Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck"

On Apr 3, 5:19 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/>
wrote:
> Quadibloc wrote:
> >Regular chess is not all things to all people. It doesn't provide
> >cheerleaders!
>
> You want me to put on a cheerleader outfit and fix that deficiency?  :)
>
> Move to the left! Move to the Right! Castle, Castle, Fight Fight Fight!

I know that the original poster is a little bit confrontational, but
not, I think to an extreme degree; in other newsgroups, I've
encountered much more contentious people with various strange theories
of mathematics or cryptography or astronomy.

I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to
address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan,
and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're
not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the
issue of the popularity of Chess.

You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you
do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. That is where
the limit to the popularity of Chess comes from, and a change to the
rules to fix that would only destroy Chess! (Smess, anyone?)

I would love for our society to become more intellectually-oriented.
Perhaps someday DNA therapy will raise the average level of
intelligence to that of a genius. But that is in the far future.

Even Fischerrandom chess makes a mess of the opening layout, and
prescribed openings, as they use in checkers, would seem antithetical
to the spirit of Chess. This is why I thought that I would propose a
different kind of randomized variant - add extra pieces with new
powers to the layout, but choose them at random from a list! I thought
that this was at least a somewhat novel idea - and it would be the
least uncomfortable for people used to conventional Chess as a way to
shake up the opening.

But I have no illusions, unlike our original poster, that this will
save the world or even boost the popularity of Chess. I just wish to
offer an alternative that might be less uncomfortable than some of the
others proposed, as a way to have a kind of Chess without a large body
of opening theory, should that be desired.

Making sure to steer clear of Gothic Chess, I have provided an
alternate version for the mere 10 x 8 board now, but with only 216
variants, if it ever did become really popular, I suppose that
extensive opening theory for each one of those variants would not be
beyond human ingenuity over time.

As to making Chess more of a fighting game and less defensive... Pawns
are the soul of Chess, as Phildor noted. But I have no idea how to
change the move of the Pawn to change Chess in that fa****on! Partial
credit for stalemate and bare King might help - or hurt.

John Savard