Thursday, November 23, 2017

[ljboaidm] Quadrant Cartesian notation

Consider a chess notation which describes a location of a square on the chessboard first by (somehow) specifying a quadrant, then specifying a location within the quadrant with coordinates using the corner of the containing quadrant as the origin.

The quadrants could be named White's Kingside, White's Queenside, Black's Kingside, Black's Queenside.

Then, four corner squares are named wka1, wqa1, bka1, bqa1.  All corner squares have "a1" as a suffix.

There is a little bit of awkwardness where b stands both for Black and the B files.

One can then say things like, it is a bad idea to put a knight on a1; it can easily get trapped there.  Or, talk about endgame technique involving a passed pawn on the a file.

This notation captures the symmetry of the chess board, at the expenses of being less compact.  But more verbosity is useful for pedagogy.

One could introduce an abbreviation in which if a location is on the same side of the board as the player to move, then the color of the quadrant can be omitted.  A symmetric c pawn opening (1. c4 c5 algebraically) might then be notated 1. qc4 qc4.  This resembles the symmetry of descriptive notation 1. P-QB4 P-QB4.

Add an additional symbol o meaning "opponent's color" or "opponent's half of the board".  A classic back rank checkmate on the king file would be Rokd1# ("Rook to opponent's kingside d1, checkmate").

Saying "advance your pawn to the opponent's 1st rank" is just as straightforward as "to your 8th rank" (and certainly less wordy than "to the 8th rank for white or to the 1st rank for black" strictly following algebraic notation).  Avoiding rank numbers outside the quadrant allows easily extending the notation to larger boards.  The "opponent's 1st rank" always means the promotion zone, whereas it might be the 8th 9th or 10th rank depending on the board size in algebraic notation.

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