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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> chess piece substitutions
        
(Message started by: KingElephant on Mar 25th, 2011, 5:24pm)
Title: chess piece substitutions
Post by KingElephant on Mar 25th, 2011, 5:24pm
When I play Arimaa with a chess set, I use the following meanings for the chess pieces:
King=Elephant
Queen=Camel
Knight=Horse
Rook=Dog
Bishop=Cat
Pawn=Rabbit
It has come to my attention that there are other substitutions.  I think the other substitutions are strange.  In the system I use, it seems logical to me that the knight should be the horse.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Eltripas on Mar 25th, 2011, 6:06pm
Fritz may disagree with this  ;)
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Fritzlein on Mar 25th, 2011, 7:24pm

on 03/25/11 at 18:06:07, Eltripas wrote:
Fritz may disagree with this  ;)

Oh, no, I think it quite logical that the knight be a horse.  Except then why should a rook be a dog and a bishop be a cat, instead of the other way around?  Because a rook is stronger than a bishop and a dog is stronger than a cat?  But a rook is stronger than a knight, so...

Anyway, there is no problem with everyone doing what seems most logical to themselves.  If there are ever any face-to-face Arimaa tournaments, they will be played on custom Arimaa sets anyway.  :)
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by qswanger on Mar 25th, 2011, 10:08pm
I think the best, most logical method for piece substitutions (which has been suggested here before), is to simply use the height of the chess pieces. Most chess sets have a height "hierarchy" of King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn which has nothing to do with actual chess piece strength, but rather (I think) with the popular aesthetics of having the pieces larger in the middle of the starting setup and then sloping downward as you go left and right toward the edge of the board. Just forget the chess strength and instead look at the height to see who beats who. Very clean. Therefore (note the quotes):
King = "Elephant"
Queen = "Camel"
Bishops = "Horses"
Knights = "Dogs"
Rooks = "Cats"
Pawns = "Rabbits"
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Eltripas on Mar 25th, 2011, 10:58pm
I'm sorry but in Spanish we call the knights "caballos" (horses), so it just seems dumb to use the horses as dogs and the bishops as horses when we can use the horses as horses.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by UruramTururam on Mar 26th, 2011, 9:50am
There's quite similar situation in Polish. "Knight" oficially is "skoczek" (jumper), but in a popular speech is often called "konik" (little horse) so this substitution is obvious.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by megajester on Mar 26th, 2011, 4:21pm
In Turkish you have the added complication that bishops are called elephants (I know this is the case for Arabic too). So when teaching the game to Turks with a chess set I tend to use the chess names for the pieces at first. Otherwise you just make the game sound complicated before you've shown them anything. I just ask them which they usually view as superior, the rook, the knight ("horse") or the bishop, and go from there. I leave explaining the official names until afterwards.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by qswanger on Mar 26th, 2011, 4:39pm

on 03/25/11 at 22:58:25, Eltripas wrote:
I'm sorry but in Spanish we call the knights "caballos" (horses), so it just seems dumb to use the horses as dogs and the bishops as horses when we can use the horses as horses.


I don't think it is dumb to simply ignore the Arimaa convention/theme of animals. Fuhgettaboutit! Think more abstractly. If you're using chess pieces, what does it matter about the Arimaa animals? Height makes the most sense for determining the Arimaa piece hierarchy.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Eltripas on Mar 26th, 2011, 5:01pm
I can't simply forget about them when we are always talking about horse hostage, horse frames, elephant-horse attacks, etc...

While I agree that it may be a good idea to use your substitution to teach someone Arimaa, when playing against other players who learnt the game with the animal pieces I is more reasonable to use the horse as a horse.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Hippo on Mar 26th, 2011, 5:07pm

on 03/26/11 at 16:39:49, qswanger wrote:
I don't think it is dumb to simply ignore the Arimaa convention/theme of animals. Fuhgettaboutit! Think more abstractly. If you're using chess pieces, what does it matter about the Arimaa animals? Height makes the most sense for determining the Arimaa piece hierarchy.


Yes, I agree, the name of the piece is important only in communication (and notation). While playing only the relative strength is important. And the height/weight represents it well.

So when playing without need of writing down the moves the shape is not that much important.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Arimabuff on Mar 27th, 2011, 9:46am

on 03/25/11 at 22:58:25, Eltripas wrote:
I'm sorry but in Spanish we call the knights "caballos" (horses), so it just seems dumb to use the horses as dogs and the bishops as horses when we can use the horses as horses.

In French the Bishop is called "fou" a mad man (maybe because it zigzags) so it makes more sense for it to be a dog as in mad dog than a cat. I've never heard of a mad cat... In Polish the Bishop is called "a runner" so it could be a greyhound or a horse or maybe a cat on steroids...
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Arimabuff on Mar 27th, 2011, 9:53am

on 03/26/11 at 16:39:49, qswanger wrote:
I don't think it is dumb to simply ignore the Arimaa convention/theme of animals. Fuhgettaboutit! Think more abstractly. If you're using chess pieces, what does it matter about the Arimaa animals? Height makes the most sense for determining the Arimaa piece hierarchy.

Or we can use the strength in Chess, A Rook is the strongest of the twin pieces and then comes the Bishop slightly stronger than the Knight according to the Grand Masters.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by megajester on Mar 27th, 2011, 11:46am

on 03/27/11 at 09:53:40, Arimabuff wrote:
Or we can use the strength in Chess, A Rook is the strongest of the twin pieces and then comes the Bishop slightly stronger than the Knight according to the Grand Masters.

I personally prefer this system, but it doesn't make sense for people who don't play much chess. Whichever system you pick you get used to it fairly quickly, so I think height is the easiest system if you're trying to teach a group of people.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Fritzlein on Mar 27th, 2011, 12:41pm

on 03/27/11 at 11:46:39, megajester wrote:
I personally prefer this system, but it doesn't make sense for people who don't play much chess. Whichever system you pick you get used to it fairly quickly, so I think height is the easiest system if you're trying to teach a group of people.

Yes, I imagine it depends on who you are teaching.  All that matters is relative strength, but chess players have a fixed notion of relative strength, so for them it is easiest to use king>queen>rook>bishop>knight>pawn.  But for non-chess-players, it is silly to first teach the relative strength of chess pieces; height is an easy substitute.

I don't find it at all useful to teach the correspondence of king to elephant, queen to camel, etc.  Why does anyone learning Arimaa on a chess set need to know what the animals are on an Arimaa set?  When I taught hull how to play, he was perfectly clear on what could push what without having any idea which piece would be a dog if he played on-line.  I admit that I sometimes slipped and called the pawns rabbits, etc., but my intention was not to add an extra layer of terminology that would make learning the rules more confusing.

If you are teaching Arimaa on a chess board to someone who has never encountered the game before, and your primary concern is to make it easy for him to learn (as opposed to making it convenient for you to teach), then try to get the mapping of pieces out of your head.  Don't call the bishop a dog (or whatever); call it a bishop.  Say, "The bishop can push the rook", or, "The rook can push the bishop", depending on which ordering of pieces you have chosen.  If you point at a bishop and a rook and say, "The dog can push the cat," of course you are going to confuse your audience.  You are forcing them to learn two new meanings that are unnecessary to the task at hand.

Arimaa is an abstract game.  Try to abstract the rules in your own mind enough to make teaching it less confusing for the person who is learning.  The relative strength of the pieces is all that matters.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by Arimabuff on Mar 28th, 2011, 2:15am

on 03/27/11 at 12:41:25, Fritzlein wrote:
Yes, I imagine it depends on who you are teaching.  All that matters is relative strength, but chess players have a fixed notion of relative strength, so for them it is easiest to use king>queen>rook>bishop>knight>pawn.  But for non-chess-players, it is silly to first teach the relative strength of chess pieces; height is an easy substitute.

I don't find it at all useful to teach the correspondence of king to elephant, queen to camel, etc.  Why does anyone learning Arimaa on a chess set need to know what the animals are on an Arimaa set?  When I taught hull how to play, he was perfectly clear on what could push what without having any idea which piece would be a dog if he played on-line.  I admit that I sometimes slipped and called the pawns rabbits, etc., but my intention was not to add an extra layer of terminology that would make learning the rules more confusing.

If you are teaching Arimaa on a chess board to someone who has never encountered the game before, and your primary concern is to make it easy for him to learn (as opposed to making it convenient for you to teach), then try to get the mapping of pieces out of your head.  Don't call the bishop a dog (or whatever); call it a bishop.  Say, "The bishop can push the rook", or, "The rook can push the bishop", depending on which ordering of pieces you have chosen.  If you point at a bishop and a rook and say, "The dog can push the cat," of course you are going to confuse your audience.  You are forcing them to learn two new meanings that are unnecessary to the task at hand.

Arimaa is an abstract game.  Try to abstract the rules in your own mind enough to make teaching it less confusing for the person who is learning.  The relative strength of the pieces is all that matters.

I am not sure about that, it's a well known fact that habits are hard to break, for instance when you learn a wrong grip  at ping pong, you can become a fairly strong player using that grip and then you can't evolve any further because of its flaws... Same thing here, its better to learn Arimaa the way "god intended" in a manner of speaking than to learn it with in mind the pieces of Chess, IOW if I were to teach Arimaa to someone, I would call the pieces elephant, camel etc... despite the fact that we would be playing with a Chess set.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by megajester on Mar 28th, 2011, 5:25am
If the person I'm teaching is really enthusiastic then yeah, I'll start by giving the piece names from the beginning. But if they're already looking at me funny because I'm talking about trap squares, pushing and pulling and stuff, I'll leave it until after they're sold on the game.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by seveer on Nov 26th, 2014, 10:56am
I just discovered this game and I am brand new here. Hello everyone!

I'm a little bit obsessive about details such as this, so I am loathe to begin playing this game over the board without determining once and for all what seems to be absolutely the most logical system of substitution of chess pieces for Arimaa. I am a math student so please excuse my fastidiousness and formality. I also have barely even played Arimaa, so I could be completely wrong about some things. I am really curious to find out what some of you think about the following.

A few observations:

First of all, let's acknowledge that when we talk about "chess sets" we are typically talking about staunton chess sets. There are no doubt thousands of representations of the abstract notion of chess pieces featuring animals, civil war heroes, etc.  The choice of how to allocate these to another abstract game is obviously of importance only to the minority of those who use them. The fact that Arimaa uses substitution at all is purely pragmatic--there are millions of staunton chess sets in the world. The reason staunton invented his particular shapes was precisely to standardize play so that everyone would eventually be able to sit down and know precisely what was what. Note that the primary method adopted to accomplish this was SHAPE, not height.  

Now, given the nascent character of Arimaa, if we want to promote its play it seems to me we should adopt the easiest and most orderly transition. Those who are interested in Arimaa, if they play any other games, are likely to play chess, and likely to own a staunton chess set. Furthermore, even if they would like to own an Arimaa set and have the money, their options are vanishingly small. These sets are simply not produced in any variety at any scale.  The mass produced set from z-man is much smaller than a tournament chess set and... well thats about it, as far as widely available sets. It seems to me that the expectation of the use of a staunton chess set, even in club play, should be taken more or less as default.

For those who would prefer to simply use a completely abstract notion like height or volume, I am not against this, but the entire community, rules, and notation seem to revolve around the animal notion. To me, a truly rich game includes the possibility of speaking intelligibly about it to others and, ideally, notating and preserving each game so we can learn from it. A height based system could work, but we should want to propagate a completely abstract notation (Pieces=ABCDE..) rather than name-based notation; we would also want our set to consist of cylinders distinguished only by height and color. This seems unlikely and rather drab anyway.

With this in mind, the seemingly "official" substitution doesn't make much sense to me for the following reasons:

If it is based on the height of the pieces it is rather dubious since even among staunton and staunton-derived sets height is highly variable. I have a set where the rooks are taller than the knight. I have a set where everything is the same height except the king and queen. "Big knight" sets are very, very common, where the knight is larger than the bishop. But anyone can still sit at these sets and tell precisely which piece is which. Because staunton sets are based on SHAPE.

There is obvious dissonance having a piece that unambiguously depicts a horse NOT be a horse.   Whatever subjective statements we make about the other pieces, having a horse-that-is-not-a-horse is an absurdity on the order of Magritte's surrealism. "Move the horse, Tommy. No, not the horse, the horse! Tommy! Move the horse!" This seems to me to border on child abuse.

All this said, this is the (largely subjective)setup that seems to make sense to me:

Elephant=King
Camel=Queen
Horse=Knight
Dog=Bishop
Cat=Rook
Rabbit=Pawn

The king and queen seem to be agreed upon by everyone and I think they are as logical as anything else.
Horse as knight is obvious and explained above. Why is the bishop the dog? It seems rather intuitive to me that the bishop (especially when it includes the mitre-like "slit" in most staunton sets which resembles a dog's open mouth) looks quite like a dog "howling at the moon" as they say. The top looks like an upturned snout, there is even a ball at the top like dog noses are often depicted in cartoons. The pawns are rabbits out of numerical necessity. This leaves only one possibility for the cat. To me, Rook=Cat is actually quite satisfactory since the rook represents a tall structure, even sort of looks like a tree trunk, and cats are arboreal (climbing) animals.

Anyhow, these are my thoughts, currently. I would really like to hear what others think.

Thanks!

-seveer
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by arimaa_master on Nov 27th, 2014, 6:49am

on 11/26/14 at 10:56:37, seveer wrote:
Elephant=King
Camel=Queen
Horse=Knight
Dog=Bishop
Cat=Rook
Rabbit=Pawn



-seveer


Hello and welcome to the community.
I believe that chess/arimaa substitution was made upon pieces strength (value) rather than piece appearance.

Thus Horse = Rook (Two horses are to Camel like two rooks to Queen). Then, Dog = bishop and Cat = horse (here is little inaccuracy because usually bishop is considered slightly stronger than horse (but in fact almost at the same strength) unlike Dog vs Cat where dog is clearly superior to cat.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by browni3141 on Nov 27th, 2014, 12:01pm

on 11/27/14 at 06:49:52, arimaa_master wrote:
Hello and welcome to the community.
I believe that chess/arimaa substitution was made upon pieces strength (value) rather than piece appearance.

Thus Horse = Rook (Two horses are to Camel like two rooks to Queen). Then, Dog = bishop and Cat = horse (here is little inaccuracy because usually bishop is considered slightly stronger than horse (but in fact almost at the same strength) unlike Dog vs Cat where dog is clearly superior to cat.

You must be talking about the suggestion on this page? http://arimaa.com/arimaa/learn/rulesIntro.html
I don't like this mapping, because pieces are mapped based on an abstraction. I like both mappings that are based on physical characteristics of standard sets better.

seveer:

Quote:
If it is based on the height of the pieces it is rather dubious since even among staunton and staunton-derived sets height is highly variable. I have a set where the rooks are taller than the knight. I have a set where everything is the same height except the king and queen. "Big knight" sets are very, very common, where the knight is larger than the bishop. But anyone can still sit at these sets and tell precisely which piece is which. Because staunton sets are based on SHAPE.


I had thought that the piece heights were fairly standard, but depending on the commonness of variations you mention, I'm not sure if it is a good mapping. If the piece heights talked about in this thread are common enough, I still really like the mapping. I'm not sure how common I want it to be though.

I like the idea of mapping based on shape because it is based on a physical property, not an additional abstraction. I don't really like that chess pieces don't look very much like the animals used in Arimaa, making the choices fairly subjective other than horse=knight.


Quote:
we would also want our set to consist of cylinders distinguished only by height and color. This seems unlikely and rather drab anyway.

I like the idea of playing Arimaa with cylinders of varied height. I think I might make a set.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by ikalyoncu on Dec 10th, 2014, 12:48am
As some of you already mentioned, the game of Arimaa is abstract and what matters is the relative strength of pieces. So, I think the best way to represent Arimaa pieces is to use numbers, 6 being an elephant and 1 being a rabbit.

I remember it was a bit difficult for me when I first started playing Arimaa, due to that pieces look quite alike (at least to a beginner's eyes). Of course, as you play more and more your brain calibrates itself and you start to see the board more clearly.

Yet, why bother with this calibration process? Everyone's brain is already calibrated to quickly and clearly asses the interactions between 2's and 4's and 5's instead of cats, horses and camels. I really would love to play with such a board if it were developed.
Title: Re: chess piece substitutions
Post by half_integer on Dec 10th, 2014, 9:02pm
And for the computer geeks among us, we can label the pieces as powers of two: 2 through 64.

Which is one of the representations in my bot anyway.


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