Time
Travel
Institute of
Columbia
agape - The fact that an exploding chessman never captures a traveling chessman or a resonator. Agape is the unbalancing factor which allows time travel to occur in practice. Without agape, instant revenge facilitated by time travel would make a time travel first strike an invariably losing move.
annihilation - The sudden disappearance of a two chessmen from the chessboard. The two chessmen involved in an annihilation are always of the same color and piece-type, and they are always untraveled chessman and traveling chessman and are one move apart just prior to the annihilation. Seen from another perspective, an annihilation is simply the instant in which a noumenal chessman begins to time travel.
assassination - An exploding chessman's capture of a hierarchically superior piece from an explosion square one move distant from an explosion support.
exploding chessman - A traveled chessman on the move in which it first appears on the board.
explosion - The sudden appearance of two new chessman on the chessboard. The two chessmen are always of the same color and piece-type, and they are always traveling chessman and traveled chessman. Seen from another perspective, an explosion is simply the instant in which a time traveling noumenal chessman ceases to time travel.
explosion support - An untraveled chessman that could reach a given explosion square in three moves or fewer (if the owner of the untraveled chessman were allowed to make these moves in succession), that is owned by the player making a given explosion, that is the same piece-type as the piece-type of the given explosion, and that was not needed for a previous explosion. (Every explosion requires an explosion support.)
grammatically correct position - A position, for a given player, (1) not deriving from a position containing an ultimately captured traveling chessman belonging to that player, and (2) not containing a traveling chessman belonging to the given player that cannot conceivably be annihilated in future play.
noumenal chessman - The ideal chessman, having a personal history, and whose phenomenal manifestations - untraveled chessman, traveling chessman, traveled chessman - are stages in that personal history (but with the events of the "traveling chessman" stage occurring in reverse order on the board as compared to the order in which they occur in the personal history).
resolved position - A position, for a given player, which is a grammatically correct position for that player and which contains no traveling chessmen belonging to that player.
resonator - An untraveled chessman which, conceivably, could reach a friendly traveling chessman of the same piece-type and thereby trigger an annihilation.
traveled chessman - The chessman that appears in an explosion, one move from the explosion square, and which thereafter moves exactly like a chessman of the same piece-type in standard chess. A traveled chessman is a noumenal chessman that has traveled backwards in time and is now again moving forward in time.
traveling chessman - The chessman that appears in an explosion on the explosion square, which cannot move, and which can annihilate with an untraveled chessman of the same piece-type. A traveling chessman is a noumenal chessman moving backwards in time.
untraveled chessman - The chessman that is on the board in the original position, which can annihilate with a traveling chessman of the same piece-type, and which otherwise moves like a chessman of the same piece-type in standard chess. An untraveled chessman is a noumenal chessman that has not yet traveled backwards in time.