Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

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> You followed up to my asking for an explanation why with:

>> As stated it's wrong

You misunderstood that comment. He was saying that my claim (that using an upside-down rook is illegal in serious play) is wrong as stated, because it's only true for FIDE rules, not USCF rules. He wasn't saying the act of using a rook that way is wrong (morally or otherwise).

> if you want to claim the rules forbid this act, you should be able to cite a rule

No, this isn't how rules work. The rules of a board game describe all the ways you're allowed to move the pieces, under what circumstances pieces can become other pieces, and so on. If some piece transformation isn't discussed in the rules, then it's not allowed. Otherwise, I could on a random turn say "I declare all my pawns to now be queens". There's no specific rule that says you can't do that, but nevertheless, the rules forbid it implicitly by not mentioning it. Similarly, the fact that they never mention that a rook can become a queen means that in fact, it can't.

So in fact the rule you're looking for is on page 7 of the PDF you linked:

> If a player having the move [...] promotes a pawn, the choice of the piece is finalised, when the piece has touched the square of promotion.

"The piece". Not a different piece having been turned upside down.

Let's take an analogy to real-world laws. Imagine you live in a country that says apples are taxed at 1 cent per apple. Now, imagine a shop turns all the apples upside-down, and declares that they consider upside-down apples to actually be bananas, so they don't have to pay the tax. Is this legal? No! Even though the law doesn't mention anything about whether you can or can't do that, nor does it give a mathematically precise definition of what an apple or banana is. Even though it's not explicitly forbidden, it is still not allowed.

> I'm also, across both of these descendant threads, annoyed with responses not readily engaging with my legitimate inquiry about why forbidding the use of the inverted rook as a promoted queen proxy may be the case. It's a neat quirk or curiosity to me

In another subthread I gave five plausible reasons why it makes sense not to allow it. Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512086

> You misunderstood that comment.

You are absolutely right, I misread that entirely. Thanks. I also misattributed the original comment and the follow-up to the same author.

The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell. If the players agree that for expediency the inverted rook is a queen, the move notation would call it a queen, it would in fact be a queen for the purposes of that game. The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game. And it doesn't affect those other people. In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.

The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.

> The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell.

Again, the identity of objects is assumed in all sets of rules or laws, as the apple/banana example was intended to show. When you write the rules for board games, you do not need to re-derive the entire foundations of metaphysics and discuss what it really means for an object to have identity. You assume these words have the normal meanings commonly associated with them.

> The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game.

Whether people can tell that a rule was violated has no bearing on whether or not it was actually violated. I thought we were talking about what the rules say, not how easy or difficult they are to enforce. Of course if you are by yourself and there are no spectators or official arbiters then you can do whatever you want; nobody is going to stop you.

> In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.

But if you're already pausing the clock to inform the arbiter anyway, why can't the arbiter just give you another queen? I thought the entire point of this whole rook-as-queen exercise was to avoid having to stop the game and talk to the arbiter?

> The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.

We're not talking about the stakes or importance. I agree that what token chess players use as the queen is less meaningful than actual crimes, but that wasn't the point of the analogy.

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