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Comments by James Spratt

Hi, Jonathan: Thanks for the excellent rating and for your very kind comments. Your astute observation regarding the difficulty of establishing representative moves for rooks and bishops on the triangular boards brought to me an inspiration I should have had earlier, which is to color-bind the Bishops, thereby restoring them to their normal level of power in the heirarchy. All they'd need is a slightly different starting position, on opposite color cells. Anyone who wished could play it that way, and thanks again.

Hi, Joshua: That's typical of three-player games, that the two weaker players will gang up on the stronger until things start to equal out, then it's every man for himself. I made a Chess for Three game (in the index here) using three equal standard teams, that works quite well, which you might like, and which frequently produces some of the fun phenomena you mentioned in your 3-way Besiege game.

Hey, Joe, no problemo. Yum, yum, eadummup! *urp!*
Well, I think a computer chess program constitutes much prior human thinking beforehand, so ultimately, it is still human vs. human, the player vs. the programmer. Further, the machine or program is dedicated to solving the chess problem at hand, not really to defeating an opponent, in a rather cold way, because, having no 'life,' it doesn't really care if it loses and isn't subject to the many distractions and self-defensive or wilfully aggressive exercises of will that color human decision-making. The human playing against a machine pits some 3 trillion neurons against x number of bytes, which would seem to be a huge advantage for the human, but focusing enough of them while ignoring distractions of life via other sensory inputs makes it tougher. Maybe a sensory deprivation chamber and memory wipe would help.
Seconded! Thirded! Thanks, all ye Editors, and a special 'Hats Off' to Dr. Fergus Duniho, Webmaster Extraordinaire, and all you other guys who come up with so much interesting chess stuff, for making this one of my favorite places. Happy New Year!
No machine will ever invent a chess variant, or challenge a human to a game unless some human directs them to do so. So-called 'intelligent' machines are merely reactive, not initiative, and won't do doodle-um unless a human kickstarts them. (Shades of 'the Matrix' and 'Y2K'. Ho hum.. We da man...
Well, hey, Joe. How's the Chess Cafe doing? No, I haven't forgotten about Postal Chess, but you kind of lost me on the 'flip' thing. Is that a Shogi thing? Fergus, what's the number-letter thing below the box here? A straight routing to File 13?
Mark, y' silly thaing, now look what you've done--you've killed the blog for three whole days, bringin' up subjects like that. It's enough to put a feller off his supper. Things like that are best ignored, I'm a-thinkin'.

I'll bet, and whoever designed the philosopher icon has a sharp sense of humor, too. Canis pensatorus, et canis pensatorus illuminati. LOL, it's too true! Mankind's in trouble! Arf, arf!
Hi, Claudio: Well I'm a little muddy (no clue) what a dev is, but I'd say, if you're making a real set using it, and the one piece spans more than one square, make the piece of a size to match the squares of the board; if it goes a long way, say, over three or four or six squares, you might make two and just remember that they are really one piece. The Elephant in Elephant Hunt Chess spans four squares, so I'd just make him big enough to put one foot in each of four adjacent squares. I usually use modeling wax to make the original models of small chess pieces; the wax off a Gouda cheese (if you just want a little bit to fiddle with) is quite moldable, strong and obedient--that is, if you put it there, it stays there, and doesn't have a rubbery resilience, which is irritating, and can be extruded into long, tall forms without flopping like some soft modeling clays do.
You're welcome. I invented this method by trial and error and long, frustrating effort, then came to find out, much later, that the basic principle of the process has been known and used for about ten thousand years. If you want to try it and get stuck at some point, feel free to ask me; I've already made most of the mistakes.:-) Good luck.
Hi, Gary: If you say it works, I'll take your word for it; I've seen some of your artwork, and am not surprised that you get professional type results with little sculptures:-) Sometimes hard molds are all you need, and if you can do hand-finishing, well, okay. I usually use a pourable silicon rubber for most molds, a rather pricy specialized stuff, but the window-caulk works fine for a semi-stiff, tough flexible mold, the advantage of which is the ability to make tricky undercuts and highly detailed surfaces, and ease of removal when demolding. For a 2-piece mold: 1. Lay the pattern on its side on a small, clean work-board, and build a vertical plastalene wall which covers the bottom of the pattern and creates a flat area all the way around it for at least an inch. 2. Use Klean-Klay (sulfur-free, commonly available oil-based plastalene clay, never dries or hardens) to build an area of 'land' around the pattern, using a small knife to dress the edge up to the side of the pattern at a clean right angle where you want the parting line to be. 3. Use a blunt tool to make a 'ditch' in the area of 'land' around the pattern, or push a few shallow holes into it; these will register the two halves of the mold into alignment. 4. Brush-apply the silicon all over the pattern and the land; let dry and repeat until at least 1/8-in. thick all over. 5. When dry, mix a small amount of plaster and make a 'mother' mold on top of the rubber; mix it thick enough to not be runny, but be quick laying it on, maybe a half-inch thick. 6. When the plaster piece is set, flip the whole rig over and carefully remove the plastalene clay, revealing the pattern, now buried halfway in the rubber, and clean the area well with a small knife. 7. With a small brush, very lightly coat the exposed rubber with vaseline, then do the other half of the rubber, just like the first half 8. When dry, make another plaster, right on top of the rubber; you now have a sandwich of plaster, rubber, (pattern), rubber, plaster. 9. Remove plaster housings and gently peel the two rubber pieces apart, completely or only down one side, if you like, and remove the original pattern. Now you have a mold that you can cast almost anything into, many times. Reassemble for pouring and rubber band around to hold it together as you pour into the exposed hole made in step 1.

Hi, DragonMaster: You can make heat-free rubber molds of considerable durability for many repeated castings out of simple clear silicon window-caulking, available in tubes in most hardware centers, for next to nothing. You can also use fiberglass resin, sold in small amounts, mixed with about 50% by volume inert filler, such as plaster or sand, colored with a bit of carpenter's chalk, for the castings, also for minimum expense. A lot depends on the complexity of the form of your models; simple rather conical forms are easiest, but once you catch on how to make a 2-piece mold, your patterns can become much more intricate, taller, etc. Build the silicon up on your model in thin coats, letting air-dry between, until it's maybe 1/8' thick all over, remove it from the original like a sock, inside-out-wise, and there's a simple mold. You can paint the resin castings with model car paints.
Hi, Smilemaker: Yes, it is permissible for a Pawn to promote to a second, third (rare) or fourth (extremely rare) Queen upon reaching the opponent's home row. Aside, I remember a 5th-Grad math trick called 'casting out nines' which I think was really trick, but can't remember exactly how it worked. Are you familiar with it?

Yeah, it does. Don't mess with this babe, she bites. (Doesn't grasp intermediate levels of force :-))

Stephen, that's a great idea--if you don't make a move in 100 days, you lose. (That's a lot kinder than what I was thinking.) They should be included in a player's percentile rating, too. There's already an etiquette recommendation against unilaterally terminating a game; I think it's just as rude to just wander off and not bother to finish one. 'Tain't sportin.

Well, Andy, you gave the answer that I gave in a physics class long ago, and which I was told then was right. Gary, I think maybe the phrasing fooled you--'before you' rather indicating arms' length, or the range at which most people look at mirrors. BUT, you prompted me to perform a few little experiments, and I realized that the further away you are from a mirror the smaller your reflection appears to be, a la 'law of perspective,' which involves square root of H or square of D over something (does anyone know the formula for it?), so I suppose you're right, too; I just can't see that far, O Eagle Eye.

Ha-ha! One of my old Navy buddies and I were playing Chess for Three on the corner of Hannah's bar one afternoon with somebody's 12-year-old daughter who had wandered over to see what we were doing, and wanted to play the game. Not only was she a cutie, she was quick, resolute, and absolutely brutal, and we two old fools, initially falling all over ourselves to help her out, never even had a chance. Worst stomping I've ever gotten. But ain't that life for ya? We played with three separate third guys, all named Brian, the same afternoon. Blew 'em away.
Hi, Jaan: I made a Chess for Three game on a triangular board (in the alphabetical index here) some years ago and had to deal with the same issues, of course, especially what to do with a dead King's remaining men. I've found that the two weaker players tend to gang up on the strongest anyhow, as a matter of survival, until one King falls, at which point, in my game, his pieces become inert and may be taken by either player as required to get them out of the way. My thinking was that for the capturer to be able to recruit the captured King's pieces would constitute an overpowering advantage which would preclude further fair play, although a subsequent victory by the (now) weaker player would be a very satisfying 'David vs. Goliath' feat. So how often does the disadvantaged guy win in your game? The shape of the board may affect the practicality of a rule requiring mutual assistance; on a triangular board a moment sometimes occurs when a Queen has both of the opposing Kings lined up in such a way that she can take them in sequence, taking one and 'checkmating' the other. I think that would be less likely on a board with square cells because it's easier for a targeted King to duck to one side.

Hey, Fergus, didn't someone (heh-heh) suggest maybe putting some more color on the front page a while back? Like maybe a few rows of the prettiest boards, maybe strung around the intro like nautical signal flags, possibly including a random selection of interesting icons?

Hey, these aren't just mirrors, these are MIRRORS, of the 'DOORWAY-TO-THE-ALTERNATE-UNIVERSE type, except they read backwards, like all good mirrors do, like, um, Chinese and Korean and such. Q: If you are six feet tall, how long must the mirror on the wall before you be so that you can see your entire self without moving? (It's astonishing the number of people who can't figure this out.)

Those animated illustrations of how the pieces move are extremely clear and effective. Hat's off to Peter and David.

Who WAS that Masked Man? (Da-da-lump, da-da-lump, da-da-lump-lump-lump! An' a mighty Hiyo, SILVER!!!)

Yep, Double Chess is one of the best games I know of. It gets intense fast and stays intense all the way through. Can't imagine it being nearly as much fun in ASCII. Greg, don't we have a tie-breaker to play sometime?
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