Comments by panther

Using Safari's address bar on my iphone,

chessvariants dot com resulted in a white page plus crash.

When I tried the link 'Summary of Part 1' (in Betza article), again a white page plus crash happened.

The link 'References' caused a white page and crash on my iphone. However, the 'Thought Experiment' link worked for me.

The link chessvariants dot com again resulted in a crash (I did it on Brave as well as Safari on my iphone, in case I didn't refresh my cache properly on Safari).

The 'Personal Variations' link (from Betza article) caused a white page plus crash, when I clicked on it while using Safari.

Hi Fergus

Those links both worked. Even better, at this time tonight I can get to the CVP homepage now. I shall try to explain what I think might have caused the whole problem with my iphone, regarding CVP site at least:

Earlier tonight I went to my usual local bar. A friend with an Android phone was there and he got to the CVP homepage no problem, When my iphone still failed to get there without a crash, he suggested I check my phone for updates. He then started one that was waiting on my iphone for me, just by getting me to agree to the update terms (hopefully it's completely free of any new $ charges to me).

That apparently started to make my iphone into a version 17.something (cannot recall exact decimal number of version), finishing up by soon after I got home, when I took my phone out of my pocket. Then, unlike a previous time I had a similar update done to my phone's version, my phone asked me for my house's Wifi's password (don't know if that's unusual or just new with this iphone update version - hopefully I won't need to bother to re-enter Wifi passwords, for use in the two bars I go out to). After that I soon had my iphone seeming to look about the same as before on its screen - except now I seem to be able to get anything on CVP site, so far, no problem, at least with Safari or Google search.

True. I thought Newton's maleness and the cartoon artist's body depiction might help, along with any further imagined changes (such as aging in appearance) that you might make to a centaur figurine on the path to finalizing it.

I haven't dug back thru all the comments, but has it been suggested that a Centaur might be represented by a tall piece (like a Staunton K's base) with a horse's head on it (like a Staunton N's head)?

Such a piece could become royal simply by adding a cross on top, if desired, as Jean-Louis did with an earlier image he gave (except that in that one, the base was not as tall as for a Staunton chess K, if I recall right).

edit: another possibility is to use the base of the Man, up to the neck, from the picture in the Piececlopedia entry for a Man, and put a horse's head on it.

edit2: a possible issue with any of these ideas is if a horse's head's weight might make such a piece fall down fairly easily; perhaps a slender-sort of horse's head might avoid that.

I edited my last post a bit.

From Google blurb, when I searched for 'meaning of reverse centaur':

A reverse centaur has the head of a horse (non-human, relatively stupid, but trainable) and the body of a man complete with human hands. It's the human hands that are the key.Jun 27, 2023

Re: "If the idea is to represent the move, the logical form in a set where the Amazon is a Staunton Knight with the head of a Staunton Queen mounted on top of it, would be a King's head on a Knight. The cross could be omitted for the non-royal case."

I'd trusted that Fergus had already thought of that and hadn't found a way to make it work, for some reason. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else can, as it would avoid using a 'reverse centaur' figurine. Maybe a Man's head (from Piececlopedia page for that) on top of a knight could be even better.

A general problem with fairy chess piece figurines is that while the 6 types of Staunton chess figurines are all quite distinct and serve orthodox chess well, for chess variants sometimes in a given CV such as Sac Chess there can a lot of similar-looking types, it may be unavoidable in such a case. Similar issues might happen for other CVs too, even if the practical similarity issue went away for just that particular CV (i.e. Sac Chess). Fergus' main concern is to get a good-looking Staunton-style figurine of a Centaur that can be used both on the Piececlopedia page and seemingly for a lot of CV games, the latter being difficult to imagine in the form of an example collection of them.

Perhaps a Knight figurine with a Man's head at the top would be the best thought for a Staunton-style Centaur figurine, if the Centaur were not a royal version.

Maybe the age he wanted to have a child was his (inside) joke. It seems his wife and the Lord may have gone along with it quite happily - the latter is thought to have a good sense of humour.

He more or less said so, though he said he wanted to pick a 'smallish number' as he was having his whim:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/

Note that Adams had his only child at age 42, and Bobby Fischer died at age 64. Carl Jung said to pay attention to coincidences. Question is, what do they mean?