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I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

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Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#171

Post by fastball »

crdrost wrote: post #52

I think this is fun, but (a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point. (b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make t…

I don't think (b) is really fair. You still call them "pieces" even if you are playing chess on a device/screen.

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#172

Post by wruza »

mmclar wrote: post #134
slily wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it take anyone longer than a game or two to remember the rules of chess? I even taught chess to adults as a child and they caught on within a few moves. Which I guess explains why it remains more popular than FOTM overcomplicated board game #5000. It's not difficult to memorize. IMO this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Knowing the rules and 'seeing' the ways that pieces can move are different things. I could see this being helpful to someone who has a working knowledge of the ways pieces can move, but hasn't yet built their skill of visualization thereof.

So we should delay the development of their visualization skill, because otherwise visualization is useless in chess? This works literally against what chess is about and materializes the least complex aspect of the game into a visual noise all over the board.

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#173

Post by seanhunter »

eru wrote: post #152
lovecg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why in some rare endgames you might want to promote to a knight instead of a queen to avoid a stalemate!

Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule. (And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot. So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves,…

Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory.

The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess variant would help to revitalise the game given how computer evaluation has affected theory.[3] There were also a couple of no-castling tournaments played, but like chess960[4], opinions were very much divided about whether or not it was actually any kind of improvement.

[1] Even though I pretty much always fall into stalemate traps in blitz.

[2] Former world champion and lately old guy shouting at clouds about cheating

[3] https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik...

[4] https://lichess.org/variant/chess960

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#174

Post by seanhunter »

tasuki wrote: post #99
andoando wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, this also makes a knight and queen a very strong attacking combo, because they can uniquely cover the most squares.

Given... they stay... in the same... square?

There was a big discussion of this topic on chess stackexchange[1]. It used to be just universally believed to be true but some modern analysts challenge the idea.

[1] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/27815/why-does-a-k...

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#175

Post by jasomill »

Agentlien wrote: post #165
godelski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, unfortunately, not many get visual descriptions when learning about these topics. To be fair, these visualizations can harm one's intuitions about how the metrics work in higher dimensions, so I can understand arguments against visualization. But in another example, I think even many people can come out of a Linear Algebra class and not understand that a matrix operating on a vector always performs an affine…

> a matrix operating on a vector always performs an affine transformation on that vector A simple matrix multiplication only performs a linear transformation. To get a nonlinear affine transformation you need to augment the matrix and vector with extra dimensions containing carefully selected extra ones and zeros in addition to the translation. The end result is still a linear transformation of the supplied vector, b…

Specifically,

https://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/ila5/linearalgebra5_1...

For more on the underlying geometry, see, e.g.,

https://archive.org/details/elementarymathem0000klei/page/70...

or, for a more modern, abstract formulation,

https://archive.org/details/geometry0001berg

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#176

Post by lgeorget »

JCharante wrote: post #143
infogulch wrote: post #63

For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance. I.e. the knight is an anti-queen. [1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129

I have no source for this but that is the definition for a knight's valid moves, it goes where the queen cannot within that distance

The official definition, as per the FIDE laws of chess [1], article 3.6 is

"The knight may move to one of the squares nearest to that on which it stands but not on the same rank, file or diagonal."

[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#177

Post by yellowapple »

seanhunter wrote: post #173
eru wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule. (And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot. So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves,…

Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory. The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess var…

> what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule?

The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate).

Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate because there's only a 2×2 square left and nowhere else for the kings to go except within each others' attack range.

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#178

Post by lijf »

freyfogle wrote: post #11

I suspect Josef Hartwig would like a word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hartwig#Chess_sets https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus-Schachspiel

I've built one with Lego.

https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF1392.jpeg> https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF2887.jpeg>

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#179

Post by MaxikCZ »

lovecg wrote: post #76
infogulch wrote: post #63

For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance. I.e. the knight is an anti-queen. [1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129

This is why in some rare endgames you might want to promote to a knight instead of a queen to avoid a stalemate!

I dont get it. Queen can do everything a knight can, and then some. How can electing a knight instead of queen can be of any usefulness?

Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?

Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

#180

Post by Raphael »

crdrost wrote: post #52

I think this is fun, but (a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point. (b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make t…

Yes, the knight is up to 8 squares in a 5x5 grid. https://github.com/vezquex/chess/blob/master/src/game/piece/...
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