Ratings & Comments

smpyasW […] looks like "sympa"

Well the ship is certainly a sympathic piece ;‌)

FvmpasyazW: doesn't work. Strange pattern: B+incomplete Manticore

Sounds like a Crooked Rook (=Girlscout) move to me, which would make sense in the old/non‐continuation‐leg interpretation of z. It gives me a Ship when I try it; maybe try refreshing your Cache? (Ctrl–Shift–R)

flbryafrFfrblyaflF: doesn't work. It skips the F-square

That is correct. But then you simply add it explicitly: FflbryafrFfrblyaflF.

All the bent trajectories you can specify with XBetza skip the first square (or actually the entire first leg if it is more than a single square, or even all non-final legs if they have more than two legs). All legs mentioned in a description are compulsary, and must contain at least one step if they are sliding.

This was a choice; it could have been defined such that slider continuation legs can make 0 to infinite steps, rather than 1 to infinite (like the initial or only leg can). But what would you do then for a piece where you don't want that? E.g. a Griffon that cannot move to the F squares, even though it can be blocked there? It is much easier to add the F moves to a piece that not naturally has those, than it would be to prevent it from stopping on the first square of its path. So asR is a hook mover that must turn a corner, and cannot move like a simple Rook. If you would want it to move as a simple Rook as well, as the Hook Mover from the large Shogi variants can, just write RasR.

Thank you HG and Bn for your answer, it's fascinating, although I can't understand everything.

I have tried the strings you said for the Ship. Not all of them work. Maybe I haven't caught what you meant.

flbryafrFfrblyaflF: doesn't work. It skips the F-square

smpyasW: it works, but I really don't have the skills to understand why (it looks like "sympa" a French equivalent of "cool" or "great" that you say when something is nice)

FvmpasyazW: doesn't work. Strange pattern: B+incomplete Manticore

@Bn Em: your trick for the Ship with the z is clever, but makes the description even less intuitive. When I made the Tamerlane II diagram this alternative use of z did not exist, though. I am not sure if defining a meaning for z and q without first using an s would be helpful. But, come to think of it, s is a dummy on a diagonal atom, as lF is the two left moves, and rF the two right moves, so together these are a full Ferz. But such a dummy s could be used to define the symmetry breaking as used by following z or q. I guess it would be most useful to define it such that it causes the diagonal atom to be interpreted as an oblique one with the longest leap in the sideway direction (i.e. as sN would have been interpreted). Then the Ship would be FsyafqF.

I have no idea why yafqF does what it does. Without a preceding s or oblique leg it triggers the code for the old Betza meaning, which lays out the entire path for the circular piece, with a special mode flag to indicate it can be terminated at any square along the path. But the preceding leg must utterly confuse it...

I agree that the way XBetza handles multi-leg moves is not very intuitive. I don't think it is too late to switch to a more intuitive notation, as long as it doesn't allow specification of moves that would not be possible to specify in XBetza. Because then it would be quite easy to just equip the Interactive Diagram (or XBoard) with a simple pre-processor, which just converts the more human-friendly notation to XBetza before interpreting the latter.

E.g. how about writing multi-leg moves always within parentheses, using a hyphen as leg separator, and requiring all atoms should be 'compatible'? Where compatibility means they should either all be multiples of K steps, or of the same oblique leap. The Griffin would then be F(F-fsR), and the pre-processor would act on anything between parentheses, run through the legs to see whether range-toggling is needed. Depending on that it then translates the hyphen to a or ya. So that it ends up with the modifier string yafs, after which it then writes the leading atom F to get the equivalent XBetza. (I guess we could also use square brackets and commas, to stay closer to Betza's original suggestion: F[F,fsR].)

As to your specific questions: the Snake is easy: vWvyafsW. This is just the Manticore with all its moves prefixed with a v. The Ship, however is hard. This is not so much the fault of the notation, but caused by the fact that moves with different initial steps bend in different directions, and you have to indicate which (while for the Snake all moves bent in both directions). The only way to do it is to separate the left-bending from the right-bending move, i.e. the diagonal from the anti-diagonal first steps. This in itself is cumbersome, as there are no shorthands like v or s for diametrically opposed diagonal moves. So you have to write out all directions, and being diagonals, each direction requires two letters. E.g. a Ferz moving along an anti-diagonal is flbrF, and in the Ship you want those to bend to the right (i.e. fr) in the next leg. So you get flbryafrF for these two paths. And then you have to write the other two paths in the same way, changing all l into r and vice versa. This is how I did it in my Diagram for Tamerlane II. (Note that flbr[F,frR] as it would look in the proposed more intuitive system would not be much less cumbersome...)

The Snaketongue is simple: a vertical W step followed by the outward turn is simply vWvyafsW (same as the manticore but with v prepended to each component).

The ship is trickier, as the first step can be in any direction and by the second step there's no way to specify which is the right twist (as there hasn't been a bend yet and l and r are relative). It may be worth special‐casing z and q here too(?) but meanwhile it can be done in a slightly hacky way involving the mp modality trick (i.e. a square that can either be empty or a mount, so it doesn't matter what's there). That gives two solutions: FvmpasyazW which (other than the F step) moves one forward, ignoring wahatever is there, turns 90° for another W step, then turns 90° again for the rest of the Rook move; or alternatively smpyasW which steps one space sideways, ignores what's there, then turns 90° and continues, now vertically, as a rook (note this latter one already includes the F step)

@HG:

quite incidentally while trying some of these, I input yafqF as a move, which seems to give a pandacub (Gilman's name for the forward‐only Slip‐rook, ft[WDD]) for some reason? Not sure exactly what I expected (though sth gryphon‐like would have made sense I think?) but it definitely wasn't that.

The preset for Very Heavy Chess seems corrupted. It is not the one I designed, it is another one made by Greg Strong. I have a game going on with Kevin P. and I'm getting an absurd check, which is removed by another absurd move.

Would it be possible to put my preset instead?

Thanks

This is really weird. I have tried Chrome too now, and also don't see anything strange there. When you try this with an open console (F12), do you get any error messages there while you enter the move?

I tried this in both Edge and Google Chrome, and it seems only the latter has the spurious highlighting. When executing the moves on Chrome with the compact description assigned, I also see a spurious highlight on e1 when entering the third leg of the move.

What I see is this (Fire Fox and Android browser):

• 1st click on e4: d4 and c4 -> blue star (= 2nd leg can follow), b4 = red dot (simple capture e4xb4)
• 2nd click on d4: e4 -> yellow dot (igui), d4 -> red dot (simple capture e4xd4), c4 -> blue star (3rd leg can follow), b4 -> red dot (e4xd4xb4 double capture)
• 3rd click on c4: c4 -> red dot (e4xd4xc4 double capture), b4 -> red dot (e4xd4xc4xb4 triple capture)
• 4th click on b4 -> move accepted, move indicated with greenish background on e4, b4 and reddish background on c4, d4.

This is exactly as it is supposed to be. Do you see anything different? If so, what?

My comment here on Oct 20th was in reply to your previous one in fact. But I still haven't learned how to incorporate a previous message or parts of it.