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zz38:

Yes, the function notation seems appropriate. This webpage, written some
years ago, was just a draft start for a more formal discussion on how to
make a mutator-oriented language for game specification. I didn't make
much progress in this sense. It seems, at least for me, a hard subject,
since there are so many different rules and ideas that games possess.

Doug:

Probably the only atomic mutator is [Void], ie, an empty canvas where you
start the composition of mutator to make games. Eventually, it would be
nice to have Macros, like [FIDE chess] or [Go] where the programmer could
easily build up new variants.

Welcome back Joao!

On mutators, the way I look at it is that a game consists three things: A board along with its topology, A set of pieces along with their movements, and a set of mutators defining various aspects of the game not covered by previous two.

May I offer up this page as a way to break out chess into its elements, to be able to see where you would classify mutators:
http://abstractgamers.org/wiki/definitions-of-abstracts

Hi Ji!

I'm not sure if we would like to see the board as a separate entity from
the game pieces. It must be thought over. A board can be seen as a set or
lattice of special pieces, that for most games are idle, neutral and
non-interactive, but in some games they interact. Some games allow players
to move cell boards, or cells can be removed (like in Zertz), or cells act
over pieces (like games with different terrains)...

Hi Richard.

Thanks for that taxonomic work. The harder part is too make those concepts glue together. How to translate those ideas into types and how to compose those types into a game.

Let's see if these mutators could be made with Haskell programming language, somehow; and/or just some general way in some mathematical category of CV mutators made up for this purpose (and you can see what are functors, monads, comonads, etc applying to).

In both cases, and in the mathematics in general, the NIL (identity) mutator should in fact be called the mutator, and it may form a monoid (if some mutators may make the game that some other mutators are not applicable to, though, then it may form a category but not a monoid).

If it is a category as above, and the objects describe features which are compatible with certain mutators, there might be an endofunctor to specify what applies to others too, and it might be a monad too (if it can be lifted into the set of additional features while keeping the same game, for example). In such case possibly even the games becoming mutators, being a morphism from a "null object" (meaning no features apply, so you have no game at all), to the object of their features.

I think the mutators could be separated into "game mutators" and "piece mutators." The latter would (or could) include Swap, Atomic, Nuclear, Inertial, Momentum, Protean, Morph, Magnetic; Ko and Must-Capture (and possibly the other move/capture rules) could be in both sets. (I probably missed a couple, at that.)

Just a thought.

I looked at this article briefly, and perhaps I have been using 'mutator' incorrectly at times, in previous posts. That is to say, I had certain CVs of mine where I simply proposed to swap only [one or] two pieces in the setup for another kind of piece (e.g. frogs for FADs in the setup of a CV I had already published), and I wrote it was a mutator. Without looking carefully, or checking for more recent usages/updates of the term 'mutator', on CVP site, I don't know for sure if my usage of the term was incorrect.

The way I'm reading the article, you used "Mutator" correctly, but not "Swap." The latter term refers to a piece's ability to trade places with another friendluy piece, such as with udQ. I don't think the article identifies replacing a piece with a different piece from the start.

Swap was an unfortunate choice of word on my part, given it appears in the article - so yes, I did mean 'replace'.