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Topic: Arimaa fonts (Read 1407 times) |
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TheVinenator
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Arimaa player #6821
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Arimaa fonts
« on: Oct 18th, 2011, 11:38am » |
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hi,
are there any fonts available to print board positions such as those used in the research papers ?
i want to create a document with boards and having a font of some sort would be great.
thanks
vince
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #1 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 11:56am » |
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Here is what I used for my book:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/fig/
The disadvantage is that you can't edit positions once they have been created, but still it is nice tool for black-and-white documents. The colored boards with 3D pieces simply don't print well if you need to make them small and/or colorless.
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TheVinenator
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #2 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 12:09pm » |
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thanks, that is a start.
um, what is KJ layout?
and this begs the obvious question....how about FEN for Arimaa !!!
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #3 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 1:11pm » |
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KJ = Karl Juhnke = Fritzlein = me
When I started writing my book, I didn't know what I was going to do for my diagrams, so as a placeholder I used text diagrams like this:
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
8 | r | | | m | | | | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
7 | r | R | c | D | | d | r | r |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
6 | | | * | c | r | R | R | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
5 | h | r | | | | | d | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
4 | e | E | r | | | | | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
3 | H | | * | | M | * | R | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
2 | | R | R | | H | h | R | r |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
1 | | | C | C | | D | | R |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
a b c d e f g h
When Omar made his figure tool for me to use, he kindly made it backwards compatible to my text diagrams.
I agree with you about FEN; I advocate it in the notation appendix of my book.
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TheVinenator
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #4 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 1:22pm » |
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ya, i saw your mention to FEN when i read your book.
perhaps as a way to promote it, ask Omar to add FEN to the fig utility. perhaps it will catch on.
since we have a dialog, i would like to ask you a question about your book. i enjoyed it a lot. i liked the a and b sub-chapters with some back story...i tended to read the b. parts first. ya, there is a "but" coming...
what prompted you to use your own notation for denoting moves rather than the accepted Ea2, etc. notation? i found it very distracting actually. as a new person to the game, seeing "official" move designations in your book would reinforce the memory process of that aspect of the game. perhaps when you do a second addition...
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #5 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 3:30pm » |
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on Oct 18th, 2011, 1:22pm, TheVinenator wrote:| what prompted you to use your own notation for denoting moves rather than the accepted Ea2, etc. notation? |
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That decision was part of a larger discussion. We noticed that when people were discussing games in the chat room, they seldom used "accepted" notation. Perhaps from natural human laziness, people would rather write moves like E->d5 rather than Ee2n Ee3n Ee4n Ee5w.
It seemed clear to me that Omar's notation with twenty characters per turn (twenty-five if there is a capture) was chosen for convenience of rendering steps in the client, but was more verbose than anyone was actually willing to use in practice. Omar himself encouraged me to use a more compact notation. There was much discussion on how to express moves in a format that is unambiguous, succinct, easy to read, and easy to write.
The trouble with standards, however, is that everyone has one. After I had changed my entire text to use the notation that you read, Omar changed his mind and decided that he preferred a different compact standard. He asked me to change all the notation in my book again, but I refused, because I had already put in the work to change it once, and because it wasn't clear to me that his new compact standard would be better than my compact standard.
Unfortunately, my book has done nothing to standardize a more compact notation, but still long form (which is the closest thing to a standard we have) is seldom typed by hand by anyone. When it is used, it is usually cut from machine output or pasted into machine input. In chat everyone still uses their own way of describing moves. For example, look at the archive from October 9, when the last Arimaa World League game was being played. Some examples:
knak: flip C to D5?
lostcalpolydude: now M d7
novacat: 43s dog to g3?
Hippo: r g5 e d5 C d6
In several of these I have replaced the chatroom piece font with a letter. I think it is cool that the animal images are actually used for live chat. But in the whole game's discussion, long notation was only used once:
lostcalpolydude: mg6s rf6e ef5n mg5w
So let me now deflect your question from myself to the Arimaa community as a whole. Go into the chat room when a game is under discussion, and ask everyone there why they are failing to use the standard notation. Or better yet, try to carry on a conversation about an Arimaa position yourself where you type out every move fully. 
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Hippo
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Re: Arimaa fonts
« Reply #6 on: Oct 18th, 2011, 3:57pm » |
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I use chess like notation as I am turn based rather than step based  .
R5c3x is sufficient for describing killing flip of the c5 Rabbit. The piece performing flip is not important (of course ther move should be legal).
Official notation is good for checking the turn based notation can be legally played.
I often write just Hb3 (in discussion) not describing where to push the dog which was on b3. This is because Hb3 is the most important part of the move and I am still thinking about the resulting position ... if I had to specify exact turn, I should exactly describe which piece moved where. So having several pieces of given kind able to rich destination square, I must identify the piece more.
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