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H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 10, 2021 08:10 PM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from 06:34 PM:

Not sure what you mean by long. The "R" part? I don't see what the problem is, it is not easy by messages. "Outward" for me means the move is always in the direction of going away from the starting square both in x and y. If after the first leg, the second leg starts by going to a square that is closer to starting square either in x or y than the intermediate square (between the two legs), then it is not outward on that definition.

If the N moves goes from e1 to f3 (i.e. both increasing in the x and y dimension) then both f3 -> f8 and f3 -> h3 are R moves that neither decrease x nor y. So both fit your definition. But they are not equivalent. Probably f3 -> f8 has the best claim on being called 'outward'. One could argue that the other one is unnatural, because it crosses its counterpart that moves from e1 -> g2 -> g8, and therefore is unlikely to ever occur in any game. So that there also is no need to have any notation for it.

Anyway, I brought this up in order to show that just having one new symbol, meaning 'outward', is not enough, but that we would likely need a complete system for indicating all 8 relative directions. Which seemed worse than just using the existing system used for indicating the 8 directions relative to the player. As these new symbols would only be encountered in multi-leg moves, which are quite rare themselves, so that people would not be familiar with those, but likely think "what kind of a freaky symbol is that???".

The price for this is that these symbols would no longer be available for indicating absolute directions, though.

The Ship just happens to be one of these very rare nasty cases, because the equivalent moves of the Ferz alternately bent to the left and the right. It hardly ever happens that referring to an absolute direction is of any help. I can think of many solutions, but most of those require introducing new symbols or new meanings of existing symbols that would virtually never be used, and thus unknown to the casual user of Betza notation. I think the best way is to accept that compactnes and intuitiveness here are conflicting demands, and thus go for the somewhat cumbersome description [frblF~flR][flbrF~frR], to explicitly indicate on which starting steps there is a right bend, and on which a left bend.

A more practical problem is that the difference between tilde and hyphen is hardly visible in this font...


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