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Topic: chess piece substitutions (Read 5258 times) |
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megajester
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Istanbul, Turkey
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #15 on: Mar 28th, 2011, 5:25am » |
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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.
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seveer
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Arimaa player #10058
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #16 on: Nov 26th, 2014, 10:56am » |
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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
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arimaa_master
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #2010
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #17 on: Nov 27th, 2014, 6:49am » |
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on Nov 26th, 2014, 10:56am, seveer wrote:
Elephant=King
Camel=Queen
Horse=Knight
Dog=Bishop
Cat=Rook
Rabbit=Pawn
-seveer
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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.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 27th, 2014, 6:51am by arimaa_master » |
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browni3141
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Arimaa player #7014
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #18 on: Nov 27th, 2014, 12:01pm » |
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on Nov 27th, 2014, 6:49am, 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.
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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. |
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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. |
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I like the idea of playing Arimaa with cylinders of varied height. I think I might make a set.
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ikalyoncu
Forum Full Member
Arimaa player #9215
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #19 on: Dec 10th, 2014, 12:48am » |
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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.
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half_integer
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #8819
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Re: chess piece substitutions
« Reply #20 on: Dec 10th, 2014, 9:02pm » |
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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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