21 May 2013

Chess NAGs

While I was writing last week's post, Informant No.1, Game No.1, I included an awkward explanation:-

A '?' on Black's 9th leads to a plus-over-minus on White's 10th, which is awarded a '!'. A couple of White's subsequent moves are also awarded a '!', after which Black is lost.

Certain that there must be a better way to use the 'plus-over-minus' notation, I discovered Wikipedia's page Numeric Annotation Glyphs, which equates various chess notation symbols to Unicode. Here's a table of the relevant symbols and codes.

8252 '‼' vs. '!!'
8263 '⁇' vs. '??'
8265 '⁉' vs. '!?'
8264 '⁈' vs. '?!'
9633 Wikipedia shows '9632' (which is ■)
8734 See also Unclear Positions (and follow ups)
10866  
10865  
± 177  
8723  
10752  
10227  
8594  
8593  
8710  
8979  
8660  
8663  
10219  
10218  
10005  
8869  

Now here's the same awkward explanation using Unicode:-

A '?' on Black's 9th leads to a '±' on White's 10th, which is awarded a '!'. A couple of White's subsequent moves are also awarded a '!', after which Black is lost.

Looks good, but more trials necessary... Thanks, Wikipedia!

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