Comments by MarkThompson

This description doesn't specify the starting arrangement of the pieces. They start in the second row, but are they otherwise in the 'usual chess' arrangement? Or are they arranged from left-to-right in the order you mention them?

They might be in some other order, or perhaps they could be arranged ad lib by the players at the start of the game: i.e., White places a piece-and-its-pawn, Black places a piece-and-its-pawn, etc., until all are in place, whereupon they start moving.

I tried on Thursday to submit a new page for an original game, Trampoline
Chess, but the game hasn't appeared yet and I haven't heard anything
about it. Can any of the editors tell me whether the submission is in their
in-box, or whether I did it incorrectly?

Flattery will get you somewhere ...

I believe it is possible to come up with betting schemes, for use in a
casino, that might give you a greater than 50% chance of ending with more
money than you began with. But that will necessarily mean that the
remaining possibilities, although they collectively have less than a 50%
chance, include losses that more than outweigh the likely winnings.
Probability theory defines a concept called 'expected value' which is the
sum, over all possible outcomes, of the product of that outcome's value,
times that outcome's probability. The expected value of the betting scheme
will not be positive, simply because it involves making a combination of
various bets that individually have negative expected values. The sum of
negative values can't be positive.

I feel pretty confident that the only reliable way to make money at casino
gambling is to get yourself a casino.

I do have David Li's book, which I bought years ago. I had read a favorable review of it that led me to expect that he had interesting new evidence on the origin of chess, but I was disappointed to find that the book merely piled up a tower of unsupported speculations. 

The closest thing to evidence was an anecdotal account of Xiang-Qi's being invented by a figure from ancient Chinese history, who as I recall lived a few centuries before Christ, the anecdote being attributed to a Chinese document only a few centuries old. This is valueless as evidence of such a theory: it means only that someone about the time of Newton or Voltaire wrote down a legend about something that had happened about the time of Alexander the Great. Without earlier documents, how could the late author know anything about events so far in his own past? Maybe the 18th century Chinese author got the story from an earlier period, but there were plenty of earlier periods between the supposed events and our document when such a legend could have been composed.

Besides this legend, everything I could find in Li's book was a seemingly endless parade of descriptions of how it MIGHT HAVE happened that way, and how it's really not so implausible that it COULD HAVE happened that way. Well, of course, it MIGHT have, as I didn't need Li's book to know. But that's what we call 'idle speculation', not evidence. Someone needs to find some much older documents, or dig up some very old equipment, or something, or this theory will remain negligible.

"The pie rule only works when both parties are highly adept at their
assigned tasks." 

But adeptness at their assigned tasks is simply the ability to evaluate the
quality of a board position as being likely to favor one side or another,
and that's the essence of playing skillfully: choosing moves that create
positions where you have the advantage. It isn't unfair if the pie rule
leaves an advantage with the better player. The better player naturally has
an advantage at every point in the game.

Here's another suggestion, related to the new comment filtering idea: perhaps registered users could set a default filter on the What's New items we want to see, according to various qualities (creation date, game features, authorship, etc.) so we could focus on the pages we find interesting.

When was this item started? I don't remember it.