Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did the queen do before then?
The queen was called a fers, and could only move one space diagonally according to most descriptions.
More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess#History
Senet
91–100 of 123 posts
Re: Senet
#92I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough. Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have differe…
And then there's hnefatafl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games).
Re: Senet
#93I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an independent project right now! It got me thinking and researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far is Fog of War.
Have you looked at InfoChess? (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permu...)
Re: Senet
#94So when chess was first played, this game was already ancient. That is pretty cool.
Chess is old, but not as old as backgammon. And backgammon is an evolved version of this game. There are 3 ancient games still played commonly: chess, backgammon, and go.
I find it interesting that they span three very broad genres of gameplay:
* deterministic with heterogeneous pieces
* deterministic with homogeneous pieces
* nondeterministic
Re: Senet
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.
> It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.
Well would you look at that, you are right. The different layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It even has the same number of different types.
Re: Senet
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it. Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps…
The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines. Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but yo…
Good to note that Pluribus is trained with Counterfactual Regret Minimization rather than deep learning, same as Libratus, the first AI player to beat professional players in Heads up no limit Texas Hold' em.
I'm not sure about the relation between Pluribus and Libratus- I think Pluribus is a newer version of Libratus, essentially?
Re: Senet
#97I once won an AI tournament for senet :) so for me this post relates to AI... But still... it's a mystery how this gets to the top of HN
>> I once won an AI tournament for senet :)
When and where was that? More details please? :)
Re: Senet
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The queen was called a fers, and could only move one space diagonally according to most descriptions.
More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess#History
Even more details, like how Queen Isabella may have inspired the change and that it was common to declare the queen in "check" for quite some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(chess)#History
Re: Senet
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.
Seems like the precursors might have originated from India but what would evolve into what we today call "Chess" seems to have been taking shape in Persia (Iran).
Do the historians who track these things have some metric that they determine that separates 'precursors' from the game itself or is it a human "you know it when you see it" or consensus? Just curious. I imagine it's something similar to how we answer the question "Are these distinct species?" (which doesn't really have a great answer).
Re: Senet
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.
Well would you look at that, you are right. The different layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It even has the same number of different types.
Actually, Xiangqi has 7 types and western Chess only has 6, unless I'm counting wrong.