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Alphabet systems

Posted By: Chase
Date: Wednesday, 7 April 2010, at 7:19 p.m.

In Response To: Alphabet systems (Nack Ballard)

Just a quick follow-up on your various alpha systems now that I've had time to play with them a bit.

In the end, the all-alpha systems have won me over. I had originally conceived DASH as an all-alpha system, but opted to go alphanumeric for ease of memorization. Why reinvent the wheel?, asked I. However, I was always nagged by having to give up a few of the things that favor an all-alpha system. Elegance is the main thing. Having numbers always indicate rolls and letters always indicate moves just feels right, and it makes the system easier to conceptualize. It also lends itself to a few more short cuts. For example, under DASH, recording doubles sometimes takes an extra character, necessitating a five-letter "word" instead of the usual four- or three-letter "word." Having removed the ambiguity of using numbers to represent both rolls and moves, it's now possible to record the roll of a double with a single numeric character. So the move 22: 13/11(2) 6/5(2) becomes simply 2LE (using your alphadual system for this example). No need to record the 2 twice.

Having decided on an all-alpha system, I soon found myself abandoning DASH's mnemonics in favor of a straight alpha approach. I still prefer mnemonics, but the need of having to invent nine more suitable associations stretched things past the breaking point. This concession to memorability pushed me toward your alphadual system, whose mirroring feature makes it easier to memorize than the other systems.

So, I've essentially adopted your alphadual system, though I'm considering a minor change. I often make notations on my computer and I've found that, just as I/i is sometimes confused with the number 1, so is a lower-case L/l mistaken for a 1. For some fonts, they are nearly identical. For this reason, I'm looking at omitting both I and L from the string, giving

a b c d e f g h j k m n
A B C D E F G H J K M N.

This leaves me abandoning a couple convenient mnemonics -- L for 'Leven and M for Midpoint. Loving mnemonics as I do, this nags at me, but, hey, you can't have everything.

Thanks again for your constructive feedback.

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