From: Benjamin Good ANDREW CMU EDU> Date: 2 feb 1999 Subject: Re: big shogi Excerpts from mail: 1-Feb-99 Re: big shogi by Michael Vanier BBB CALTE > I was mostly thinking about the feasibility of email play. My problem with > really huge shogi variants is that there's so much going on that I despair > of being able to make even a superficial analysis of the position unless > I've got, say, an hour to spare (I imagine the same would apply to Tenjiku > shogi, but then I've never played it). This would suggest that email play > would be optimal. But if a Tai game (say) takes 1000 moves per player then > even playing one move per day by email will require about five and a half > years to complete the game, which is longer than most people are willing to > tolerate. Whereas if you could move, say, 10 pieces at a time then the > total number of turns would be much less and email play would be feasible. somebody emailed me once that he had played an entire game of either dai-dai or maka-dai-dai (i can't remember which) by either email or snail mail (i can't remember which either, i just looked to see if i saved the original email he sent me and i can't find it, maybe he'll read this and post) and it took a long time, 5-7 years. he won. i have played quite a few email games myself that have lasted more than a year, including chu shogi. the other thing you have to consider in play-by-email is that generally most people like to have some kind of diagram of the board sent along w/ the moves, and that the larger shogi's may be tough for some people to fit in their email window. i can't even fit a dai board in my email window (which has a fixed upper limit on width, changing the window size does not help). actually, the size of the board becomes a consideration when playing larger shogi variants too. i have a tai shogi set i made myself, the pieces are cut out of matboard, w/ abbreviation and name of the piece at the top and a diagram of the piece movement, like those in the hodge manuals, at the bottom (like we're really going to memorize all the japanese symbols for all the pieces and how they move; i also put yellow and blue squares on the front of the pieces to help keep track of which ones promote, since most don't, yellow means that the piece promotes to gold general and blue means that it promotes to something else). the pieces are about 2" long, so the squares of the board need to be at least 2.25" squared. add on a small border for notation, then for tai, this makes for a board that is 5 feet on a side (i made my board using a computer drawing program, except that the only paper size i had to print on was 8.5"x11", so there was a lot of taping involved. at this size, the 36x36 board would be about 7 feet on a side). we didn't have a table that big, so we had to play on the floor. eventually our backs started to hurt from sitting on the floor, so we got chairs and hunched over the board, which wasn't exactly great for our backs either. as our pieces started to get to the farther side of the board, we often had to walk around the side of the board to move our own pieces. we played moving quite quickly, in the beginning of course you can move quickly anyway, there's a lot of stepping pieces and quite a bit of space b/n the pieces at the beginning of the game. later tho, as things got more complicated, we still never spent more than 5 minutes on a move. i'm not sure that spending an hour on one move would be that productive anyway, there's no way you can calculate every possibility, see that far ahead, or predict what your opponent might do, except in certain close-range confrontations. we played about 4 hours and called it a night, i estimated we were b/n 1/3 and 1/2 of the way thru the game. i wrote down the position so that we could finish the game, but it's been nearly 2 years and we've never continued it. i've since thrown away my paper board (it was difficult to store), and just sorting out the pieces and resetting the position would probably take half an hour. and other than the sheer size of it (i have to admit, you get a certain sense of awesome power when you see your gigantic tai shogi army paid out in front of you ready to do battle), tai shogi has little interesting to offer. Excerpts from mail: 1-Feb-99 Re: big shogi by Michael Vanier BBB CALTE >However, your point is well taken: the games weren't designed for this mode >of play. In fact, if what George Hodges has written is correct, they >weren't really designed to be played at all, just to be marvelled at. They >certainly succeed in this goal :-) hodges sells tai shogi for $300 US, quite a bit of money to spend on a game you're going to marvel at but not play. of course, if i had as much money as bill gates or michael jordan, i'd buy one anyway. well, i'm done talking for now. later, ben