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Comment by crdrost | Hacker News Reader

I think this is fun, but

(a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point.

(b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make the bishop look like it is "sniping" along the diagonals while the rook looks more "sweeping" maybe?

(c) don't make the king a little-queen. Make the king a little square to emphasize "it can only threaten the neighboring square," then it looks more visually distinctive.

The pawns are fun though.

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I think I'd be inclined to disambiguate them by making the ends of the bishop pointed and the ends of the rook blunt. When moving along a diagonal you're moving in the direction of square corners, vs faces for moving in ranks and files, so it makes sense in that way, and it also evokes the shapes of the classical pieces.

>an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa

This was my first thought too. If the "feet" of all of the pieces were "flat", or parallel to the rows of the board, you could more easily tell their proper orientation.

A swastika shape would make sense for the knight.

I guess there is still a cultural aversion to its use, however.

A swastika?! Not quite, it's more like a cross: ꖅ

Speaking of swastikas, that's very close to an Iron Cross.

...anyway so people can see it better, that actual character is a pretty close representation of the knight's movement, it's just a little hard to tell the 2-then-1 distances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EA%96%85

It would need 8 arms, not 4. (A well-placed Knight meaningfully controlling all of its 8 target squares is actually referred to as an "octopus Knight" sometimes).

It is also opinionated, in the sense that the vectors for Knight moves is [2, 1] and [1, 2] (whereby in both cases negative numbers can be used)... so whether you visualize a Knight move towards the left top corner as an L (x-1 first, then y-2), or as an ꓶ (y-2 first, then x-1) is an arbitrary decision.

It might be my OCD side coming out, but any design prioritizing one of these perspectives over the equally valid alternative doesn't feel "clean" to me somehow : )

A swastika would only cover half of a knight's legal moves.

Unrelated, but I just realized the horse is not in fact called "horse" like it is in Italian/Spanish.

It's been weird/amusing observing how different age groups at my local chess clubs call pieces and concepts. The older group very much stays to the local Dutch terminology for both while the younger group (presumably influenced by youtube) tends to mix Dutch piece names with English concepts. So you can have a koning (king) that is being "skewered" by a koningin (Queen) on the tweede (second) rank.

It is called "Springer" (translates to: jumper) in German. Sometimes "Pferd" or "Ross" is also used (translates to: horse and steed, resp.). That's why "Knight's tour" is called "Springerproblem" or "Rösselsprung" (from "Ross") in German.

Hence the German academic publisher, Springer, which uses a knight as it's logo.

(Not to be confused with the much larger Axel-Springer publishers, nor the American academic Springer publisher.)

When I was younger, I always believed that the proper name was for the knight was "horse" (my primary language is English). I only figured it out when I was playing chess against my friend, and he was like, "horse? wth is that"

Or Dutch

Yes, the knight is up to 8 squares in a 5x5 grid. https://github.com/vezquex/chess/blob/master/src/game/piece/...

I also realized that if you defined the pieces like their moves, the knight's shape would be.... Interesting

Wouldn’t it look like four capital tees joined at opposites/right angles at the stem?

I mean, sorta? If you think about it as the "rules of the move," but the actual movement can be drawn as a straight line. See: https://twitter.com/graycrawford/status/1750248031784763639

Ahhh, yes, from that pov, yes totally!

I don't think (b) is really fair. You still call them "pieces" even if you are playing chess on a device/screen.

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