On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:58:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
wrote, in part:
On Apr 16, 4:48 pm, Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ wrote:
The question of *meaningful* differences is more
interesting. I don't see any meaningful difference
between playing on an 8x1000 board and playing on an
8x1002 board. But the loss of meaningfulness is
gradual; where exactly does it reach zero?
But what about the variant on an 8 x 3,698,201,443,...,828,216 board,
where the ... stands for a number of digits which, if printed in 4
point type, in the pages of a thick telephone directory, would require
enough of those volumes to cover Manhattan Island to a height of one
mile?
The number of practical variants of chess that real humans can play is
strictly finite - yet people keep coming up with unexpected new ideas
for variants.
Here is a more practical variant of Chess which belongs to a class of
variants with a very large number of members.
(Best seen with fixed-pitch font.)
R Q K R
B N N B
P P P P
P P P P
R P - . - . P R
N P . - . - P N
B P - . - . P B
K P . - . - P K
Q P - . - . P Q
B P . - . - P B
N P - . - . P N
R P . - . - P R
P P P P
P P P P
B N N B
R Q K R
The two players have their narrow arrays at the top and bottom of the
board. The pieces in arrays on the side of the board may not be captured
by either of the two players, but they can capture the players' pieces.
These pieces move once after every three ply. That is, the sequence
of moves is:
White, Black, White, Left Pieces, Black, White, Black, Right Pieces
The left pieces, as White, and the black pieces, as Black, when they
move simply replay the moves of the Immortal Game between Anderssen and
Kieseritzky.
If one's piece happens to be standing on a square which was empty in the
game to which a piece moves, then it is captured.
Replace the Immortal by the Evergreen, and you get another variant.
So here is a very practical chess variant belonging to a very large
class of chess variants - as many variants of chess as there are *games*
of chess!
John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html