George Duke wrote on Wed, Dec 15, 2010 04:52 PM UTC:
It's true what Shi Ji implies, that Cavebear, http://www.chessvariants.org/other.dir/abc-chess.html, should have cited Betza and Cohen's old Tutti-Frutti. Tutti-Frutti uses Cavebear's ABC template after all, and what Shi Ji says there, the Tutti-Frutti piece-types are too stong,
http://chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=26869. So Cavebear's would be a stand-alone improvement not to mention apt generalization. The first response was: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=26870. Two more points follow.
(1) Even editors and other general prolificists get into the fashion of dismissing earlier 'identicals' saying things like ''I wasn't aware of that so it is not relevant to my 'new new new CV'.'' Crazy. Jejune. But hey the enthusiasm is there for the cover page's ''something different for a change.'' They of CVPage got that all right and then some. This case, if Tutti-Frutti had been called to Cavebear Stroud's attention earlier, he may well have had edited-in the prior art precedent, but Cavebear hasn't been around recently.
(2) Also relevant is that Betza for Different Armies, originally called then unequal armies, invented more or less simultaneously with Tutti-Frutti late 1970s -- with new armies added steadily til his departure in 2003 -- did not design this efficient way. Betza did define atoms in A,F,W,D and N, but those extreme elementals are too weak to total the wanted 39/31 points. Different Armies are still being put up occasionally such as this year's Spartan Army. Would not the best way to generate Different Army after Different Army be exactly the algorithmic A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, ABC way of instructor Cavebear pure and simple?
Http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=16808,
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=25640.