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CONTEST TIME!

OBJECT: Design a game with the best use of an unsymmetrical board!
More points for very unsymmetrical boards, sparse boards, boards with other unusual features, and intuitive rules that govern movement so as the unsymmetrical board is not a hindrance. Technically normal boards where the board is hippogonally connected and all the pieces are Knightoids, etc. don't count!


Deadline is April 2nd!

Cowards, abuse and their enablers, asymmetric warfare, environmental degradation. Asymmetry beckons
infinity, philosophically and scientifically. The contradictions: not only is 8x8 over-used -- abused as it were -- so are 6x6, 8x10, 10x10, 12x12, 10x16, 16x16 and all such boards exhibiting more than mirror symmetry. We are practically using asymmetrical and unsymmetrical synonymously. If flipping the board (rotational symmetry order 2), opposites see the same board (not necessarily starting arrays), your bourgeois CV-art is stuck in limbo of symmetricality. The Long March: Betza broke the new ground, because Betza's Chess Unequal Armies is the pieces-equivalent of asymmetric board! Betza says there will be CUA takeover in 21st century, Betza's standard from all 150 CVs. (One wonders, what is Gilman's chosen best among his equal 150 CVs?). Once each asymmetric board is chosen, corrections are in order to right imbalances.  Examples are Ramayana and Ultra Slanted Escalator, both having mirror symmetry across one midline, but players facing different board patterns. More extreme is dispensing with even any reflection symmetry (Catastrophic 8x8 by Missoum). In either event, Rules not usually altered to help balance asymmetric board must be considered: en passant, castling, Betza unequal armies, Berolina pawns, all offbeat rules restoring semblance of balance. For every case symmetric, there are scads and scads and scads of unsymmetrical and skewed boards and/or piece-ownerships, retaining recognizability to the core. Moreover, asymmetry is pathway to the real world, in some cliched ''every act of the common day makes or breaks character.'' CMXV presumes to be introduced by Hermes Trismegistus: ''That which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the miracles of the One Thing.'' Asymmetry is the order of the day. CUA (unsymmetrical pieces) is around for 30 years now, and unsymmetrical boards are equally inevitable. Anyway, White, or Black, first-move means asymmetry in process, and only a lopsided board could conceivably really restore that.

This thread is now for programmers. Computer (italicized) programmers. (1)
Within narrow limits with a filename like *ChessboardMath7*. Real
numbers are scientifically definitional, whereas floating point are
heuristic only. (2) Within programs, use a lot of // and /*  */,
because most of what is said is ignored anyway, and what is not said is
forgotten. (3) Programming CVs is like this. Take a perfectly good
sentence: A QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOGS. It's conveniently
I.T. because of having every letter, with only 9 doubles making 35 letters. Erroneously it often goes to length 34 only as ''dog'' not dogs, but then there is no ''s''. So dogs it is.  How about 'sgod yzal eht revo
depmuj xof nworb kciuq a'? That's like one necessary
Carrera-Bird-Capablanca-Trice-Duniho array of the original. Think of
several effective ways (you have to be immersed in it) to code for that
backwards array, and other permutations too, using any tools of the trade, string, character array, loops, sorting, what return values, the whole gamut of specialization, functions neat and tidy. Next, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (white space) adeeoooru. It packs the same wallop on CPU as aqbfjotld, and the letters are just straightened out. Yet Argentinan Jorge Luis Borges found Lasswitz's Universal Library, cataloguing every possible permutation of every concatenation of words, in each and all languages ever to be spoken and written, to be essentially useless, because most volumes are mumbo jumbo, and folio of Shakespeare, or poem of Borges, rarely produced randomly. (4) Now try 'A quick brown OX jumped over the lazy FROGS. /*watch case sensitivity*/ It's catchier because fox and dog are really the same thing, in the new mathematical biology -- like all we primates down to the hairless seven billion ones -- that computer experts tend to be totally ignorant of, separate from nature. All 26 letters are still used with OX FROGS instead of FOX DOGS because 'd' was already a double letter, and the string is still 35 letters, so no need for drudgeried secretarial maintenance by the poor programmer. The four, Fox, Dogs, Ox, Frogs are the variant chess **pieces** substituted and should already be familiar to CVers. As many piece-types as we want, forever and evermore, and when running out of
characters, if computer is holding 128, start using words, and if they run
out someday, call up numeric variables to hold them all, each one very
so slightly altering the original inventors' intentions back there and then at India year 600. Evolution, in contradistinction to devolution.

Seriously what should Next Chesses be like? These 21 were all nominated in
2008. Over a year later they were ordered here, as
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=24759.
There are concise explanations justifying each inclusion that together will become an article. Even the lowest ranked, Seirawan Chess, would be more interesting in this day and age than f.i.d.e. chess. The latter still has all the glory in rote scores played and re-played by the ignorant masses 1000s and 1000s of times per day online. It is their particular secular religion, lackeys and conformists, like working crossword puzzles; and at the opposite pole, variantists are content to be patsies to the status quo. By February will be factored in Fourriere's Bilateral, Aronson's Transactional, and Fischer Random for accumulating 24 CVs. Then guaranteed to Gilman, Gifford, and J. Smith are one spot each.  There are 3 more slots to consider adding to 30 CVs, being a round number. A few among others under preliminary consideration are Cylinder Chess, Quintessential, Grandmaster Reshevsky's Zonal, and Three Fat Brothers. But #s (unordered) 28, 29, and 30 may end up being none of those. Or there may be all those particular presumptively deserving ones and in addition 9 more for 40 CVs, instead of 30, to be next chesses. Or 13 more to 40 CVs including none of those happened to be just mentioned. There are many ways to go, and there would be no difficulty extending the list, in principle and in fact, exactly ordered properly to 50 CVs. The only error I notice so far is Centennial's being ranked one or two too high; but I will not change that now arbitrarily without explanation. The project is a tough problem aggravated by the Aughts' prolificist ethos under CVPage auspices, and by the outside dogma of the OrthoChessists' religion. Another nuisance is regional forms not worth very much any more for active widespread ongoing play, such as ancient Xiangqi, Shogi, and Makruk, all still vying or dying for attention. People and programmers first becoming familiar with those, wanting to show their intellectual credentials, become their leading
proponents. Those 3 are only of historical importance. Why else would
Chinese youth be abandoning Xiangqi in droves to less tasteless f.i.d.e 64?
Because even little mad Queen 64 is more logical for players than classical
inspiring Xiangqi. Better 40 Next CVs than CVPage's formal 4000 CVs.
Eventually designers will get ashamed of themselves and their subjective
artwork, convenienced by Internet piece-working retarding progress, and
take up such topics of evaluation importantly. And Chess will stand a chance to acquire cultural rootedness again. Unlike the 21 CVs above, Aronson's Transactional
Chess,
http://www.chessvariants.org/incinf.dir/transactional.html,
 may begin to address computer dominances. Are we going to watch
computer play computer in the future more exclusively? What can be the
mechanisms of how to change the rules in process, or to introduce verbal as opposed to strictly calculational skills, in order to help thwart the uncreative stale mechanical play coming out of competitive copycat over-preparation?

Fuller context of Next Chess threads since 2008 for entertainment and edification 
of new readers:
Invented in the 1480s, advanced Shatranj added the strong Queen and in
Italian was called Regina Rabiosa and translated that way at least to
French. They, and we, continue playing it occasionally today. ''Mediaeval
ingenuity had more commonsense than we do today.'' What they invented
lasted 500 years until the Internet and until Fischer random chess.
  After Regina Rabiosa swept across Italy, Columbus first set sail
easterly-wind-aided to begin to save/enslave America. Shakespeare (who
describes chess-playing at the american west indies in 'The Tempest')
and Elizabeth were yet to be born two generations later, and Newton at the
sesquicentennial of ''modern'' OrthoChess64.  Still called ''modern'' for having two-step Pawn and regular Bishop too, but really
about the only remaining cultural artifact from the Middle Ages of any
science or art (please try to name another one intact). The popular game Chess competed with back then and replaced was Rithmomacia:
http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/mebben.ryth.html.
 The above adverb ''occasionally'' is used advisedly: like Stepford Wives, or like fundamentalist religionists, a million go through the motions a million times a year at
enablers like Chessbase etc.  Seen one, seen them all in each opening 
played  at least the umpteenth time by rote to move 20 and many to 30 now. Tom Wolfe's scoffing metaphor for the whole Internet, ''click, click, click,'' as like the local
retiree knitting circle (he wanted people to read more books
proportionately), should best only apply to f.i.d.e. OrthoChess64 habitues by our bias within Next Chesses, since each and all of our 21 CVs nominated and ranked so far there would be better than that particular conventional one. The concept of reality is that Next Chesses exist and ought to be determined, whether or not they achieve immediate popularity.

Here are going to be few comments that will bear on Fischer Random and
Transactional Chess:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/chessvariants/message/2786; which from Yahoo by M. Winther links back to this one in CVPage by J. Good:
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=23149. 
And R. Hutnik at Yahoo discussion:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/chessvariants/message/2694,
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/chessvariants/message/2643,
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/chessvariants/message/2607.

[Comment revised 6.Feb.10]  Uwe Kreuzer showed me this CV, and we played a couple games of Grosses
Schach 10x10 at Game Courier, one of which ended 24.December.2005:
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/REGELN_grosses_schach_10x10htm.
One relevance is merely German like Die Schwalbe. Another is Adler jumps like Bison/Falcon. Figure about everything C.V.Page has done since 1994 has its equivalent volume online in German since 1994 with but 25-50% overlap of actual material. Who knows exactly? It is the obvious way to expand if or when, or now that, we run out of ideas. Those prolificist designers specializing in reworks, and more than one are 100% participants that way, can just lift the unknown German reversedly by their very own bootstraps with minimal acknowledgement or attribution -- or properly plenty of it so long as there is the variantist tweak to call the new behemoth one's own.  Constructively over half the time ''re-inventions'' are not deliberate but inadvertent from the impossibility anymore knowing all what is out there, from the profound to the puerile. The world of CVs a many-spendoured thing or multi-faceted phenomenon in many languages: from the fiery to the rotten, many are theories or theorems, and others are shadows, from lively malices or mere whims and amiabilities, naive or pedantic, to the bizarre and the grotesque, one and all by dedicated CVers making a statement. 
[Source: last two lines copy or try parodying opening of this Fort whose other quotes are in Chess Moralities: http://www.resologist.net/damn01.htm. Well-known photo shows anomalist Fort playing  1000-square chess.]
 Not fitting any obvious category -- to be analyzed in follow-up --  fine Grosses Schach in the first link itself is original from the late 1990s, after Falcon/Bison was first put into a CV December 1992.

Grosses Schach 10x10 has five paired exotic piece-types in the back rank
behind the King and Queen.
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/REGELN_grosses_schach_10x10htm
Pawns are regular, and the regular-piece line is the second, files 2 and 9, with the only necessary addition there  Einhorn/Unicorn, who is another Knight strengthened with Trebouchet (0,3).
Cornered Adler moves like Bison to squares called 1,3 and 2,3. Minister moves like Rook and captures as Bishop. Kardinal moves like Bishop and captures as Rook.
Later Winkelspecht's Divergent Chess (1999) copies the style of those two piece-types, though Grosses Schach is not the first either with the technique:
http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/contest/divergentchess.html.
Hammer is to Pfeil as Minister is to Kardinal. And Hammer and Pfeil are certainly brand-new piece-type inventions. They make Grosses Schach an excellent original novelty CV, though not suitable Next Chess for having too many exotics.

[German Lasswitz and Argentinian Borges contribute to the The Universal Library: 
http://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/lasswitz-and-borges-indexing-the-library-of-everything]

Some comments are harder than others, but this one on topic of
cvs-and-computers, http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=23298, 
re-re-rereading now my own ''adeeoooru'' halfway down I did not understand.
Embarrassing.  Okay, okay ''adeeoooru'' out of the sentence ''a quick
brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs'' are the excess letters used twice
beyond the 26 English letters used once.  The comment analogizes
substitutions 'fox', 'dogs', 'ox' and 'frogs' to cv piece-types. 
The object is to exemplify  and ridicule over-proliferation of cv forms.  
Actually ''qbfjotld'' without 'a' in the beginning works even better with minimum 34 letters only (the letter a is already in lazy), and it has to be still the briefest sentence solving the condition whoever the anonymous 19th century author is. If a cv has 34 files and there are 34 different piece-types, there are 34! starting arrays back-ranked. 34! is between 10^38 and 10^39. 

See the end of the article above, over the Borges photo, for fuller quotation
from Borges ''The Library of Babel''(1941): ''How could one locate the venerated and secret Hexagon which housed Him? Someone suggested a regressive method.... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years.''

Thanks, Serge. Awesome. How about a *longer* palindrome than: ''Are we not drawn
onward, we Few, drawn onward to new era?'' That one is worked into chess morality number 20 along with ''never odd or even.''

A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac, a liar, a hoop, a pint, a catalpa, a gas, an oil, a bird, a yell, a vat, a caw, a pax, a wag, a tax, a nay, a ram, a cap, a yam, a gay, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a parabola, a dog, a pat, a cud, a nu, a fan, a pal, a rum, a nod, an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a lever, a hair, a pad, a tapir, a door, a moor, an aid, a raid, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a catnip, a pooh, a rail, a calamus, a dairyman, a bater, a canal--Panama.

Not to miss the point (as someone appears to have): the amazing sentence,
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=27482, uses
23 of the 26 letters only once and 3 twice in total 29 letters with
meaning! The other one, Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz, does the job
in 31. ''Quick brown fox, jump over the lazy dogs'' does cut the
classic one to 32, but that is the limit there. Since 32 can be
number of cv files in double chesses, there is representable by the
letters most of the piece-types as different and just a few wanted pairs,
the last fox-dogs one four 'o's, such as Lavieri's Overtaker or
Brown's Orphan. // CV-length Palindromes are still open, but only the
first 3 lines of the long palindrome already have these chess pieces: Man(courier chess), Bird,
Ram, Wall ('chess on a longer board' & ganymede), Car(novo chess), Bin(feature of 'in the bin'), Vassal(mediaeval pawn), Wolf(by Stiles).

Oh, I didn't miss the point.  My point was that it has nothing to do with
Chess with Different Armies.

Perhaps a better sarcastic response would have been 'How does the sphinx of black quartz move?  Does judging a vow requrie a turn?'