My personality type has a worldview that “everything can be improved”. While testing the Douglas Modern layout, I noticed a lack of variation in opening moves, so in an attempt to offer the engines more variety, I tried two variants.
As a reminder, the current layout looks like this:
My first change was an attempt to provide the rooks with better protection. At the moment the knights can be pinned, and there are frequent rook swaps.
So I tried this: Continue reading
The name may be a bit “look at me” but other people tag their names onto things they do so why not? 🙂
I did consider names like “Atast” (Advanced Tactics and Strategy) or Etast (Enhanced Tactics and Strategy), because from watching the games, the level of difficulty seems higher than normal chess.
My basic thinking was to create a scenario that more closely resembled what chess is supposed to be… a simulation of old-style warfare as practised by the Persians and others in that area.
The layout lends itself to murderous combat to the death amongst the disposable (from the king’s point of view) peasants (pawns), while the flanks are free for the calvary (knights) and elephants (rooks) to storm down and attack. Continue reading
Lately I’ve been watching computer chess over at TCEC, which is at times interesting and at time frustrating as the engines lock themselves up into knots. They get into positions where basically the only way to make any sort of progress is to make a slightly bad move. Which of course they don’t do.
So we end up with kings and queens dancing around until such time as the 50-move rule kicks in, or TCEC decides it’s a draw based on engine evaluation and some other criteria.
The other problem with computer chess is that they may end up playing the same game over and over, unless you force them to use different opening books. To be fair, they then play the same opening again after swapping colours.
Anyway, I decided to try evaluating my own unique starting position, which has a more limited set of opening moves, and hopefully will force engines to randomly pick one of several “equivalent” moves, thus producing more random openings.
I did look in THE CLASSIFIED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHESS VARIANTS by D.B. Pritchard, and the only “similar” variant I can find is this one:
Crowded Chess (quoted by C. Pickover,
1992). Each player has two rows of pawns
(2nd/3rd & 6th/7th ranks) and the usual
pieces. (Mazes for the Mind)
Unfortunately there is no picture worth a thousand words, so it must either look like this:
Not sure where this is going, so just posting the image in the mean time, until such time as I gain enlightenment.
Metre – root 2 – Royal cubit – π
[Note: I need to end the equations with a period to persuade WordPress/Latex to put sane spacing between lines.
Euler’s famous equation e^{iπ} + 1 = 0 is usually considered the “most beautiful” in mathematics.
We could also write it in the so-called “ugly” format as e^{iπ} = -1.
Now we know that for the golden ratio φ,
{1 \over {φ}} - φ = -1.
So let’s rewrite Euler using that:
Well, I’m not in academia, so I won’t perish, but I have spent the last few months discovering some things about Giza which I didn’t post here. Instead I posted them as papers online (because I really don’t like the Academic Publishing business model, and probably would not have been accepted by any ‘proper’ journal anyway, because what I say is rather history-shattering…)
So the first paper was a round-up of stuff posted here, relating to the cubit:
The Beautiful Cubit System
While the other two are companion papers that rely on each other to a degree:
Diskerfery and the Four Main Giza Pyramids and
55,550 BCE and the 23 Stars of Giza
The important images are below, read the papers to get the full story 🙂
So do people speaking Arabic get 17, while those speaking English only get 16?
Oreo pack
So it was Easter again, which means chocolates. Heaven only knows why.
Now we need truth in packaging.
Empty space.
Updated versions of the different ways of approximating the cubit. Also includes separate table for Grand Metre (1 plus royal cubit) == 1.5236…. == 1.524.
These are done with pi, phi, e, roots and powers (usually of basic primes), as well as ln, log, sin, cos and tan.
See square roots, cube roots and ln(4) for formulas not shown below.
Changelog at the bottom.See also The Magical Mystical Royal Cubit for the Pretty Picture version.
To borrow a phrase from Robert Bauval, this falls under the Spooky Stuff category.
It is a very strange connection between the Grand Metre (1 + royal cubit), the base of the natural logarithm ⅇ, and the royal cubit as measured in inches.
Changelog:
2018-11-29: added Spooky Stuff 7 and 8
2018-12-03: added Spooky Stuff 9
2018-12-04: added Spooky Stuff 10
2019-04-24: added Spooky Stuff 11
Royal cubit, e and inch
I have no explanation for this. It just highlights again the ancient origins of the metre, inch and royal cubit, and how they mysteriously link together with π and ⅇ. But what about φ you ask?…. here you go: