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    Types: TextFile
    Names: »cg.6«

└─⟦b20c6495f⟧ Bits:30007238 EUUGD18: Wien-båndet, efterår 1987
    └─⟦this⟧ »EUUGD18/General/Chessguess/cg.6« 

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.TH CG 6L "Sep 24, 1987"
.UC 4
.SH NAME
cg \- play the chess guess game
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B /usr/games/cg
[-n]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Cg
plays the game of chess guess, which was described in one of Martin
Gardener's famous articles on recreational mathematics.  The game starts
out with a standard 8 X 8 chess board with 5 pieces on it,
a King, a Queen, a Bishop, a Knight, and a Rook. The pieces
are all disguised.  But it isn't really a guessing game.  You may query
squares on the board for how may pieces attack that square.  From this
information you can deduce which pieces are which.  The object of the
game is to minimize the number of squares queried in order to find out
the identity of all the pieces.
.PP
When the game starts up there is a help menu and a reminder on the right
hand side of the screen, and the game board is to the left.  To query
a blank square for attacks, you move the to the square with the standard
emacs(1?) or vi(1) cursor movement keys, and hit the space bar.  The number
of pieces that can attack that square will be displayed.  To make a guess
at what piece is at a certain square, you move to the square with the
piece on it, and type G (for guess) and they letter that represents
the piece you think it is: K for king, Q for queen, B for Bishop, N
for Knight, and R for Rook.  If you are correct the piece will be displayed.
An individual game will end when you have guessed all the pieces, or have
quit.  If you don't quit, and you finish the game, a list of statistics
will be displayed at the top of the screen.  It is rumored that any
layout of the board can be successfully guessed with only two attack queries or
one attack query and one missed guess.  It is certainly possible to guess all
the pieces without making any attack queries, but it's probable that you
won't succeed.
.SH OPTIONS
There is only one option:
.IP \-n
Display a black on black (or white on white, depending on how you view it)
board instead of the standard black/white arrangement.  This can also
be selected from inside the program.
.SH AUTHOR
Jon Foreman
College of Marin, in Kentfield, California.
Plausible net addresses are: ...!ucbvax!dual!unicom!physh, 
or ptsfa!unicom!physh or hplabs!well!unicom!physh or
killer!rrm!ssbn!physh
.SH "SEE ALSO"
curses(3X),
.I "Screen Updating and Cursor Movement Optimization:"
.IR "A Library Package" ,
.SH BUGS
There are
.I no
bugs in
.I my
code, but there may be any number of undesirable features.
.SH PORTABILITY
Other than using curses(3X) for screen optimization, this code should
be easily portable to any machine running UNIX(r).  There are no particularly
machine dependent things with the exception of "isupper()" and "islower()"
which rely on [A-Z] and [a-z] being contiguous.
.SH PROBLEMS
There are other ways of implementing this program, and I leave it to
the general body of students and others who wish to explore new and
different ideas to implement them.  Here are some suggestions.  Instead
of displaying disguised pieces, don't display the pieces at all.  This
makes the game harder.  Another alternative would be to put all the
non pawn types of pieces on the board (1 King, 1 Queen, 2 Bishops (one on a
while diagonal, and one on a black), 2 Knights,
and 2 Rooks.)  Still another would be to just display all the attacks, and
to divine the location and types of all the pieces from just this information.
The squares under the pieces should show the number of attacks on that piece.
.SH NOTES
The code for this game has certain landmarks which people seem to
pick out every time.  For instance, the 'for' loops in the nitemove()
function.  In addition, I think that the program, while bigger, is
a better sampler for the use of curses(3X) than either twinkle or
life, which are listed in the curses documents.  At least the
help() function does expand on the use of windows, which is not covered
at all well in the curses documents that I have.  In any case, I leave
this program in the custody of the public domain, so that all may
benefit.  If you really enjoy it, send a thank you letter so that I
may know that some of my effort has been of use.