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Man and Beast 13: Straight and Crooked Moving. Systematic naming of part-straight and more complex non-straight pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
George Duke wrote on Fri, Jan 14, 2011 08:22 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Up for three years but not much noted yet, this chapter overlaps Multi-path pieces (http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=7794), more than any other Man and Beast. (1) Have Stiles' Fox and Wolf ever appeared in a CV? Why not extrapolate from Stiles' Rabbit too? (2) Early on in this article ''Ricochet turning at the piece which they hop'' would be describing hopping bifurcators of Winther (for other units in m&b13); and you are probably going to have to work the language of bifurcators eventually in some way, as to hop, deflect, collide, bounce, for separate class. (3) In the series' reworking, if trying to deal with pentagonal now too, why not ever treat triangular 2-d and 3-d? Would they already be taken care of by some other geometry? What about holes in pentagonal? (4) Concentrating on comprehensive renaming and new naming misses some of the features at times lacking sense of proportion. For example, it is important that Sissa is two-path and four-path depending on arrival spot. (5) Same for multi-path Scorpion and Dragon that have differing number of ways to traverse different square-destinations. It is not evident how different coordinates are conditional on so many pathways when stressing the names can miss the ramification. (6) The six-stepper counterpart to five-stepper Dragon is Phoenix, and seven-stepper is Roc. (7) Other pieces going to (1,3) + (2,3) are in chessboardmath6, not that they should fit in here, but names include Osprey, Fourriere Falcon, Marsh Hawk, plus others. (8) 4-compound Combine of Tri-punch has interesting multi-path breakdown. How is it multi-path offhand since the only Tri-punch leaper is NN? (9) Where is Badbaba defined for 3d Hex, another chapter I guess? What should be review, is Prince just one-stepping Queen these boards, to get compound Barnawarbler, Prince + Badbaba for instance M&B13? (10) Thanks for the indexing/glossary recent years, which eventually should have every piece-type too to intensify reference utility.

💡📝Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Jan 16, 2011 07:42 AM UTC:
(1) The Rabbit is not as neat an extrapolation as the Wolf, which 'double-ends' the Gryphon, and the Fox, which does the same with the Anchorite and thereby flips it back from colourswitching to colourbound. It also looks like falling into the same trap as Rook+Cannon of being too strong to use in an actual game. Finally I cannot see how I would extrapolate from the name.
(2) You may be right. The Winther games (and I don't mean skiing et cetera) are hard to follow as they each introduce one piece by a link to a page on his own site. They would have been better introduced as a single page of links, or perhaps one to each shape board.
(3) It has been established that a board of triangles is a hex board with missing cells and pieces leaping holes.
(4/5) It is true that I haven't stressed aspects of numbers of paths, but I would be interested to see if anyone else thinks that's important before enlarging my articles further.
(6) I didn't spot them, plain and simple. What page are they defined on?
(7) Again, where are these? Interestingly the Man and Beast 13 Osprey is also a three-step piece.
(8) For the Combine and Contracombine only the Knight destinations are multipath. For the Double Combine, all except the Queen ones are.
(9) Prince on 01, Badbaba on 09 - the index pages will eventually address questions like this but they take a lot of writing and checking. The first will be a one off suffix one, but the rest I'll do alphabetically so B for Badbaba should appear early on. I once wondered about a Sweeney Todd Chess featuring a Badbaba, but it has yet to inspire me enough to devise an array.

George Duke wrote on Tue, Jan 18, 2011 05:38 PM UTC:
Thanks for added information. 
(1) One Rabbit square is (8,7) Deacon  circuitously. I think Stiles' are none of them in a CV yet, unusual for so much attention, well, like Conway's Angels. ProblemThemes threads do have Wolf and Fox a lot, that need to be put in graphics.
(4/5) Experimenting, Sissa is about Queen value. Make a new piece-type out of Sissa without the NN legs, instead only to Rook squares. That Sister is four-path to Rook squares, and stronger than the Rook, 5.5 to 5.0, because there are four pretty good pathways not the one direct one. Now make a Sissy, who like some non-jumping Bach Dang Ship goes in three legs. Say Sissy is five horizontal, one diagonal backwards and four reverse-horizontal to Rook(0,1), and similarly to all the other Rook spots. The Sissy is as weak as a Ferz initially on 8x8 but reaches all the Rook squares.  Then the other extreme, Ramayana Buddha is Queen value again, no quite a bit more, whilst still going exclusively to the same Rook squares.  Rook squares can command from 1.0 to 13.0 value without even considering any Mutator like immobilizing at all. So Multi-path alone as piece-category could warrant as extensive treatment as all 21/22 Man & Beasts, but when they are more catalogued, let's just highlight the most important ones, or list them in order of priority.
(6) Several comments hard to find, 
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=17215, http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=17216.
(7) About ten more Falcons/Bisons are here, 
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/listcomments.php?subjectid=ChessboardMath6, all going to the {(1,3)+(2,3)}, of course only the one being mathematically correct.
(8) Those multi-pathers of Tri-punch are year 2002 as Jetan's are year 1921, showing there is a fuller history of them that would expand ''Multi-path Chess Pieces.''

George Duke wrote on Wed, Jan 19, 2011 05:39 PM UTC:
Crying for attention are Triangles, not covered in Man&Beasts. In point (3) of this month's discussion, Gilman comments, ''It has been established that a board with triangles is a hex board with missing cells and pieces leaping holes.''  Triangles, like http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=25236, and such as the comfortable, aesthetic two Bishop bindings there are not explained by any hexagon-based exposition so far.  Regular Hex comprised of six triangles within would not be the way to approach Triangular fundamentals. Rather, Triangles are virgin territory relatively, and Gilman just skips these the most important primitive connectivities of all. All sentient creatures, operate right up the ladder of importance: Triangles, Squares, and then the derivative lesser geometries (bird/ant navigation; lunar trajectories). True, art-design faddists have happened to like Hexagons for working cvs towards intellectual prestige.  Surrounding a regular hexagon in 2-d chess board/tiling are 6 hexagons making equilateral non-convex 18-side polygon. Certainly we do not opt for explaining the movement and jumping around ''hex board'' by that concave star-shaped isotoxal octadecagon the 7 hexagons subdivide.  Useful as far as they go, like earlier ''Multi-path Chess Pieces'' and ''Ideal and Practical Values,'' Man&Beasts articles can and do give false sense of completeness momentarily; but each step of the way in expansion of chapters leaves sense that only some lowly approximate-1% of potential ever is getting covered at all.  The peril of classification, catalogue, nomenclature.  In fact, the more names and piece-types, the more exponentially distant any goal of summation: Man&Beasts 9999. In other words, it is absolutely fatal flaw that Triangles are not covered, at the same time it will useless to do anything about it, incorporating them (the way Pentagons are now added, more or less a field birthed this past year).  Any correcting of the error is dooming effort to failure. Leave the hole, whistle in the dark; Nagual.

💡📝Charles Gilman wrote on Fri, Jan 21, 2011 06:34 AM UTC:
My description of triangular-cell boards was fairly dismissive - and yet now that you mention it I can see how it could be seen ther opposite way, putting its pieces within a whole family of pieces of all geometries that omit cells of a particular binding. A hex Wazir or Sennight restricted to cells of just two colours really is colourswitching. It might be intersting to devise a variant in which army 1 are restricted to colours A and B, army 2 to colours A and C, and army 3 to colours B and C. That way each player would have exactly one enemy on each colour of cells. There might even be potential for a corner-camp 4-player even-side square variant in whioch each army is barred from (a different) one of the 4 Dabbaba bindings. You may have just given me the idea for a new departure for Chess variants.
	I have used teh Wolf and Fox in one form of 4 Linepiece Fusion and their compounds in Missing Ox Chess.

George Duke wrote on Fri, Jan 21, 2011 07:07 PM UTC:
[Incidentally AltOrth Hex looks to in-slot soon closer to Time Travel than Fisher R.] That is still the wrong way about it. All the M&Bxxs need to be re-done from scratch from the ground up not the top down. There were already cries to re-name basic mono-leapers. The more piece-types get developed in Triangles, as they should, the more the cv art-designer crowd is going to use plain Triangles for clarity, not Squares or Hexagons under that and this binding and switching qualification.  From the One Chess 8x8 and the lesser age-old Xiangqi, players might be weened by consensus of approved cvs getting played. To connect with common sense, the CVPage artist should convey the triangle-CV on Triangles; then all avenues are getting explored helping the cause. No one as player is intent to dwell on Gilmanesque ''duality between Cubic and Tetrahedral boards'' or ''semi-duality on cubic boards.'' Instead, just state the Rules in plain parlance. Those other interesting topics belong with problemists, including prolificists themselves, as who we rightly bridle at one arbitrary specific rules-sets after another by seeming random selection.  By the way, where are Man&Beasts' Alquerque-board piece-types: 
http://www.chessvariants.org/shape.dir/chesquerque.html? Appearances are deceptive that they look square, and do not collapse them into treatment by Squares alone. Or, if going to use Weave and Dungeon connectivity,  
http://www.chessvariants.org/other.dir/weave.html, any new pieces are more interesting than such generality on how, by twist or turn, this can really be diced up a certain way into something other than unique board.  Strategy and tactics are nil when, upon quick read, the boards and rules are not intuitive.  It never can get to a playing sequence and competition, simulation of Nature.  Where is even one Gilman game score? Or problem-theme Mate in Two? Compare that oversight to the Betzan thousands of scores:
http://www.chessvariants.org/d.betza/chessvar/dan/openings.html.

💡📝Charles Gilman wrote on Sat, Jan 22, 2011 08:07 AM UTC:
The more I think about this the more sense pieces avoiding different cells makes. The cells that an army avoids could even be the same colour as its pieces, solving a problem of array graphics. Suxh pieces could be termed 'Camouflage-averse'. On the other hand pieces that all avoid the same cells need a term for them, to cover the triangular geometry. Any ideas, anyone?
	An interesting fact: even the hex Wazbaba is colourswitching when confined to just two colours, when the square-board one is manifestly not.

🔔Notification on Mon, Jan 22 11:06 PM UTC:

The editor Ben Reiniger has revised this page.


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