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There is a board game that is hugely popular in Japan and is often referred to as Japanese chess. Finding someone in the United States who knows how to play would be very hard. However, with the invention of Artificial Intelligence and the right teaching tools, it’s possible for anyone to learn.

I bought a game on Steam which teaches me how to play Shogi and play against the computer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1486050/Lets_Learn_Shogi

Last week I did a Twitch Stream where I launched the game for the first time and went through all the tutorials. I picked it up very quickly because I am already a chess player. You can watch it to learn along with me even if you don’t buy the game itself. I plan to master it and earn all the Steam achievements.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2099981069

There are some very key differences between western chess and Japanese chess. First, knights don’t have 8 different squares they can move to. They only move in a similar way as how they can jump over pawns for the first move in western chess. Second, there is no Queen. There are the pieces King, Bishop, and Rook which operate exactly the same as western chess but there are also new pieces and different rules for them (especially pawns). I’m not going to go over all the differences in this post because I could never explain it as well as the game itself does.

But what I had the most problem with was that the pieces are Japanese symbols so I can’t tell them apart by memory. Take a look at the board here and you’ll see what I mean!

Unless you happen to know Japanese this will look like nonsense and probably stop you from trying to learn! However, I came up with a solution!

I took screenshots of each of the pages briefly explaining the pieces. These pages contain slightly larger images of the pieces than what shows during the game itself. Below are the screenshots so that I can always refer to this post and see which is which!

This post does not cover include the information about the promotion of pieces. Refer to the game itself for more on that. However, I can tell you that the promotion of most of the pieces gives them power equal to the Gold General. The bishop and rook however are special cases because they retain their existing moves but gain the ability to move like a king. This means that evolved bishops are far more powerful than they were in western chess, and they can move to any square on the board in 3 moves or less.

There are many more things that make the game of shogi much more complicated but interesting. However, I will end this post for now and share more in the future as I learn to be better at this game.

Update: since originally posting this I made a helpful image showing the names of all the pieces in just one picture! I refer to this when I am playing Let’s Learn Shogi.

I also made a small animated GIF which, while not as helpful as the image above, looks very cool.

My college mathematics class was my first time actually understanding algebra. I am also fascinated by the way that business situations can be represented as lines on a graph, even though I don’t understand graphing very well. Although this has been my hardest course and the lowest grade of any course in Full Sail, I am glad I am finally overcoming my greatest academic weakness. On arithmetic, I am solid, but all of the other subjects are quite new to me.

I will also have the PDF textbook to review even when the class ends so I can have a better idea about these subjects. I simply haven’t had time to look at it because I am gone 11 to 12 hours out of the day, trying to get some sleep and then working on school. It’s a miracle I can get anything done with my insane life!

But I also know that as long as I work a full-time job, I will not have the time to learn as well as I could have if school was the only thing going on. I try to cram and do everything on Thursday and Saturday, which are my nights off.

In any case, I am proud of myself for trying to continue my education even though I didn’t start college until one month before my 36th birthday. Yeah, I’ll be in debt trying to pay off my student loans for the rest of my life, but at least this was a decision I made.

Some much younger people go to college when they are 18 or in their early 20s because they are told they have to. I don’t think that someone should automatically pursue higher education unless they have a good reason for it and goals they think it will help with.

But the math class, which is only one class of many, is actually my favorite because I know that with math, there is a right answer even if I can’t find it. It lacks the subjective, opinionated nature of all the other subjects.

In fact, math class is like playing chess. I may have lost the game, but I enjoyed the process of trying to find the right moves. At least I know the rules and can identify what went wrong, even if it is after the fact.

In case you haven’t heard, I am making a chess game. It’s not complete but most of the pieces move correctly. I still need to work on the pawn rules. However, I have an example of the two move checkmate called the Fool’s Mate.

In this chess game, all pieces are represented by letters. It’s not too hard to figure out which is which if you are familiar with chess notation.

This program is not meant to compete with existing ways to play chess. Most notably chess.com and lichess.org are the best websites to play chess against other people. This program is more for me to make videos explaining chess openings and also show off my programming skills.

I made up a two-part word that has a meaning that makes sense.

quiz jockey

A jockey is someone competitive in sports. Usually, it refers to a horse jockey(though the horse does all the work). People have also used the word disc jockey. Often this is shortened to jock, which is a term for an athlete.

However, if competitive sports were solving quizzes, then a quiz jockey would be a real thing. This word is not allowed in words with friends as far as I am aware, but if it were, it would be the highest-scoring 10-letter word. If made plural, then quiz jockeys would be the highest-scoring 11-letter word!

Words with Friends accepts quizmaster as a compound word of quiz and master. If the same reasoning were applied, this word I invented, “quizjockey”, would definitely be the best word to ever exist for points.

What I am about to show you is nothing short of amazing. The method used to combine the XOR checkerboard is theoretically simple, but implementing it in code is not!

First, you should see the original Progress Flag image I designed in Inkscape:

Then you can look at how it is when the XOR checkerboard is drawn on top of it. This inverts the colors where the pattern covers it.

This was achieved by use of direct pixel access on an SDL surface using my own custom checkerboard drawing function. A lot of error checking went into it! But all the work was worth it because now I have something beautiful beyond comprehension!