[Retros] Inappropriate comments

[Kevin Begley]

    Tom,

        Please pardon me if you think my play on words was in any way inappropriate. Calling your analogy "criminally bad" should not have been regarded as a personal attack on you. I assure you, I have nothing but respect for your experience with chess problems, and legal matters, and I am appalled to discover that my comment could be considered anything but a friendly refutation of your legalistic analogy.

        I hope you can get passed that first sentence, which was nothing but a play on legal words describing a flaw in your argument.  It was absolutely not personal, in any way, and I sincerely apologize if it can be misconstrued otherwise (perhaps you might better discover the context of my comment after reading my full reply!?).

        In an effort to get beyond the semantics of what is "sound," I have decided to concede that the term "retrograde soundness" is of no real concern. Personally, it doesn't concern me in the slightest if, years from now, somebody calls an original problem I made "cooked by later rule changes," or "sound in its day."  What does concern me is how these problems may be re-published.

        If a "retro sound" problem is no longer sound, under present rules (regardless whether we call it "previously sound" or "presently cooked"), it would be "obscene" (my new term, to get around the semantics of "cook/sound") to republish it without making a correction (either a corrected diagram which now complies with the present rules, or by stipulating some minimal set of fairy conditions to clarify the old rules). Publishing old chess problems prior to the en passant rule, for example, and expecting the solver to adjust their notion of soundness based upon the publication date, is simply obscene.  Good problem journals have always done a good job at making such corrections, of course, because they might fast lose credibility otherwise.

        Anybody can have problems appear however they like in their personal database -- but republishing problems which are widely regarded as incorrect under present rules, without some correction, is a transgression that should not be perpetrated upon solvers (and perhaps upon the original author).

        If the rules of circe changed tomorrow, and you republished a problem of mine next week which is no longer valid under circe rules, you have not done me a service by pretending it is still correct under present rules of circe;  quite the contrary -- a re-publisher has an obligation to assure that the problem is clearly understood in the original context (by including whatever conditions get the problem back to what circe was, or by correcting the diagram to adjust for rule changes).

        As I have stated before, there is a long history of such corrections, and it should never fall upon the solvers shoulders to decipher what the original problem's rules were (based upon publication date).

                Kevin Begley.


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