as in e.g. Fezbaon for H.G.'s Lame Duck), to include pieces which leap over the first cell, or indeed the last or any single intermediate one — these latter three being resp. early‐ late‐ and flexi‐leap versions of the usually Stepping pieces.

It seems he only ever used the stepping form in his actual games though (though it seems ski‐ itself is (or at least originates as) problemist usage, which fwiw Gilman tended to be dismissive of, if not without his reasons)

Speaking of 404's, I also get those from the What's New page, specifically the two newest links (Cubic Chess and 3D Chess 4 Cubed). Though they also have the External Link icon next to the name, so perhaps that's related.

Having just read the book, this description is erroneous. Morley does propose the first variant givn on this page, but it is an alternative proposal, offered almost reluctantly after a digression on Knight's Tours, to the one the book is ‘about’ (though in many ways it's really a long and winding — though charming — book of Chess‐variant apologetics); the main variant in the book has only the ‘corridors’ on the sides, not the ones behind the camps. The second version offered here would seem to be apocryphal.

The corridors originate, according to Morley, as a way of giving the Rooks' pawns the ability of capturing in both directions, as the other 6 pawns can. The promotion rule is, as suggested here, that pawns can promote on the enemy back rank — pawns are given the opportunity to capture into the corridor ‘at their own risk’.

The variant as a whole is intended to expand the possibilities of the game (and counteract its being ‘played out’ — not so much between players of equal strength, as between players of potentially equal intuitive ability but differing levels of learnedness, esp. re the Opening) without making any changes to the rules or pieces, in contrast to e.g. Henry Bird's earlier proposal (referred to in the text) which introduces the Carrera compounds, as the added complexity would in his opinion be, though perhaps interesting to experts, too intimidating for lay chessplayers.

As a change, the ‘inverse Gustavian’ board (i.e. adding everything except the corners on each side) is a nice way of accomplishing that goal imo (and indeed, the Gustavian board has the opposite goal: introducing new pieces while changing the board as little as possible).

I see at the bottom of that page a note saying that it was translated by Altavista's Babelfish. We should probably get rid of it,

The note does also say that one “Cherry X.Z.”, who even had an email address linked in Wayback's copy, ‘modified’ it, which may mean it has had some human input to make it sensible Chinese. But my own Chinese isn't good enough to judge the correctness/idiomaticness(?) of the original page, so I can't weigh in on it from that perspective. I'm happy to leave that up to Editorial Discretion

The link in the introduction is broken; it should probably point to the author's translation of the Chaturanga page — note that the latter, as well as the Courier Chess page still need converting (the Shogi page oþoh seems intact — it was last edited in 2018 though so perhaps it escaped the corruption). Also is there an old backup of the Chinese page on FIDE? As it stands now it's complete nonsense. EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy (and the garbled version seems to have the same update stamp so it probably hadn't changed in the 14 years before conversion to its current state)

I don't see anything wrong with having pages in multiple languages here, and we do indeed have some pages in Spanish, among others. The Alphabetical Index issues queries for English pages only by default, but you can query for non‐English pages too — apparently there's only(!) 108 of them so there's no difficulty getting them to display. Though in any case the Index lacks pages for “Pages beginning with ⟨菲⟩”, for example…

That does indeed look quite plausible (as does the Shatranj page), and concords with my own efforts at making sense of it, as well as lining up, afaict, with what the English page says.

The note at the end looks a little odd (It literally reads, as far as my Chinese gets me: “This is our English page's translation Fischer Random Chess”; the syntax of the Chinese is fine afaict but the link afterward, even with a space separating it, reads strangely). Would it be worth putting the link on the Chinese for “Our English page” (i.e. “我们英文页面”) instead?

Also incidentally what software did you use to convert it to CP1252? All the immediately accessible ones on linux seem to put up a (quiet) fuss about e.g. U+0081 not being available in the target encoding.