Determining chess 960 starting positions with a standard die (no rethrows)
Chess 960 is a chess game variant invented by Bobby Fischer in 1996. In Chess 960, the pawns are lined up on the second rank as in standard chess. The first rank pieces are positioned randomly whilst conforming to certain caveats - the king must be placed somewhere between the rooks to allow castling; the bishops must stand on opposite coloured squares. I've worked out a system that allows me to select a starting arrangement for the first rank pieces using a standard six sided die without the need for rethrows. My dice procedure is different from that of I ngo Althöfer's (devised in 1998), where rethrows can occur. Some information on how his system works can be seen here https://www.chessvariants.org/diffsetup.dir/fischer-random-setup.html The die I use to generate the random piece arrangement is a standard cube/hexahedron (one of the platonic solids). O nly five or six throws of the die are needed to formulate one of the 960 starting positions. Rethrows add to the t