This is a special post for quick takes by Kongo Landwalker. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Kongo Landwalker's Shortform
24Kongo Landwalker
4Shankar Sivarajan
2Kongo Landwalker
1Kongo Landwalker
1Kongo Landwalker
-3Kongo Landwalker
5Luiza
2Kongo Landwalker
3Luiza
3samuelshadrach
1Kongo Landwalker
DEFCON Chess
The game requires 1d6. The match is divided into 6 stages, named DEFCON 6 to DEFCON 1. The game starts at DEFCON 6. Before a player moves he is required to throw a dice: if the value is 1 the game progresses to the next stage.
DEFCON 6: players are constrained to their home half of the board.
DEFCON 5: players now can move anywhere on the board.
DEFCON 4: captures are unlocked.
DEFCON 3: special moves (pawn double move, en passant, promotion, castling) are unlocked.
DEFCON 2: attacking piece also dies on capture event.
DEFCON 1: atomic chess variant rules apply.
I think this moves between stages too quickly. Maybe a d12 or d20 would be better.
Also, it might be fun to allow the stages to decrease as well. Then you could start in the middle of your stages, with normal chess rules, and if the threat level decreases, the board becomes more "peaceful."
Despite AI slop my internet usage might be temporarily growing.
I have a feeling that I am witnessing the last months of internet having low-enough-for-me density of generated content. If it continues to grow, I will not even bother opening Youtube and similar websites or using any recommendation algorithms. So I am spending the time binging to "say goodbye" to the authenticity and human approach of my favourite parts of the internet.
"Experience" chess variant.
I believe most fun chess variants are those, which have small mutations, but big impacts on the gameplay.
This post is a description of my chess variant idea and a search for volunteers to test it.
1. Normal chess rules apply if not stated otherwise.
2. Each piece is assigned a number, which is called Experience. Its starting value is 1.
3. When a piece with Experience X tries to capture enemy target piece with Experience Y, the probability of success is X/(X+Y).
4. If capture was a success, the attacked piece is taken off the board, the attacking piece is placed on the target square and its Experience is incremented by 1.
5. If capture was a failure, the attacking piece is taken off the board, the attacked piece has its Experience incremented by 1.
6. Losing your king is a loss.
What if we construct generalised chess variant? Which does not bring new mechanics into the game, but expands the existing ones.
Knights, rooks, bishops stay unchanged, They are already capable of fully utilising their ability.
Queen has a combined power of 2 other piecetypes, rook and bishop. Why only two? Why these two? Instead of answering those question let's just expand:
- Queen inherits powers and characteristics of all other 5 types of pieces. (Inheritance from king and pawn explained later.)
Why pawns are in the front? Well, this is not an arbitrary structure - less valuable and more replaceable stand in the front to be a shield and prevent immediate danger on more important warriors while entering the battle. But the order of pieces on the first rank... Let's make it fully random. 2) First row positions are fully random and not symmetrical. This way we cover classical standing, 960, and all those which do not follow the 960 limitations (king between rooks, two color bishops).
King between rooks was made in 960 to allow castling. That is the narrow ability, which is targeted by this variant. Why only rooks? Why not after moving? 3) King can pull a visible friendly target piece to the king and jump over it. Both 0-0 and 0-0-0 can be viewed as a narrow case of this rule. But in or generalised variant we should be able to pull also vertically and diagonally. Delete the limitation, that only rooks qualify, and that only once we can perform that. Queen obviously also gets this ability. Thanks to that rule 960 limitations are unnecessary: king does not need rooks on both sides to castle, and bishops can change their squarecolor by being pulled, can be used if they spawned on single color.
Pawn. Double move works ONLY from a starting position. In generalised chess we allow the double move whenever. En passant. Pawn captures a pawn, that has just crossed the attacked square. 4) Pawn can immediately capture ANY piece that has just crossed the attacked square. That means queen also can double move (which overlaps with her rook ability and brings nothing new), and en passant whoever tries to cross its huge control territory.
There is one more thing, which nerfs Queen bit. King characteristic: cannot be left in check, if impossible to avoid - you lose. Queen inherits this property automatically.
Pawn can promote to the queen, but would you want to increase the number of your pieces that are vulnerable to checks? I guess yes, if the position is under control, but better take a rook if position is complicated. Queen can also promote and turn into any other piece. Might be usefull to escape a check sequence. But if it promotes into a pawn, it becomes a dead weight as pawn cannot move backwards. (But you can use your king to pull it back 😉 )
To sum up.
- Queen inherits all abilities and characteristics.
- First rows are fully random.
- King can pull a visible friendly target piece in a straight line up to him and jump over it.
- Pawn can en-passant anyone and double move from anywhere.
Contact me if you would play this Generalised chess variant by mail/messages.
"Stop consuming, start creating" is sometimes considered to be a call for publishing whatever was done/performed. I think publishing is the root of the societal mental problem. More people get access to the internet over years, bigger proportion of people begins to publish some content. 15 years ago the amount of content in the internet was orders of magnitude smaller, and it was more authentic. Now people are hooked by a flood of information, then are encouraged to join to add a drop, they join the crowd and listen to advice of how to make content seeable, making the flood harder for the next person. It becomes more difficult to find great authentic content, difficulty provokes search (scrolling), but also exposes to lots öf ok content, giving small gratification (addiction).
But switching from a consumer to a creator mindset is a process that seems to improve the quality of one's thinking. I'd even say that more people should start creating. Though I do agree that we also need better consumption and better metrics for creation (not just volume & engagement).
I say this because I recently made a Wikipedia account (inspired by Why You Should Edit Wikipedia) and as a first-time contributor I noticed a big difference between what reading a page on whatever does to my mind and how my mind acts when working through an edit on a page I care about. Reading/consuming can easily fall into passive pattern matching, but editting/writting pushes one into building an overall understanding of the meta of context of content, structure, audience &more.
My take is that the cognitive development justifies the noise.
Also, feedback helps.
I was not talking about creator mindset, just about publishing mindset and the resulting flood. This year people talk about "ai slop" content, but slop content existed even before ai.
The current tendency of the internet will benefit like SOME creators (not all of the internet creators put thoughts into their production) and just overwhelm the majority of passive users, making it more addictive for them and less healthy over years.
Soo, what do you see as a better alternative?
Or mini-alternative, with some minimal changes that could create a better future for quality content and access to it?
edit: silly typo
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link this new post fits to my argument, üresenting many instances of the edge case of "mindless publishing". It shows the problem from memetic view, not from the addiction concept.
Curated and popular this week