[Retros] Steno-Chess proposal

Francois Labelle flab at EECS.Berkeley.EDU
Wed Mar 3 15:41:42 EST 2004


What's unfortunate about Steno-Chess is that it has many rules, it is
highly dependent on its precise rules, and the precise rules aren't yet
stabilized (can "K" indicate castling, can we have a letter to denote a
pawn promotion without revealing what kind of piece the pawn promoted
into, etc).

I have a proposal which could solve this. The following sentence contains
*all the rules* of my proposed Steno-Chess:

"For every move, write exactly one symbol from its Standard Algebraic
Notation."

Here are (I think) all the differences between this and the currently
published Steno-Chess rules:

- No "P" to denote pawn moves.
- No notation for en passant captures.
- No wildcard "~" to denote any move.
- No distinction between O-O-O and O-O. Both can be written as "O" or "-".
- "K" can't be used to denote castling.
- NBRQ can mean a move or a pawn promotion to that piece.
- The symbol "=" can be used to indicate an unknown pawn promotion.

Here is a possibly undesirable consequence:
- For a pawn capture, the starting file can also be used.

Here is a very unusual consequence with occurs rarely:
- "a".."h" and "1".."8" can also represent a disambiguation character.

So my proposition could be amended in a few ways to "fix" some of these
"problems", but note that then we would be back to arguing exactly which
fixes should be made, and these "fixes" would complicate the definition,
easily doubling or tripling its length.

Therefore my proposition is to use the elegant one-line definition and to
accept all of its consequences, good or bad.

Francois





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