Dragon Alf by ~Freideugoi on deviantART

I do hereby decree that Kanye West interruption icons are officially Old Meme.

Thanksgiving is over, so the Christmas season has semi-officially begun. Time to break out the Christmas avatars and the Pac-Man Christmas Album!

Got to thinking about chess variants lately. Specifically, spicing up pawn promotions.

In standard chess, technically a pawn that reaches the back row can promote to any first-rank piece other than the king. In practice, it almost always promotes to a queen, and only very very rarely to a knight. There's no point in promoting to rook or bishop, since the queen contains the moves for both. The choice of promotion would be more interesting if the pawn could promote to any compound of simple first-rank pieces: the queen (bishop+rook), archbishop (bishop+knight), or marshall (rook+knight). Possibly other pieces of similar strength as well.

The idea of allowing pawn promotion to fairy chess pieces not found in the starting array is not new. My idea is for the promotion to be undeclared, and revealed by how the piece is moved. There would therefore be an element of deduction on the part of the opposing player. For example, if the promoted pawn slides orthagonally, the player knows that it has a rook component (a queen or marshall); if it later makes a knight's move, it must be a marshall.

A bit like a particle in quantum mechanics, its move only "collapses" into something definite as it is observed. Until the player commits to a specific move, it could be anything. In other words, the player doesn't have to decide on a promotion as soon as the pawn reaches the back row, but fixes components as he goes. If only one component has been used (for example, an orthagonal move meaning the piece is part rook), the player can still keep his options open and decide whether it's also part knight or part bishop later.

We can say that a pawn that has reached the 8th rank but has not moved yet is unexposed: its nature is not known. One that has made only one type of move is partly exposed. One that has made two types of moves is fully exposed: its move possibilities are fixed, and it is effectively

The problem here is that a pawn that is not yet fully exposed is immensely powerful. If it is unexposed, it threatens all of the squares for any of its potential moves (since it's free to choose any of those moves as a component). If partly exposed, it still threatens all squares for all possible components, because it is still indeterminate between the two unknown components. This is way too powerful, effectively an amazon (rook+bishop+knight): the game Maharajah and the Sepoys pits a single royal (kinglike: unable to move into threatened squares, game lost if it cannot escape capture) amazon on one side against an entire chess army on the other, and the full army only barely outclasses it. To fix this, we can rule that squares are only threatened if the player reveals that they are on his turn (explicit), or they are threatened by a move that has already been exposed (implicit). If the space is not threatened (explicitly or implicitly), the promoted pawn is not allowed to capture a piece that moves there on the next turn (although it may fix a component later that would have allowed it to make that capture if it had been set beforehand).

This rule could also be limited to determining threatened squares only for purposes of giving check (since a king is not allowed to move into check).

Let's add another possible promotion to the mix. A piece with the king's move (minus royal restrictions and castling) is called a "mann", and is a valid basic piece that could be used as a component. The combination of a mann and knight is called a centaur, and while it is short-range and seems weak, it is actually a pretty strong piece in the same range as the previously mentioned compounds (and maybe a bit stronger than the bishop+knight). Mann+bishop and mann+rook can be safely ignored; while perfectly valid pieces in their own right, they are both subsets of the queen and therefore redundant in this case.

The addition of this piece causes some interesting complications. A single-space move, orthagonal or diagonal, no longer unambiguously reveals a full component (a knightwise move still reveals a knight component on its own). A piece that has made a knight's move and a single-space orthagonal move may be a marshall or a centaur (if it also makes a single-space diagonal move, though, it's clearly a centaur; if it slides more than one space orthagonally, it's clearly a marshall). A piece that has made a single-space diagonal move and a knightwise move could be archbishop or centaur. One that has moved only like a king may be queen or centaur.

Now another type of piece: the bent riders gryphon and aanca. Technically these aren't compound pieces at all: a gryphon moves one space diagonally followed by sliding at least one orthagonally away from the starting space; the aanca swaps these (one orthagonal, multiple diagonal). However, I believe they around the same range of strength, especially in the endgame when the board is relatively cleared out. They also make deductions more complicated, because they include the knight's move, but not exactly. Unlike a knightwise jump, they can be blocked: a gryphon on a diagonally adjacent square, the aanca on an orthagonally adjacent square. An unimpeded knight's move could be any piece but a queen, but if there was a piece in the way, the possibilities narrow.

While it seems like this element of uncertainty would be a sort of "wild card", the game is still actually deterministic. It may not seem so, but it is still a complete information game: the possible moves of every piece are known to both players.

Another way of achieving a "black box" effect of pawn promotions would be for a player who promotes a pawn to determine at the time of promotion which piece it now is, note it down, and hold to that decision. Under this rule, there would be no "declared threat": if the piece can capture with one of its moves, it can, and if the opposing player moves his king to a threatened square, he must be told that he has moved into check and allowed to take back the move. While this is probably easier to understand, it actually does add an incomplete information aspect to the game, and would play very differently. Call this one "Clue Chess".

I'm pretty proud of how they turned out this year. The one on the left is my dad's, and the one on the right is mine. Dad was working around several bite marks made by (we think) squirrels, while the mouth of mine started with a gouge I made accidentally when I was gutting it. Mine was going to be a triclops, but the middle eye wasn't centered enough and I decided I liked the lopsided face more.



There were a lot more trick-or-treaters coming by this year than there have been in recent years, which was nice.

I finished off the night watching the MST3k of the classic crapfest Robot Monster, a movie so cheap that they couldn't afford a robot costume, so they used a borrowed gorilla suit with a helmet instead. Season One of MST3k was...odd. Not a big fan of Josh Weinstein. Larry, the second mad scientist, wasn't that funny (replacing him with TV's Frank was a good move, because the boss/lackey dynamic had more comedic potential) and I prefer Kevin Murphy's sarcastic, slightly fabulous version of Tom Servo to Weinstein's deadpan one. They were still definitely working out the kinks: they wasted pretty much the entire opening credits sequence to the Commando Cody episodes that preceded the film proper with unfunny variations on "not another one" and "wow, this is bad", and in general there weren't really enough quips. The show really hit its stride in Season Two; two of my all-time favorites are from that season (First Spaceship on Venus "Secretly, we've replaced their planet with Folger's Crystals" and Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster "Kabob, and Ka-Steve!").

Facebook and Mozilla apparently don't get along. I can't post status updates from my home computer. If I click on the "What's on your mind?" box, it goes blank, changes size a little bit, and doesn't accept any input. If I type anything, the browser thinks I'm trying to do a find-in-page, because it doesn't recognize that box as an object that takes focus.

Why in the everloving fuck do so many sites insist on rolling their own text input widgets? They're inevitably slower than normal ones (Last.FM really took the cake here for a while, with a text widget that would make a network call for every letter typed just so it could display a little "376/500 characters" thing) and usually glitchy. The vanilla text boxes work fine! Use them!

The threads in the support forums indicate that this problem has been around for the last couple of months, and are full of people saying that they've gotten no response from tech support.

I finally got badgered into getting a Facebook profile.

I have no idea what I intend to do with it, and it'll probably go the way of my MySpace page (which I check about once a year, when I remember it exists). But still, yep, there it is.

Still haven't had time to put together a real comprehensive post on my trip, but to tide you all over here's a couple of videos of me at the tournament:

My match from the men's team randori event:


The freestyle kata I did with Ash:


I don't think there's any video of my individual randori match, or my koryu dai san suwari waza with Aaron from the kongodantaisen.

日本語で：　これはBKのMSウィンドーズ７ワーパーです。七百七十七円ハンバーガーです。パッティーが七枚あります。日本だけで七日だけで売り物です。こわいですね？

英語で：　This is Burger King's MS Windows 7 Whopper. It's a ¥777 hamburger. It has 7 patties. It's for sale only in Japan for 7 days. Scary, huh?

This is what happens when shepherds get really bored

Safe for work. Honest.

Happy birthday, Maggie!

Captain Lou Albano, dead of natural causes at 76.

To soothe the pain of his loss, here's a few videos to remember him by.

...I just got Rickrolled by Mystery Science Theater.

The Muppet Show season 2 for my birthday.

HELL YES. Also: Logicomics, a graphic novel biography of Bertrand Russell, which looks interesting.

And a tie. I guess I am getting old.

30.

And I really feel like watching some MST3k, but I won't have any time until the weekend. :(

In case anyone's wondering why I haven't posted about my trip yet, it's because about half of my photos are on a laptop that is still currently in Japan, travelling with a friend. I'd maxed out my memory card (due to shooting video of matches, which I may be able to YouTubify later) about halfway through and needed to make room. He'll be back next week, I think, though I may not be able to meet up with him until the following weekend.

In the meantime, if you hear any rumors about me at the tournament afterparty, they are scandalous lies.

This game has to be seen to be disbelieved. Metal Wolf Chaos, the heartwarming story of a President of the United States and his trustworthy mecha. Think Air Force One in mecha anime form, but with dialogue ten times worse.



And speaking of SIPPING some DELICIOUS DARJEELING TEA, behold the Chap Olympics, a sporting meet for "traditional gentlemen who are against the vulgarity of modern culture", including events such as the Three-Trousered Limbo, Pipe Relay, and a competition to mix a dry martini (without the aid of a butler).

I lost all of my matches, ate some good food and some terrible food, drank way too much beer, saw Nijo castle and the Heian Imperial Palace as well as several temples and shrines, and generally had a blast. I will be back.

More substantive posts (with photos!) to come.

Now, to bed. It's good to be home.