I was curious if there were any other chess notation forms out there. (I’ll exclude figurine, since its only used in chess books, etc.)
Algebraic: and variations of that, including figurine.
Descriptive/long descriptive
and one other actually not mentioned in Wikipedia: numbers only. My recollection is that it was/is used in some prisons, and possibly in some international corrospondance games, at least at some point in the history of chess. -it may have been the way to play chess in prison with prisoners being in different cells, but before algabraic notation came along.
Numbers only: first 2 digits is the starting square, last 2 digits is the ending square.
For example: 1188 would mean a bishop or a queen moving from a1 to h8, or 2133 = knight from b1 to c3. I’m not an expert, so no idea if they used 21x33 if a knight was capturing a piece on c3.
I’ll also exclude home brewed notation, in which the only person using it is the person that created it.
The original Blitz program used 22 for a1 thru 99 for h8 although I doubt people ever used it. Their board representation started with 21 offboard squares, the first rank, two more offboards, 2nd rank etc. thru 8th rank and 21 more squares. It was a one dimensional array of 120 elements to save computing time and the offboard squares contained weird unmovable pieces. Orthogonal moves added +/- 1 or 10, diagonals +/- 9 or 11, and knights were +/- 8, 12, 19, and 21. The offboard squares eliminated the need for a separate check to see if a move was on the board such as moving Rh8 to i8 or h9. Click my globe on the right for more info.
Not necessary. I couldn’t top Col. Sicherman’s presentation in that Google piece, anyway.
Smythescript originated when I saw a player using a home-grown version of algebraic in his tournament games. The files were S-Z instead of A-H, the numbers were written before the letters instead of after, and castling was “!” and “?” for K-side and Q-side respectively.
When I saw that, I figured we should do home-grown notations really right by coming up with something absolutely consistent, yet absolutely ludicrous. And thus Smythescript was born.