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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 Wed, Feb 21, 2024 03:26 PM UTC in reply to Niels van Ham from 02:26 PM:

There are several issues here. The 'range' indicator 4 means 0 to 4. So all the pincher captures become optional; it can use the 0 case. And I suppose you want it to be an automatic side effect. Even if you could force it to traverse the parenthesized part 4 times, (by just writing it in full 4 times), there is no guarantee it doesn't take the path 4 times over the same piece, or over two pieces each twice.

The problem is that what you are trying to describe is not really a move. It is a form of conditional burning. These can both be described in Betza notation. But the difference is that for a move you have to pick one of the possible realizations, while for burning every possible realization should be executed. And that nothing moves during such execution: you really describe the path of a 'flame', which evaporates after having done its damage.

What you would want is being able to define spellZone=dabuafcK.

Now that I think about it, this might not be so difficult to implement. I could treat the spellZone as an extra piece, letting the Betza parser create the move list as usual. Then every move of a burning piece should automatically be followed by all possible moves of an empty square from the destination of that piece. Tomorrow I will try if I can get something working along those lines; most code for it already exists, and should just be called for another purpose.