Re: Proposal to encode dominoes and other game symbols

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 18:09:01 CDT

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    John Hudson asked:

    > I would
    > like to know what the presumed purpose of U+2616 and U+2617 is.

    In Unicode? To map to JIS X 0213. You need to ask the JSC what *their*
    intent was in adding these two characters to the Japanese standard.

    > Not so. Both sides has four generals: two 'gold' and two 'silver'. The gold and silver
    > generals differ from each other, but each side's pieces are entirely identical.

    Except for orientation on the board, of course.

    >
    > By the way, if any Unicoders play shogi,

    I do -- or used to, a number of years ago.

    > I could bring my travel set next time I come to
    > the conference.

    Unfortunately, I generally attend the UTC meetings and not the conferences,
    so our distribution is complementary.

    --Ken

    P.S. Regarding the dominoes per se, I'm coming down on the side of
    those arguing (as John Cowan has) that the *orientation* of the bones
    is not significant in the plain text usages. The *characters* to
    encode here should be for each distinct bone, regardless of orientation.
    Layout orientation can be handled by other means. I also concur with
    John that going beyond the double-twelve (for now) is just speculative
    and not supported by actual use in dominoes books. This is not a
    case where things are made simpler by encoding a set of 724 symbols.
    With only a canonical orientation of each distinct *bone* required for
    the basic characters, and 0..12 = 13, implies (13 x 12)/2 = 78
    combinations + 1 for the back of a tile, you just need 79 symbols for
    a core set. *That* would be a far more palatable proposal than the
    current one.



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