Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 11:39:41 09/23/98
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On September 23, 1998 at 13:21:02, William H Rogers wrote: >On September 23, 1998 at 01:18:29, Jouni Uski wrote: >>2Q5/5Rpk/8/1p2p1qp/1P2Pn1P/5PP1/4r3/7K b - - >Forgive me for being a little slow, but how do I set up one of these positions? >I am new to this type of notation. Could you start with the first line (2Q5)? We need a FAQ. This is Forsythe-Edward notation. "2Q5" means a white queen on c8, and nothing else on the 8th rank. Take a chess board, put your finger on a8. If there is a number in the notation, move your finger that many squares to the right. If there is a lower-case letter, put the appropriate black piece there and move your finger one square to the right. If there is an upper-case letter, same thing with a white piece. If there is a slash, go to the next row of squares and continue. Eventually you run out of gibberish and hit either a "w" or a "b". That's white or black to move. Now you get two hyphens typically. What you might get in place of the first hyphen is some combination of the letters "K", "Q", "k", and "q", for instance "KQkq" or "Kkq", etc. "K" means that white has not forfeited king-side castling privileges, you can figure out the rest. The next hyphen might be a square, like "e6". If there is a square instead of a hyphen, that is the square to which an en-passant capture supposedly is legal, although sometimes you see something like "d3" if white's last move was d4, even if there is no black pawn on c4 or e4. Most people seem to stop here, but you can also have a couple of numbers appended to this string, the first is the number of plies (moves by one side or the other) since the last capture or pawn move (used to determine when the 50-move rule comes into play), the second is the current move number in the game. So the initial setup before anyone has made a move is: rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w - - 0 1 bruce
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