Study by Philipp Stamma

Can anyone tell me when (in what year) the following study by Philipp Stamma was first published?

 Thank you in advance.

Can't say exactly, but it would probably have been within 25 years of 1730. Averbakh's "Knight Endings" contains the following variant by Troitsky, but also undated.

                                                         White to play and win.

Repost:

Wikipedia says Philipp Stamma's "reputation rests largely on his authorship of the early chess book Essai sur le jeu des echecs published 1737 in France."

Yes. - and if he played 3.Kf1, you get OP's position (but there wouldn't be much point).

I had a position like that against a guy in blitz recently, my king had trapped his king in front of his edge pawn and I had a knight, I knew it was winnable but had less than ten seconds left on my clock, couldn't think fast enough to solve the damn thing, so, draw. 

It was published in 1737 in Essai sur le jeu des echecs https://www.google.com/books/edition/Essai_sur_le_jeu_des_echecs/IxpZAAAAYAAJ, and then again in English in 1745 as The Noble Game of Chess, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Noble_Game_of_Chess/D_4UAAAAYAAJ.
Here is the page from Essai:

And the English version:

Tried to carbon date it from my screenshot but failed. Guess we gotta believe the postman

Why does Stamma call the king "E"? Or the knight "B"? I can't find a reason in French or in English.

I'm not much into language but the bet that the "E" stands for "Empereur" or "Emperor" looks like a winner. Can't come up with the same odds for a "B-word".

Well, Boxer was the horse in Animal Farm, but that might have come later.

The king starts on the e-file. The queen's knight starts on the b-file.

That sounds more plausible.

He calls each piece by the letter of the file that piece begins on. Hence, rooks are A and H, knights are B and G, et cetera.

His notation was the beginning of the system that we use today, but needed some refinement to get us where we are. His books have been digitized by Google and thus are easily read. That’s where I got the screenshots.

He must have been a tremendous retro-analyst knowing where the knight came from. One of those lost technologies from ancient times I suppose

No. His description of the position includes the starting file, so the picture shown in the first post would represent one of ten different positions in Stamma's notation. Not very compatible with retro problems in general (e.g. if A is on H.1 you know there's no castling) and Tromp's count of legal positions would need revising.

Question is, what does he call the knight if it's a promoted pawn? How, for example, would he have described this final position in Crafty v Nakamura 2007`?

The knight on f3 is G.F.3, but the rest are promoted. 

I think maybe he called both knights B, both rooks A etc. so F-G-H were not used.

All this just shows that even a brilliant idea might have a very clumsy first appearance, and it needs another simple idea (in this case, calling the pieces by their name) for the whole thing to click into place.

I think maybe he called both knights B, both rooks A etc. so F-G-H were not used.

That sounds more likely. Superior in fact because it's language independent apart from the alphabet.

Shame he didn't think of using 1-8 for the files. (Also simplifies visualising the moves if you're not into base 18 arithmetic.)

Maybe take a look at his book instead of speculating.

People are always very forgiving about ancient habits. I am not. Their brains were not that far apart from ours on the evolutionary scale and it is not that hard to conjure up a comprehensive notation system for chess. I am entitled to make that statement since I reinvented parts of mathematics in High School.before they were taught on a higher level. These things are doable even with modest talents.

As they say in the programming world, "if all else fails, read the f***ing manual".

As also often happens, the manual doesn't tell you what you want to know. The system is incomplete.

It does at least clear up whether F-H are used to denote pieces (they are) but the system of stars is insufficient to accomodate some positions with three or more pieces of the same kind and colour, e.g. he doesn't say how to specify White to play f3-g5 here in some games

Edit: That should read three or more pieces with the same label and the same colour, so the problem only occurs with five or more pieces of the same kind and colour. My diagram doesn't apply. The moves that Stamma  can't specify in a particular diagram will depend on the labelling. E.g. if the h3 knight's label matches at least two others in the diagram below, then h3-f4 can't be specified whereas if it matches at most one it can. But in the latter case, if it matches, say, just g6, then h5-f3 can't be specified. 

If there are less than four men on the board of a given colour and type and no more than two have the same label, the choice of label on promoting a pawn of that colour can avoid increasing the number beyond two, but if it produces five pieces of the same colour and type, at least three will necessarily have the same label.

The problem can't occur with rooks or bishops.