Comments by nelk114

Since my only reservation with Manticore was that it is without precedent in games, and the Editors seem fine with the exception in this case, Manticore is fine with me too. I've updated the page to refer to it so unless Ben strongly objects this is probably the near‐final version.

I've also made a few additional tweaks and added some extra uses: Jörg Knappen's Seeping Switchers and the Gryphon compound in (Gollon's, though according to Jean‐Louis in another comment not Pritchard's, account of) Mideast Chess.

@Ben: Thanks for the reminder about Botterill inventing the Prelate — that had completely passed through my mind and I hadn't read through the article again while drafting this. Also I've added Aanca, as well as the other two names used both for the modern piece and by more than one person, to the first paragraph.

@Jean‐Louis: Thanks, that's good to know. Plenty of interesting material there indeed (though I was already familiar with your GA page :) ). No doubt I shall have to take a look into the Musser translation when I have a bit more free time

As far as I can tell, that leaves this page substantially complete. Any remaining remarks?

Thanks, Fergus!

@Jean‐Louis: Hmm, in that case it does seem like Hans was in error, esp. if, as you say, RennChess was a followup to Mideast which would suggest that Greenwood had the (putatively) correct description. It may be worth taking the reference back out then given that the otherwise necessary explicit caveat regarding Hans' account might reflect unnecessarily harshly.

@H. G.: Fair; I'll put that in the notes section. Do you think it's worth generally adopting Gilman's additional ‘Double’ term as well for the Duke?

I also remembered one more variant featuring the manticore as iirc a knight upgrade, but haven't found it again [Edit: just found it], and I also found this one with a lame double‐ski (i.e. at least 3‐square) manticore move as one form of the ‘mutating serpent’. Oþoh I feel like this page may well be more than comprehensive enough as it is(!)

Also since I expect to make at least one more revision of this, I seem to remember there's a preference for relative urls in intra‐site links; am I correct in thinking that those are the same as absolute ones but without the leading https://www.chessvariants.com?

Indeed, I updated my comment once I noticed they weren't the same after all. It seems like the kind of thing he'd've come up with a prefix word (like switchback) for, but I can't find one, and Helical does seem apt (though I expect he'd have called them helical girl‐/boy‐/doublescouts rather than rooks/bishops/queens)

The remark was very much an assessment of my impression of Man and Beast rather than an actual suggestion as such.

True, he was rather fond of, sometimes gratuitously, proliferating names, though in his case it kind of makes sense considering they would often turn up in games together and it'd be a bit of a pain to have several kinds of very different ‘rook’ in a game. A matter of degree I suppose really (after all we don't go around calling things wazir‐/ferz‐/manriders (the reuse of those for shogi‐general extrapolations in M&B10 notwithstanding) — and ofc the large shogis are even more extreme, if not nearly as numerous).

Fwiw at least Boyscout is well‐enough established imo that ‘helical boyscout’ wouldn't generate much confusion — but helical bishop doesn't have any other obvious meaning so… they can be synonyms! (now all that's missing is a prefix combining helical and switchback…)

Agreed that it's not exactly the same, and taking the motivations into account there are some noticeable differences, merely very similar — especially since iirc Duke explicitly mentions the leaping falcon (i. e., indeed, the Bison) and 10×10 board as (rejected, in his case, but possible as subvariants) alternatives and the setup with falcons in the corners is his second favourite according to the comments on that page. Honestly I mostly just find it interesting that much of it seems to have been reinvented independently — suggests that, for all his self‐importance (patenting a variant? Really?), he (and, indeed, you) may have been onto something.

It is a bit of an odd artifact that leaping pieces tend to be named after non‐leaping animals: Camels, Giraffes, Bisons, Buffaloes… while the piece with a bird's name (the rook — indeed even in Japanese the ‘Flying’ Chariot) is among the most easily blocked, at least of the orthodox set.

I don't see as great an issue with the Falcon name clash though; after all we don't distinguish leaping and stepping elephants, dabbabas, ⁊c., or Chinese and (albeit much less popular) Korean cannons by name. And since the name is also used for the forward‐bishop/backward‐rook piece…

@Uli:

Re Duke's variant and patent: whilst it was, indeed, probably an exercise in extending the patent's scope, I'd argue that technically he did describe this variant first (and strictly speaking patents are a different thing from copyright, and I'm not convinced that someone patenting a new set of chords (perhaps in some unusual tuning?) that wasn't in prior use coudn't in fact claim a breach of patent on anything using them, though ofc IANAL) — however you rightly point out that he came to different conclusions, and that merely having described it as part of a set of possibilities doesn't mean that he should be credited for it (H. G. Muller's analogy with integers is apt here). My main point was that it's more interesting (at least for me ☺︎) to acknowledge the commonalities (as you have now, indeed, done) and explore the differences within that than to insist that everything is unique and special in itself.

Also I agree, naming things is hard (which is partly why it was uncanny that you ended up with the same name as Duke did).

@Jörg:

Strictly speaking Kestrel has been used (by Gilman, predictably enough) for a piece — just not in any games. It's the compound of (stepping) Falcon and Kite (the latter moving as falcon but replacing orthogonal steps with ‘nonstandard’ (i.e. √3) diagonal ones) according to M&B13.

Since any parents or children are listed on the page for a tag

Parents are listed, but at present children seem to be absent

I'm using Firefox 86.0.1 on an Artix Linux stratum on a desktop Bedrock Linux system (so effectively Arch Linux's FF); I have both uBlock Origin and uMatrix enabled with no exceptions set up for this site, but temporarily enabling an exception for the stuff that isn't in its dark red list (i.e. mostly ad servers ⁊c., so basically just enabling google fonts and paypal objects) doesn't make anything show up. Also I'm connecting over Tor, which sometimes affects things, though idþ that's given me any issues here before.

I checked the page source, and that doesn't include the string ‘grand’, so it's probably something serverside?

Ditto — thanks