Interactive explorer for Shogi Kakugen Mame Jiten (Tiny Dictionary of Shogi Proverbs).
Shogi Proverbs
This project was inspired by James Leahy’s similar “Shogi Proverbs” app[1].
Both of these projects were inspired by “Shogi Kakugen Mame Jiten (Tiny Dictionary of Shogi proverbs)”[2].
But the approaches are different. Leahy’s app converted the source text into code,
and focused on creating an elegant book-like reading experience; it’s well done
and much appreciated! On the other hand, this interactive reader takes a
different approach, aiming to…
– Use the original text with minimal editing
– Help find and fix any errors in the original diagrams & notation
– Improve understanding by visualizing diagrams with moves applied
– Provide kanji font options for clear and aesthetically pleasing game views
– Support numeric rank coordinates (“5c” == “53”)
– Extract any position as standard SFEN for further analysis
It was an experiment and I’m happy with the results! By parsing the original
source text, I found and fixed several errors in notation and had fun exploring the
diagrams and move sequences. Instead of scrolling to see diagrams and imagining
how move sequences change the position, I can see the dedicated board and follow
the moves provided by the text. When I want to go deeper, I can copy SFEN to
the clipboard and fire up lishogi.org[3] or any shogi tool that can import SFEN.
There are some limitations inherent in this reader’s approach, though. In particular,
there’s no deep understanding of the flow of moves & text. The author jumps around,
sometimes describing hypothetical alternative moves or listing moves as
if a single player could move repeatedly. No attempt is made to interpret
context from sentences; instead, it’s up to the reader to start from a
diagram link and then apply each move by touching the notation. Colors provide
hints about which moves can be applied from the current position and whether
making such a move will be in sync with the player on turn, but it’s perfectly
possible to apply moves out of order or get lost. So track carefully and,
when in doubt, just start from a diagram and remember the SFEN is there if you need it.
A note about notation: it’s all text using Japanese fonts that include the necessary
kanji piece characters. The source fonts can be found by name on Google Fonts[4].
For visual simplicity and consistency, promoted pieces without dedicated single
kanji characters use an apostrophe to indicate that they’re promoted. This is
sometimes read in math notation as “prime”, so ‘銀 is “prime silver”
or “promoted silver”; likewise ‘桂 is the promoted knight and ‘香 is the promoted lance.
Tips:
– The board can be resized by dragging the splitter bar between the text and board view.
– On touch devices, some precision may be needed to operate the UI. It’s a bit quirky.
– This app uses zero persistent state (doesn’t save any settings to nonvolatile storage)
so hopefully it’s easy & quick enough to configure once per run!
This was a for-fun weekend hacking project, offered freely for the love and promotion
of the great game of Shogi. I hope you enjoy it! If there are particularly painful
issues or fixes that need to be made, suggestions and contributions are welcome.
Also feel free to send an email to say hello or get a game going.
Developer contact:
[com . outlook @ voidshine].reverse.join
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.defuncart.shogiproverbs&gl=US
[2]: http://www.shogi.net/kakugen/
[3]: https://lishogi.org/analysis
[4]: https://fonts.google.com