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H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, May 15 09:57 PM UTC:

I am thinking of making a version of the Interactive-Diagram script dedicated to hexagonal boards. For the display this would just be a matter of making the board a table or grid with half the horizontal spacing, and combining the cells in pairs to create a masonry pattern. And displaying a background image with true hexagons behind it. This should not be very hard.

A more serious problem is how to describe the moves. A board of hexagons can be transformed into a board of squares by sheering the rows. But borrowing normal Betza description from a such distorted board is pretty awkward, and would use notations like RfrblB a simple hexagonal Rook. To serve the purpose of describing piece moves in an easily understandable way this falls short of the mark.

So I would prefer to use a notation system similar to (X)Betza, where there are 6 rather than 4 'orthogonal' directions, a hexagonal Rook would be simply R. This would be nice for fully 6-fold symmetric pieces, but puts a heavier burden on directional modifiers for selecting a subset of those. For 6-fold sliders it would not be that bad, as the ordinary directional modifiers f, b, l and r can actually describe 12 directions when they are combined as ordered pairs. E.g. if one direction operpendicular to one of the hexagon edges is defined as f, counting clockwise we could have fr, br, b, bl, fl for the R moves, and rf, r, rb, lb, l, lf for the B moves.

Hexagonally 'oblique' moves would have 12 symmetry equivalent directions all of their own, though. And none of these would point exactly in one of the elementary directions. And if directions described by a single modifier are out, only 8 ordered pairs are left. This could of course be solved by using triples.


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