This web site features an extensive section concerning cryptography: A Cryptographic Compendium And here is a direct link to its index page. Originally, I had among the pages on other topics, a single page about a map projection of my own. Now, having once again written, this time to run on a PC, a program to draw maps in a variety of projections, this site now also contains: Map Projections an extensive series of pages describing several map projections and how to construct them. Note that there are some other topics addressed within the section on cryptography as well. Error-Correcting Codes have a page, and the section on teletypewriter ciphers illustrates many codes used with teletypewriters; more on this topic is at a page within the section on data compression. Particularly intriguing may be the proposal for representing a large repertoire of characters within 5-level code. For quicker loading, the section on Featured Images which addresses a number of topics for which I have created drawings, but not a full page concerning the topic as yet, has been taken off the main page. It includes an image showing the purported relation of pi and the golden ratio to the Great Pyramid, and a new item, showing a solid with both faces having octagonal symmetry and faces having pentagonal symmetry. As you may have noticed, there is now a link banner to the right on this page. Except for a nice desktop background, no compensation has been received for placing the banner on this page; thus, try not to think of it as advertising, but as information about a very enjoyable webcomic (which is also available for a reasonable price in the more convenient form of a TPB (trade paperback edition) at a comics store such as is likely to be near most viewers of this page). As the comic concerns mad scientists, somehow it felt appropriate to provide a link from this page. A brief page with a few annotations about the series is now on this site.

Latest New Additions

The section about Making Wargames More Complicated now includes one possible way to build a dungeon with random tiles representing sections that allows one basic card type to be used while avoiding dead ends except those intentionally placed on the cards, yet allowing a dungeon with a limited number of entrances. Also recently added is a new image of a grid in which a grid of octagons with small squares in the corners between them alternates with a hexagonal grid; the result is chequered using a somewhat complicated color scheme.

A correction has been made to the unit widths for Times Roman on this page; as well, several recent additions have been made to the chart of unit widths: the widths for the Mid-Century face on the IBM Executive typewriter, those for Diablo 630 proportional-spacing printwheels, and the unit widths for several special forms of type made for easier setting of tabular matter by American Type Founders: Self-Spacing Type, Quick-Set Roman, and Typotabular Gothic No. 4.

On this page, I describe a board game which meets a number of desiderata for a board game that I had not previously seen how to fulfill all at once.

I have finally found the moves of the infamous repeated game of the 1863 world championship checkers match between Wyllie and Martins, and have illustrated that game move by move on this page.

A page on the game of Rithmomachy has been added to the site, this topic being a natural for this site, it being a complicated board game of a mathematical bent.

In the section about an imaginary computer architecture, a new addressing mode, Aligned Operand Mode, has been added, and a large number of the addressing modes previously defined have been removed. Aligned Operand Mode uses an idea from the SEL 32 minicomputer to reduce significantly the number of bits in an instruction required to indicate the type of its operand, by taking advantage of the fact that the last few bits of an address will normally be zero for data types longer than one byte, since data is usually aligned.

A page to remind people that before both Auction Bridge and Contract Bridge were invented, there really was another game that was called just plain Bridge (the one that is now called Russian Whist to avoid confusion). As well, most noticeably inspired by the Russian game of Vint, on a following page I describe what seems to me to be the next step in the evolution of Bridge, given the pattern of what has gone before: Siberian Semi-Contract Whist (or Bridge). And now I have added a simplified version of Bridge that requires six players.

A new chess variant, Antimatter Universe Chess, is now described wherein conventional chessmen may be used in a game which allows one to drop captured pieces on the board as in Shogi by having players control forces of opposing colors on the secondary board formed by the interior points of the chessboard. As well, a second additional chess variant is described here on this page, and a number of additional combinations have been added to Random Variant Chess.

Major additions have been made to the page about using the roll of three identical ordinary six-siced dice for a greater number of purposes in such applications as role-playing games.

On the page about the games of Chivalry and Camelot, descriptions of the game of King's Court (also known as Supercheckers) and of the Strand War Game have been added. As well, a page about Backgammon has been added.

On a page within the section on unit conversions, a discussion of the standard tournament sizes for boards for a number of different games has been added, as well as a note on the length measures of Barsoom.

In brief, the available topics are:

Two Famous Equations
(HTML version: page itself displays on all browsers; MathML displays on Amaya, recently updated)
(XML version: required for MathML on IE with the DesignScience MathPlayer plug-in in addition to Amaya)
(XHTML version: required for MathML on Firefox in addition to Amaya)

When this page had a counter, the number of visitors recorded on the counter had reached about 107,000.

You may send me E-mail; my E-mail address is:

Back again, after a long absence:

• Telegraph Code
• Big Five
• GuoBiao

How to Save the Game of Chess!

Having recently added to this site the score of the Checkers game between James Wyllie and Robert Martins which was repeated, move for move, in 21 out of the 40 games of the World Championship match between them in 1863, it has occurred to me that I should call attention to a page on my site which proposes a way to solve the (fortunately less severe) problems which are faced by the game of Chess.

In Japan, the legendary Go player Honinbo Shusaku revolutionized the understanding of the game and improved the standard of play. The result of this, however, was not entirely fortunate. It became possible, with sound defensive play, for the first player (in Go, the one who sets down the black stones) to win almost every game by a margin of two or three points of territory.

This was dealt with by an innovation known as komidashi, in which Black is required to cover more territory than white by a margin which was at first 3 1/2 points, but which has since gradually increased to as much as 6 1/2 points, in order to be the winner, with White winning otherwise.

Similarly, in Chess, Wilhelm Steinitz revolutionized the understanding of the game, but this led to a situation in which sound defensive play, leading to draws, replaced exciting but unsound sacrificial combinations as the norm. In Chess, however, checkmate either takes place or it does not. One scheme that has recently become popular is to award only 1/3 point to each player in the case of a draw. While this scheme is effective in tournament play, I feel it is much less likely to be effective in match play; and it is, of course, the World Championship match in Chess which is the one Chess competition with the most chance of capturing the interest and attention of the general public.

On the page about Dynamic Scoring, I suggest a way to adapt the principle of komidashi to Chess.

If a player inflicting stalemate received 3/5 of a point, and the stalemated player 2/5 of a point, since the difference between the two scores is now 1/5 of a point instead of 1 point as it would be in the event of checkmate, allowing this lesser victory to be counted towards the result of a match would not destroy the parts of existing endgame theory which are concerned with avoiding a stalemate when a checkmate is possible. In Dynamic Scoring, I propose adding stalemate, bare King, and even perpetual check as minor victories, but with the points awarded for each minor victory more strongly favoring Black (the second player in Chess, of course) as the victory becomes more minor. The intent is to encourage Black to play somewhat aggressively instead of entirely defensively by favoring the Black side for minor victories, and in turn to encourage White as well to play aggressively instead of defensively, as the greater the victory, the less the amount by which the scoring scheme favors Black,

Also for quicker loading, a page about What's New on the site, but from which I haven't had the heart to remove links to some of the older new things from, is on a separate page.

I will keep one highlight from the site on the front page, however:

this heptagonal tiling is from a section of the web site that discusses such matters as Penrose tilings.

Other attractive images on my site include one of the Riemann Zeta Function, what I think is a very nice map on the world based on Lambert's Conic Conformal Projection, a really colorful series of pages with drawings of computer front panels (of course, if you use Google, you can find actual *photographs* of nearly all the computers presented).

It's difficult to summarize the content of this site, but from the table below, you can see that in addition to the major sections on cryptography and map projections listed above, mathematics, board games, and computers are addressed here.

Contact Information and Notes

Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2008 John J. G. Savard

The term QUADIBLOC is the designation of a family of block ciphers described on these web pages; the description of these block ciphers, and a claim of trademark rights to the term QUADIBLOC is to be found on this page.