What happens in our Going Forward to Light and Order project? While I haven’t followed the project for about 3 weeks, the team was continuously discovering new highlights and new questions as well. Tonight I couldn’t provide any summary of the current situation, but let me show you some moments jumped into my eyes. Later on the members of the team might comment something more, and of course, all of us would appreciate your comments (and joining to the team as well! 🙂 )
Shankar always makes some nice graphical presentations for us. So, I’d like to share something with you:
“I did a small analysis of the way Leapers evolve into Riders, Hoppers and other related types. This scheme generates 116 different pieces – some of them possibly not yet used and/or named!
Note: the 116 pieces are generated from only the 3 basic leapers: Wazir, Fers and Wazir+Fers(Erlking). Another 63 can be added with the Knight evolving into Nightrider/Rose, N-Hopper, Nao, N-Lion, etc. Adding up to 179 Pieces!”
See more! ⇒
This is only a “simplest” part of Vlaicu‘s comment given to the scheme:
“1. I have some difficulties in understanding how a (1,2) Hopper can turn direction with 45 or 135 degrees. Maybe not all these angles are possible with all the leapers?
2. For the sake of clarity, I think we should divide the leapers into two categories: those with linear march and those with non-linear march.
The non-linear march can be further divided into Double Riders (e.g. Boy-scout, Girl-scout, Quintessence and the 4 types of ZigZag NightRiders recognized by Popeye) or Octogonal Riders (Rose)
3. There are also the double Hoppers – pieces which jump over two pieces – again with linear march and non-linear march (Double Grasshopper).
4. There are also the newly invented movable hurdles – the Bul and Dob pieces, which are similar with the “hurdle colour changers”. So far nobody decided to use an Andernach Bul Grasshopper, but I think that combination should be also possible…”
The ending phrase by Maryan Kerhual on the Homogeneity topic made me smile:
“First remark: do we agree that the chapter Pieces should only answer to the question “how are pieces allowed to perform a move geographically on a normal chessboard”? (the question, is the piece allowed to move is not pertinent). If the answer is yes, the classification of the Jaguar in 2.2.5 of the Fairy Glossary, and of the Bul Grasshopper in 2.3.4 of FG is questionable.
Second remark: do we agree that Leapers are pieces that are not blocked by obstacles on their way to a given square, whereas Riders need encountering no obstacles on their way.
In that case Maos and Moas should be classified as Simple Riders (see 2.2.1 of the) and not as Restricted Leapers (see 2.1.3 of FG), an option already admitted in FG.
By the way the Nightrider should have been called Knightrider to be consistent with a unified terminology, but we are not going to modify that poetic name!”
And the same Maryan about the Attributes: “We know about that excellent idea of associating attributes to some pieces, very efficiently in the case of Royal units, Neutral and Half-neutral units , Undefined Pieces, Invisible Pieces, excellent because these characteristics cannot be confounded with conditions.
But the idea could also be applied to conditions, and I see two interesting attributes associated to conditions to begin with: 1) attribute ‘ultra’ ; 2) attribute ‘strict’…. “
Of course, the discussion goes in different directions, and can go continuously deeper and deeper, as Vlaicu commented:
Human imagination has actually no limits! 🙂
But allowing some more imagination to ourselves, we still have to do some practical work to push the results to appear.
“What we need to do immediately is make a selection of some popular elements belonging to each of the main groups and fill out the intended details like history, popularity, supporting software and example problems to put into a publicly viewable and searchable database on JF. This will give some immediate benefit and feedback. We can then fine tune our work to improve it further.” (Shankar)
Thanks a lot to everybody involved!
Here’s an interesting board type: Glinski’s Hexagonal Chess!
Equi(h|st)opper-class seems to be missing, it’s part of the hopper family also.
This was only an example covering the “simple” leapers/riders/hoppers!
at this stage it seems that not one but two bases should be constructed, most preferably with a similar skeleton. The first one containing the most popular fairy elements, with the additional informations mentioned by Shankar: history, popularity, software and example problems, etc The second one, gathering all known fairy elements, with their name and definition and supporting software, if any. It would be then possible to respond correctly to such demands as: “last night I could not sleep, so I created a new condition, which should be called Thomson Chess if you do not mind” and the answer, after investigation in the groups, subgroups, etc of the base, would often be “your condition has already been invented, by Andreï Zorglub, back in 1953, but we know no example”…The question is: how do we define popular conditions? Maybe a conversation should start on the subject “Popularity”
Maryan,
The whole project started by Julia listing the frequency of various pieces and conditions found in the Echecs database of WinChloe. The post is here: https://juliasfairies.com/fairy-elements-statistics/
We could use as a criteria of popularity the number of examples of a particular fairy element found in the WinChloe database.
Just for the sake of discussion.
Is it known, that two types of Gnu exist?
Classic Gnu is double Leaper (1,2)+(1,3)=Knight+Camel.
Non-classic Gnu is Rider (1,2) with 90 degrees rotation.
Both pieces can move from a1 to c2, b3, d2, b4 on the empty board.
Non-classic Gnu will not be able to move to d2/b4 if the squares b3/c2 are not empty.
Georgy,
I haven’t come across this before. If you know of any published example, please quote it..
I checked with Christian Poisson. He said it can be defined in WinChloe as a Bondisseur Double (1,2;-2,1)+(1,2;2,-1). See the link to his page.
In the menu for user defined pieces, for the 1st component, define m=1, n=2; and m1 = -2, n1 = 1; for the 2nd component, define m=1, n=2; and m1 = 2, n1 = -1.
Also, I think this could be defined as the zig-zag rider Quintessence restricted to 2 steps.
Not really.
I have just found this possibility once and made a memory note. Never needed to use this feature though.