I suspect Josef Hartwig would like a word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hartwig#Chess_sets https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus-Schachspiel
Those peaces remain unreasonably expensive on Amazon, btw.
Good whittling project then.
I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
191–200 of 269 posts
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#192I 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…
Unrelated, but I just realized the horse is not in fact called "horse" like it is in Italian/Spanish.
It is called "Springer" (translates to: jumper) in German. Sometimes "Pferd" or "Ross" is also used (translates to: horse and steed, resp.). That's why "Knight's tour" is called "Springerproblem" or "Rösselsprung" (from "Ross") in German.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#193Fun as it may be as a thought/UX experiment, I don't think it's a good design, because half-truth is usually the worst compromise.
This design doesn't account for many special qualities and behaviors pieces exhibit. It doesn't indicate that
* while pawns do capture diagonally (forward), they are pushed forward in straight line
* they can capture en passant
* they can move by 2 squares from their initial file, and only from the initial file
* they can be promoted to another piece
* Knight moves are not inhibited by the presence of other pieces (unlike any other piece, a Knight can "jump over" pieces)
* castling
* special status of the King (unless it's conveyed by that circle in the middle, but it's not nearly as readable a symbol as a crown)
So this design kind of works if you already have complete information from elsewhere, but isn't that great if it were your first source of info.
It also loses the poetic aesthetics of the traditional pieces, with queens and kings and bishops etc.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#194What I enjoy about this design is it exploits the correlation between piece value with the number of ways it can move, resulting in a visual intuition that more visually complex pieces are worth more on average. The knight is perhaps the frustrating exceptions to this.
Piece value is determined by how many squares it can threaten. This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3, despite both having apparently equal freedom of movement (just rotated 45 degrees). The bishop will be able to access strictly fewer squares than the rook even in the best case, and usually much fewer. And the bishop is stuck on one color.
"This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3"
Such evaluations are only a rule of thumb intended for beginners.
It's all context dependent. There are positions where a Bishop is more powerful than a Rook. Other things being equal, Bishops tend to be preferred over Knights in serious play (especially when you've got a Bishop pair, which is synergically more powerful than one Bishop times two), even though both are theoretically "worth" 3 pawns. Two minor pieces are usually worth more than a Rook and a pawn, and more often than not it isn't a good idea to exchange the former for the latter, even though the total value appears the same (3+3 = 5+1). And so on.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That's a horrendously hard to parse definition. Couldn't they say "3 squares away but not on the same rank/file/diagonal" or something a bit easier?
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an updated version of this set (probably from the 90s?). Mine had a better board and I think the tops of the pieces were different, but the text/diagrams were identical: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/c1ri78/t... Not all of the moves were the clearest, but it was still handy while trying to learn.
It doesn't represent the "en passant" rule, nor the castling. :-)
Nor the "promotion" of a pawn that has marched across the board to begin a new life as... a pawn (or anything else that isn't a king -- this almost means a queen, but a promotion to knight can also be useful).
Displaying usual the moves on the pieces is certainly super-handy for beginners to understand the moves, but as you've pointed out: Chess also has other nuances.
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I was showing off one night and, at the tail end of an end game, and promoted a pawn to a pawn once it reached the far rank. It didn't really help in that game (although I can envision corner cases where it could be helpful as a blocker, but any other promotion is equally useful a blocker), but I had a move that I could afford to burn and it was fun to do so I did it.
It was a fun game. 10/10, did repeat other fun (and absurd) chess games.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#197For 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'm not a master or anything, but I've always found it interesting that the queen is usually thought of as the most powerful piece while I think it's the knight. Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
Knights are objectively nowhere near as powerful as queens. However they're underrated in blitz chess, where their visually hard to see moves often catch people unaware.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#198Ok, but the attack direction is the easiest part of chess to learn. I learnt the rules of chess as a child and despite having played less than 20 games in my life I remember them entirely, including things like en passant.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 beca…
> 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.
If the only two pieces left are kings, that is a stalemate. It is not even a legal move for two kings to come within one square of each other.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people think of the knight moving 2 and then 1.
Chess players do, yet experience of basically any non-player I have ever heard describing it as "one straight, one diagonal" tells me otherwise. Also "moving two and then one" is ambiguous and would allow moving 3 squares into the same direction.
This probably _heavily_ depends on the country where you live.
I don't know people that think or thought that horses move "one straight, one diagonal".