[Retros] "half" proof games

[Noam Elkies]

[sorry for the delayed reply -- I was out of town]

F.Labelle wrote:


> > > Noam Elkies:

> > > 1 e4 ... 2 Q:h5 ... 3 Q:g6 ... 4 Q:f6 ... 5 Q:e5+ ... 6 Q:h8+ ...

> > 7 Qe5+ ... 8 Qh8+ ... 9 Qe5+ ...  10 d3 ... 11 Kd2 ... 12 Kc3 ...

> > > 13 Q:h5 ...# [3620696 SOLUTIONS]



> > Almost 10! solutions!?  Oh dear, what have I done wrong?



> Maybe it would help if you wouldn't try to make the problem harder

> by leaving it open whether some white moves are captures or not.

> With "x" instead of ":" the problem works: [1 SOLUTION].


Um, I certainly didn't *try* to make it harder by doing this -- 
else I would have just written Qh5 instead of either Q:h5 or Qxh5.
(And I agree that "half proof games" that do not exploit captures
at all are more satisfying.)


> I'm sorry if I got your intent wrong. I know that colon is the German

> notation for capture, but the piece letters were not in German and you

> used "x" in another problem.


Well, I first learned chess notation in Hebrew, which presumably
chose : because there's no Hebrew letter that looks like x
so the shape wasn't readily available on typewriters.


> I really have little patience with non-strict SAN. Sorry!


I haven't previously had problems with readers who didn't understand
what I mean by ":".  But presumably here it is not your patience but
your computer program's that is at issue, and I can certainly see
that a computer would be less flexible in such matters.  I simply hadn't
expected that you'd answer my post by feeding my moves into your program!
I guess that your I/O routine happens to just ignore ":", as well as
stray characters like the 6 in Richard's typo B6d8.

[The one thing that does strike me as strange is "Qh5:"
-- is this used in languages in which the correct word order
is "the Queen h5 captures"?]

Two further questions:

1) What move generating routines do you use for your investigation?

2) Have you tried to adapt your methods to "one-sided proof games" --
White series from either the opening array (16+16) or only White's men
(16+0)?

NDE