Comments by nelk114

I made a couple of minor edits for grammar (and in one case formatting); more could in principle be done but I prefer to be conservative with all but the most egregious things. Please check to see if there's any of the edits that you take issue with (I'd imagine not), and if they're OK with you I'll release it — I think the rules themselves are clearly enough stated

With apologies for taking so long :‌) (life got a bit busy for a moment there)

Something like this? Noting that the bishop would threaten its own king (without checkmating the opponent) if it took the rook, neither side has any valid moves.

Though there seems little reason to judge that differently from a win for the last to move

‘Marine’ here is a problemist usage; most of these names do seem to be standard for these pieces in the Problem world (though my go‐to source is in German so there may be differences). ‘Prawn’ for Marine Pawn differs from German usage of ‘Matelot’, or Sailor, but since I don't immediately find any English‐language references to Marine pieces that name the Pawn analogue I'm willing to let it stand.

I'll do a more thorough check later but I don't expect it'll get in the way of publishing this

Hmmm, there doesn't seem to be any attribution on that (unless it's missing because I'm on Desktop); shame really, nice to be able to attribute things where due. I'll definitely mention it though (and might be worth the Chess+ link as well (I'd look for it myself but the site seems to lack a search facility), if only for the attribution — and the fact that ‘Test’ is not the most inspiring name for a game!)

ChessCraft

I'd been wondering where you were getting all the variants from (especially since you attribute them to others) that you've been posting IDs for :‌)

why you want to expand xBetza

As with Bob, really my answer is (at the moment) that I don't; it works well enough for what it does (as H.G. has elaborated on). More that we were discussing a previous commenter's proposal to extend it using non‐ASCII.

I'd still be tempted to hold out a degree of openness for exactly the purpose I mentioned: 3D (let alone 4D) or unusual (hyperbolic, say — I've been musing over an actual Regular Octagonal Chess to match Frolov's approximation) boards where the existing letters would all apply but more would be necessary to cover the extra moves. Though one might equally argue that at that point it's far enough from the familiar that Betza is somewhat out of its depth anyway.

And while hexagonal boards may be in scope for the ID, I imagine 3D and hyperbolic boards are far from it ;‌)

you'd (apparently) lean toward using ß for Sexton, while I'd use it for Switchback

We're technically not contradicting each other; I was using capital ⟨ẞ⟩, as is usual for atoms, whereas Switchback, whilst really something that XBetza would tend to spell out explicitly, is definitely small ⟨ß⟩ material

under my suggestion, I could define Þ to represent the Rose's movement path (possibly with a line something like def Þ = qN -- not just a character replacement, but a definition of a movement path).

Strictly speaking a path‐and‐mode model is not quite what XBetza does; rather it decribes moves in stages.

Which is, to be fair, in line with how Betza thought; the ‘Ferz‐then‐Cannon’ of his Bent Riders article comes easily to XBetza whereas a path‐and‐mode description thereof is cumbersome at best. Conversely path‐and‐mode describes the contrasted ‘Bent Cannon’ much more naturally.

I may be wrong, but trying to get XBetza to manipulate a Rose path in that way once it's been defined might be more convoluted than it appears

Do you have a link for that? Would definitely be good info to have here

@Bob: No doubt you're at least the first person to deploy it using Gilman's name :‌) (even if that's an even more trivial place in history ;‌P)

I assume I'd added the tag on account of the ‘Minimal Not-Particularly-New Chess’ subvariant described some way down the page, which basically only adds the Cardinal to the usual array and would thus qualify.

It's not entirely clear what to do about pages describing multiple games; do we tag it if anything on the page qualifies, or only if they all do? Or, in cases like this, only if it's the main game on a page? I'm happy to remove the tag if we prefer (either of) the latter two

should [arbitrary XBetza move footprints as blastZone] have an absolute orientation, or be relative to the move of the burning piece? […] you could not specify an Advancer with [absolute directions]

But surely the advancer doesn't have a burning move? But rather an extension of its movement to capture on the next square? After all, passive burning is out of the question for an advancer (unless it were to remember its orientation)

Or have I misunderstood how blastZone works? (And also, now that I'm rereading the IDiag page, does the burn spell act only on pieces landing next to the spellcaster, or also on pieces it lands next to? A strict reading of the text implies the former plus a need for a matching blastZone, but this seems… an unusual rule, if consistent with modern Tenjiku)

cc (or, indeed, :) looks like it'd make sense

H.G. had mentioned Superchess

Odd. It works for me in the full comments listing but not in isolation.

Also, the AI capitulates immediately as the game begins without Kings on the board.

his chess variant was not even that great

The distinction there is probably not so much one of quality as of priority; it's one of the earliest enlargements of Shatranj (behind Grant Acedrex) that did more than add one, maybe two, pairs of pieces to the board.

Since you've done the research, would you care to do the honours of writing up a page?

If not I'll probably pick it up eventually (unless someone else beats me to it), but since I don't own a copy of your book I'd probably miss something.

The difficulties in Fr would be that "knight" is translated by "chevalier" in a general context and by "cavalier" (meaning a horse rider) in the context of chess. So a CV having Knight, Cavalier and Chevalier, will be difficult to translate in French. Or a CV having a Tower and a Rook, both being "Tour". A CV having a Lady, would be translated as "Demoiselle", as "Dame" is already the word for Queen. Etc.

In general, this is true, yes; my previous comment was referring specifically to Bigorra (and by extension the rest of the games in its family) which doesn't have such conflicts.

The difficulties with translating to French are mainly due to French being one of the main sources for Modern English

I'd say the difficulty is a little subtler: English, due to both its Lingua Franca status and its extensive acquisition of loanwords, simply has a lot of words in certain semantic domains that mean either the same or very similar things. Which is obvious when, as with French, there are actual clashes, but even in Russian I'd be a little surprised (perhaps @Lev can enlighten us?) if it had three different words for Knight/Cavalier/Chevalier.

For comparison, German might get away with that triplet using both ‘Knecht’ and ‘Ritter’, (cognate to ‘Knight’ and ‘Rider’ respectively, and with (I think) slightly different connotations), but even then only because the Chess Knight is unrelatedly named ‘Springer’ — it can thus even spare a word for ‘Horse’ (‘Pferd’ — or even ‘Ross’ if necessary, though that'd be a bit like naming two pieces ‘Horse’ and ‘Steed’ in English). It would have just as much trouble as French with ‘Rook’/‘Tower’ (both ‘Turm’), though.

At some point, creative license would no doubt become necessary.

Some English speakers would call [Cardinal and Marshall] Archbishop and Chancellor or Princess and Empress

And some would call the Amazon Ace or Terror. Yes, English CV nomenclature is a mess.

One might argue that's an accident of history: several people independently reinventing the same pieces under different names before any one convention got established. There's no reason a priori to replicate that in translation (this being the ‘opportunity’ I referred to).

I now set up a 3-vs-1 page that can be preconfigured in the same way as the existing 2-vs-1 page

I've added a link to that, plus a bit more of your detailed explanation (with the terms clarified — hopefully correctly — as they're as yet far from established terminology)

The mFcW is potent (it can switch its attack from c1 to a1 by moving from c2 to b1), and can thus in principle force mate together with any minor

I'm lightly torn on whether to include this information on the page too; it's not the main subject of the page but it's interesting and it'd be a shame to have it hidden away in a comment

You're missing a link to Interdependent Chess

It does have a link earlier in the page; I had made a conscious decision not to duplicate links (the two Schwalbe glossary links being to different portions of the document), though I don't feel strongly about that if you feel it's better to link it twice

I left a comment on that page about the name of Guardian being used for the Berolina Steward in Lt. Obert's Decimal Chess from the 1870's

I'd completely forgotten about that, especially since it's not the main subject of the page; I've added a mention thereof (though CECV gives the date as 1880, which is what I've put down)

In Decimal Chess, Obert gave his Guardian a double move

The relevance of double moves for pawnlike pieces such as steward and guardian had gone completely over my head; it's late now but I'll make sure to double(!) check when I next get time to do so what the rules are in the various games (though I expect it'll be double moves only if they're pawn replacements)

The problem of names of the piece, which is already an issue in English, may become a problem with other languages

Yeah piece nomenclature would definitely be the hardest part of this; as H.G. notes, there'll be some precedent in whatever exesting literature on CVs there is in a given target language, but that will almost certainly be limited in scope for most languages compared to what we have here (even, say, Die Schwalbe's relatively extensive glossary has some, from a variantist point of view, arguably major omissions). And as you say there's a certain amount of conflicting usage between languages that makes things less than straightforward.

Of course, that cuts both ways; would‐be translators have an opportunity (if they do their research appropriately) to avoid making quite as much of a mess of naming as we have in English :‌) Even if we don't go as far as attempting the likely‐futile task of trying to replicate the likes of Man and Beast in, say, French.

And depending on the pages Lev is interested in translating it may not be much of an issue at all; plenty of games on these pages use only the Orthodox sextet

If I had to translate Bigorra with its more than 30 different pieces, I may come to some difficulties

Might be an interesting exercise in itself, to see how feasible such a task would be. And whilst i don't know the established French names (assuming there are any) for Cardinal/Marshall/Amazon, most of the remaining pieces (with the exception of the Direwolf and maybe the Soldier) ought to be easily translated word‐for‐word. For Russian we might have to pay more attention to the Elephant and Ship (we could always take precedent from English and go with ‘Филь’ for the former at least), and Italian/Spanish/German might want something more distinct from ‘dame’ than ‘duchess’, but these are exceptions really.

I'm sure someone will come up with it within the hour

Hardly on time, but the Griffin+Rhino is Gilman's Gorgon, also used under that name by Daniil Frolov

But 8x8 is the largest square board where they manage that

Noted

The problem for having something similar for 3-vs-1 is not technical, but the use case

The Stewards being the exception proving the rule :‌)

Page descriptions can be edited from the editors' Edit Links page ([links]).

Ok, I've done that now; I'd spotted that page but wasn't sure it was usable for updating links as well as adding new ones (it's not terribly extensively documented(!)) and I'm still not sure I can intuit the correct set of features just from looking at it. Maybe something to test in future

"capturing" in the paragraph with my name in it is misspelled

Well spotted :‌) something was bound to get through (I'm lightly surprised I'm not spotting more to be honest)

UCC may be of interest, regarding your Steward article

Perhaps once it's ready and published ;‌) Little sense in linking out to a page noöne can (yet) officially access

The main problem here is that I don't think anyone among the editorship understands Russian (I can speak German and Spanish, I presume H.G. speaks Dutch, and Jean‐Louis, while not presently an editor, would be able to help with French, but as far as I'm aware that's about it), so it would be difficult to be confident in the quality of such a translation (though I suppose there are other Russian speakers on this forum, who might be better placed to help in this regard?).

That said, in principle I'm all for having more Russian‐language (or any other non‐English) pages, so if we can find a way to make this work by all means :‌)

OK so looking at the page as it stands, I think I can make out most of the rules, so in that sense it at least more‐or‐less meets the minimum criteria for publishing. Nevertheless I feel it could be profitably edited to make the flow of information clearer. A couple of specifics:

• ‘In a row’ (Pieces section, Paragraph 1) doesn't imply adjacency in English; I would consider all the black pieces in each Diagram except the g7 knight to be in a row. ‘Adjacent’ would be more precise, or you could say explicitly that this applies even if there are no empty spaces between them, as long as there is one behind them
• The descriptions of the pieces make no distinctions between rules (e.g. “moves & checks as in chess, unobstructed diagonal line”) and incidental observable properties (“can't capture a piece which stands on the edge of the board”); in general it's more useful to separate these out clearly — the latter is perfect Notes section material
• It might be clearer to describe the details of the Ranging moves (and captures) outwith the individual piece sections, all in one go; it might even be sufficient to just describe how their captures differ from the orthodox ones (e.g. “Bishop, Rook, and Queen move and give check as in normal Chess, but capture differently as follows:” followed by the list of applicable rules).
• You note that capturing is optional for the knight; is it possible for it to take one potential victim but not both? The Example clarifies that it can capture even if the other square it passes through contains a Friendly piece, but that might be worth making textually explicit too
• Can a king castle if it's in check from a piece it would capture by castling? e.g. White Ke1,Ra1/Black Rd1? A literal reading says no, but it could be made more explicit either way
• The requirement for a space between pieces to be captured by castling is inconsistent with the lack of such a requirement for all other pieces; why?
• The distinction between giving check and winning by capture, whilst as you say shared with Atomic, I find very strange (in both games); saying that a threat of capture is also check would lead to entirely equivalent outcomes. But with Atomic as a precedent I guess this isn't in itself really a blocker for publication

Given its stated purpose, this is a charming little game! I'm quite partial to these kinds of training game/exercise.

I'm taking the non‐private status to mean you're happy to have this published, and the page seems to me good enough that I'm happy to do so

This should be mostly (with one exception near the bottom) ready to publish, but I'd appreciate one or two of the other editors (and/or anyone else) taking a look to see if I've missed anything.

The Related Pieces subsection is not something that's usually in Piececlopedia pages, and I'm not 100% sure whether it's considered properly within scope; on the other hand it seems reasonable to put this information somewhere, and since none of the pieces there discussed have seen wide enough use to qualify for their own Piececlopedia enties… (And my Manticore page also features a paragraph to that effect, just not marked off as such with a heading)

@H.G.:

I'd assumed you might have a measurement of the Steward's value somewhere but a quick search of the Comments doesn't turn anything up; does such a measurement exist, or shall I leave out the bit about its value? (or can I just use one of the formulas? the N‐square leaper one or ⅔F+⅓W or the like?)

@Fergus:

This has ended up without a description as I submitted the form in a rush due to some apparently bugged aspects of both logging in and the Submission form (I might describe those further in another comment); the metadata editing form I now have access to was very useful for setting this to be a Piececlopedia page and correctly assigning attribution, but it seems (and I think this has been noted before) it lacks a field for adjusting the Description (as opposed from the, distinct, What's New text); is there any way for me to do this?

*I couldn't figure out a way to include both curved slides in one XBetza code. I'm not sure that one even exists.

At least for the non‐bracket notation, z and q should have that effect (though I haven't at this point checked whether it holds there aþm); it seems not to work for the Bracket notation though — probably something for H.G.'s attention