Chess Variants

I just got home from a less-than-formal bughouse tournament at the local chess club. Bughouse is a very unusual variation of chess in which four players are split into two "teams" and one member from each team plays a member of the other team on a board. Pieces cycle through the boards and can be placed (almost) anywhere on the board in lieu of a normal move.

Strategy in bughouse is extremely different from that in normal chess, and though the games are played with the same pieces, chess and bughouse are totally different things. I feel that playing bughouse and other variants too often will corrupt my skill in real chess by subconsciously using tactics from the wrong game to internally generate possible moves.

Perhaps it would be better for everyone's chess skills if different-colored or -sized boards were used for playing bughouse. I suspect there could be some at-least-semi-valid psychological support for such a thing. That way, mental associations would treat the games more differently.

Place out of Time

My school is doing some type of learning experience experiment with the University of Michigan. It's called Place out of Time, and it integrates history, writing, and literature. Each student takes on the identity of a noteworthy person in history. For example, in the "mosaic-w14" environment/arena/game I am Solon, the ancient Athenian lawgiver.

A whole bunch of these personalities meet together to discuss a real-life court case that is only a few years in the past. This year, the case is that concerning the L'Aquila earthquake that occurred in Italy around 2008. Some scientists were on trial for reporting that there was no danger, when in reality the earthquake was very real and very destructive. Before even mentioning the case, however, the personalities get to respond to all kinds of questions given by the "hosts" of the gathering.

Once the stage of giving a verdict becomes close, 25 justices are appointed to serve on some sort of board. They get to post a legal philosophy and hand down a ruling on the case after receiving 25 votes of confidence from the general population of personalities. I have been selected as one of these justices, so I suppose I will be writing things soon.

I don't know any more than that, but this has been awesome so far!

Abiathar Video Series

The level editor I made that I mentioned last post is - in case you missed this - really awesome. [Self-promotional mode engage.] In fact, it's so amazing that I decided to start a video series to help spread the word about how easy it is to get started modding with Abiathar. Today, I recorded a 20 minute long video in which I used Abiathar and talked about all the features it has to make modding better.

In fact, I think I'm going to turn this into a full series. Abiathar is so fun to use that I want to take every chance I have to do so and promote it at the same time. Already, one non-modder commented and said that he might try level editing with it.

Watch the amazing video!

Great Success

The last few days, feedback has been rolling in concerning Abiathar. What's Abiathar, you ask? Well, it's something you would know about had you been following Fleex's Lab, my more technical blog. Basically, Abiathar is a super-powerful level editor for the Galaxy (next-generation) episodes of Commander Keen.

I'd like to take a moment to share everyone's kind words:

• Way before the public release, "lemm" said that it is "truly the level editor of the future"
• Hearing about the tile property overlay, "levellass" said "Well now..." in amazement
• After the release, "guynietoren" said "Wow this is massive! Even the manual looks nice!"
• "lemm" said "This looks great! I'll definitely switch over to using this for my Keen projects."
• "Ceilick" also said "Abiathar is the future of Keen Galaxy level editing and possible of Keen Galaxy modding altogether. More than well done, Fleexy"
• "MoffD" wrote "This has an amazing tile interface, well done Fleexy!"
• "CKeen" wrote "Excellent work there Fleexy"
• "Flaose" simply said "Beautiful."
• Then, after the v1.1 update, "lemm" declared "Fleexy is the hero the Keen Community needs."
• DoomJedi says "Looks to be one impressive editor."

Wow, this is amazing! Abiathar is a great success!

Language Flexibility

In English, people do their best to not invent words or use ones not in the dictionary (or at least in common use). However, this may cause problems when describing new ideas, things that are made up of common components but have never been put together in a certain way before. Things like this tend to get stuck with an entirely useless title, like the last name of its inventor, that says absolutely nothing about what it is or does.

Lojban has a really nice system for dealing with this. Every root word (gismu) has several shorter components (rafsi) associated with it. These rafsi can be shoved together (sometimes with rafsi of grammatical particles) to form somewhat lengthy words that are essentially a sentence telling what the thing is. It's very easy to put some of these together to create a new word of fairly obvious meaning, far less ambiguous than a compound word (tanru).

English: blue + green = blue-green
Lojban (tanru): blanu + crino = blano crino
Lojban (lujvo): blanu + crino = bla + ri'o = blari'o

Directing a Chess Tournament

There is a school somewhat near me that runs a scholastic chess tournament around this time of year. I am now too old to play in it, but its organizer (who goes to the local chess club) asked me and my father to help manage it - there are usually almost thirty kids there, from kindergarten to eighth grade.

It went on today, and 27 players showed up. I was assigned to be the section director for the youngest part, K through 2. There were only seven players, which is manageable, but having an odd number of players in a round robin does add some difficulty. Instead of setting one person as the "anchor" and having everyone else move in a cycle around the table (which would require every game to be completed before moving), I manually set up matches and let kids having a tough time take a break. This strategy worked very well, especially after taking other section directors' advice to place a clock on games that were taking a (relatively) very long time.

There was some minor drama in the beginning when there were three people all not playing (two had just finished a game) and neither of the remaining possible pairs wanted to play. I picked two of them and had them play, so it wasn't really that much of a problem.

Later, I also presented the awards for the 6-8 section, which was fun. (Congratulating people is easy.) After all the awards were complete, I played a relatively small simul with the people who had not left already - there were five or so.

Presenting an "honorable mention" medallion

Searching Through a Mess

While wanting to reminisce about the good old days in which I played Boggle with my family, I went searching for the game in the house. It was not to be found on my floor, on my bed, in the closet, on my shelf, on my sister's shelf, or anywhere else I thought I might have put it. So, I found a massive pile of junk in my sister's room and started digging through it with the help of my father.

Almost immediately, I found the base and cover and he found 11 of the 16 letter cubes. They were on the floor near the mess pile and a shelving unit which contained even more messes. Knowing that the game set had been spilled there, we continued moving all kinds of interesting (and painful to sit on) things, uncovering 4 more cubes. Some of those items were:

• Scissors
• Glue sticks
• Pencils
• Pens
• Photo album
• (No longer) edible bracelet
• Lip balm
• Mousetrap (the game) parts
• Pawns
• (So many) loose cards
• Gloves
• Socks
• Outgrown clothing items
• Discharged flashlight
• Basketball
• Bouncy ball
• Window caulking kit
• (Real) broken pumpkin stem

We never did actually turn up the last one cube, but it was really a lot of fun to go through a giant pile of old stuff that had been forgotten and ignored for years. I will probably take similar opportunities to perform archaeological operations in other living spaces, if possible.