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Betza notation (extended). The powerful XBetza extension to Betza's funny notation.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 10, 2021 06:24 PM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from 03:51 PM:

I think mpsyasW is pretty clear, but perhaps not very intuitive.

Well, I think it is a justified complaint that it is not easy to see that there is a Rook move hidden in there. The bracket notation [smpW-sR] would make that more explicit. The notation of a full Griffin based on this idea would be [mpW-sR], and would automatically visit the F squares, as these are now reached by the first sideway Rook step. But it literally requires some 'out of the box' thinking to detour the trajectory over an auxiliary square (sW), and subsequently make that square fully transparent by giving it mode mp. And this obscures the fact that in reality the first square visited by the piece (in the sence that it can move to it or be blocked there) is an F square. That distracts greatly from the intuitiveness.

Doubling of directional modifiers is a bit tricky, as sometimes it is needed to prevent such modifiers from combining to the intermediate direction. E.g. if we want to describe a Knight that lacks the two backward-most moves, we must specify an s and an f direction on it. But we cannot just write fsN, as this means flNfrN, and fl and fr describe individual N moves. To prevent that we write ffssN.