George Duke wrote on Sat, Jul 28, 2007 08:23 PM UTC:
Nah. I subscribe to an opposite ethos to CVPage's multiform one. There has
been one widely-recognized Western Chess at a time, and probably will
continue to be, however it evolves. Variant pieces of quality go back 800
years and are less frequently invented today, not more. However, I shall
continue to develop my method for the infinite-variety mentality
hereabouts. To begin with Angel is precisely to get rid of one end-point
in the discussion. Joe is entirely missing the point. When I developed
formulaic 'M = 3.5ZT/P(1-G)', many constantly brought up extreme cases
like one-piece-type Battle Chieftain as unsupporting the model for Number
of Moves(M). So, with 'Angel-Prime' we start with most extreme powerful
piece. [Much more to come, like it or not, actually how to calculate real-world piece-values] Nalls' Comment is not before me now, but until his system comes to be used for piece-value calculations, it is of none other than theoretical interest. Marshall and Cardinal, on a scale of interesting variant pieces from 1 to 10, rank about '2'. Jeremy has pointed out Capablanca was lazy to revive those hack pseudo-compounds, and games with them are boring. Derek Nalls should calculate some piece values for interesting Betza Half-Duck, Rococo Withdrawer or Cannon Pawns, Lavieri's Promoter, or any of 100 other interesting fairy pieces of inventiveness, but nevertheless all nonstandard oddball pieces of present topics are doomed to near-esoteric, mathethematical, or game-theoretic interest.