Subject:
      Site review - Chess Dictionary
Date:
      1999/08/26
Author:
      Mark Weeks <100046.2106@compuserve.com>

The next review, covering the seventh Chess History bookmark, is for 'Chess
Dictionary' by Raymond Reid. The main page is at
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~rayreid/, an Irish address. Reid adds 'E. & O.
E.' to his signature. I suppose I should know what this means, but I don't.

The main page announces itself as 'CHESMAYNE - The largest Chess
Dictionary in the world' & '5,000+ Keywords in an A to Z format'. When I first
looked at this site a couple of months ago, the main page was 109K bytes &
listed 5000 words. Each word was linked to another page & the links stopped
after the 'O's.

Now the main page contains links to the 26 letters of the alphabet, which is
an improvement in site navigation. and the links stop in the 'P's ('Praetor').
This aroused my curiosity. What does 'Praetor' have to do with chess?
Clicking on the word, I got the error message 'Not Found; The requested URL
/~rayreid/Praetor.htm was not found on this server'. Oops! I backed up one
word to 'Power', clicked the link, & got a similar message. How about the first
word in the list ('Pagoda')? Same thing. Now I was suspicious. How about the
last word in the 'O's ('Oxymoron')? This works & I got a definition of the word,
but it's not at all clear to me what 'oxymoron' has to do with chess.

The first entries in the 'A's are 'Abandon Abba Abdicate Abelard Ability Able
Abstract-Of-Title Accelerated-Pairing-Systems Acentric Alekhine Achilles
Acolyte ...'. Let's take a look at 'Alekhine', who is on everyone's list of the
greatest players of all time. There is a one paragraph biography of the former
world champion. This is followed by a paragraph with a description of the
Alekhine Memorial Tournament, a mention of Alekhine's reputation for
drinking, & an oblique reference to his preference for older women.

This is followed by nine games which give only the names of the two players,
i.e. event & dates are not indicated. The notation for the games is unusual.
'01A PA4-D02/D04' followed by '01B PA5-D07/D05' means '1.d4 d5'. At the
end of the games is an entry for '//ALEKHINE’S DEFENCE 65:02', where the
first moves are given as '01A PA5-E02/E04' & '01B KT1-G08/F06', and which
is described as 'Like the KIs Fianchetto defence, it aims to tempt the :A mps
forward onto cells where they will be liable to counter attack by :B.' (sic).

Now I reached the point where I had to admit that I didn't understand this site.
It doesn't seem to use any of the conventions that many of us know and love.
It also looks like the whole thing is being generated out of a database & that
the process to produce the definitions is not flawless.

I gave it one more try & looked at 'Caissa', which I recently researched in
preparing a post for this discussion group (which was never
posted)...

Goddess (muse) of chess. The name is taken from a nymph in a poem
composed by Sir William Jones in 1763. It is based on Vida’s "Scacchia
ludus" in which the nymph is referred to as "Scacchis." Mars asks the god of
sport to invent a game that will soften the nymphs heart. See "Muse".

...followed by a fragment of the Jones poem. 'Muse' is not hyperlinked from
the 'Caissa' page, although there is a definition in the 'M's. Fair enough.

The main page contains more links. The first is [Free Chess Set], which offers
a set via email. The next is [Read me first]. OK, I didn't read it first, but I
should have. It says, 'This text contains an extensive dictionary of Chess.
Chesmayne is not a variant of chess but a global form of the game in which
traditional western chess, Shatranj, [...] and many other levels of chess can
all be played quite easily for the first time in the same format with a new type
of chess-set'. It says later, 'Chess is universally acknowledged as the
supreme communicator
(organon/yantra)'. [Overview] goes on in the same vein.

Now everything is clear. This is not a site about chess -- it's a chess variant,
'a global form of the game'. If no one complains, I'll remove it from the list of
bookmarks for Chess History.

--
Kind regards,
Mark Weeks