I wonder why algebraic notation?

I don't want to be picky, but I don't see the correlation between chess notation history and imperial measurement standards.

It may not be useless but I agree it is very annoying. I hate all those signs on people's lawns before an election.

Yes, that's the ambiguity of it.  To me, KN simply signifies the knight currently on the kingside.

Inasmuch as every thread degenerates in much the same way, the few literary moments help me think of the humanity of bears.

Most of the time when I open a book written in the old short descriptive notation, I sense that my aesthetic sensibilities will require reprogramming after study of a few chess games. At least the long descriptive employed by Howard Staunton and his predecessors offered a poetic element. Once stripped bare of the imagery of of the village, the simplicity of a coordinate system seemed cleaner, and almost poetic. It was no surprise to learn later that it had first been advocated by German writers.

The French were the first to propose eating those disgusting gastropods... snails! And they think that Jerry Lewis is God. That is why We will have nothing to do with the French!!!  >:[

I've heard that before, but I thought it must have been a joke. I watched about an hour's worth of Jerry Lewis films, and he was just silly and annoying. Not at all witty.

You were actually able to take a full hour of Jerry Lewis? You do not strike Us as the masochistic type. :)

One of many errors I have made in life

Yes, the children have an excuse for liking Jerry Lewis, but the French have no excuse for calling him a genius

Yes. I should have said popularized. It was popularized by the German Handbuch and other state of the art publications.

Exactly! Ridiculous. I'm still laughing too. 

If ink and syllables are that important, algebraic notation could be shortened even further by abbreviating non-ambiguous takes as "x", omitting the piece and square. Then the printed notation would match the spoken convention ("takes, takes"). Of course, that makes keeping track of context even more essential. Imo, conventional algebraic strikes the right balance - but maybe that's because it is what I have gotten used to (having started chess in the descriptive era).

Btw, I'd still like to know whether people playing black picture the board in the conventional orientation (white at bottom) with unrotated coordinates, or rotate the board and coordinate system in their head to place black at the bottom. The former would be more 'logical' as that is what books mostly do. However, it seems more 'natural' to me to visualize the game with my (or 'my', if I'm following the pov of another player) pieces closest.

Personally, I don't have a problem with either flavor.  If you give me something, I'll thank you for it, provided it's not with malice and I know you.  My question in your quote was rather academic, not dogmatic.  If you observe this thread, people got angry when I not only point out algebraic flaws that I know exists in descriptive, but also reveal characteristics that only exist in one of them and not the other.  And all that just by being stupid.

I agree.

Good point.  When it's clear on the board that there's no second matching piece (e.g., only one rook), you can use R-Q1 instead of RQ-Q1 or R/1-Q1 (the 1 referencing the rank).  This is also true if there's two rooks and the second rook can't move there.  If you can't move a pawn on the king or queen side because of blockage and the counterpart pawn can, you don't need to add the the clarifying K or Q in the notation.

Wow! The world is diverse. I irrationally avoided playing 1.P-K4 for several years because Fischer advocated it (I did grow out of such nonsense). To embrace any notion of his that is not specifically about chess strategy because it was his view would have been anathema.

Too funny! I started out playing 1.e4 because "if it was good enough for Fischer, it was good enough for me". It wasn't until I realized that I totally sucked at 1.e4 that I started playing QP openings.

But Fischer played 1.P-K4 not 1.e4 - maybe that's where you went wrong? 

Algebraic notation is dry, tasteless and nondescript I've. It's like reading a math problem in base two - I have to translate it. When black plays P-K5, I can visualize it. When black plays e5-e4, I must translate the "e" into a "K" and remember that the pawn isn't moving backwards. I'd like to see the chess apparently offer the choice to old Flintstones like me. And by the way, "apatosaurus" (deceptive lizard ) is not a scientifically accurate name- the brontosaurus who got busted, so to speak, did not deliberately switch skulls with a camarasaurus.

hmm with that logic snark63 we can even go back further to the notation i have in one of my books where its written like this

White's King pawn to King pawn four     Black's King pawn to King pawn four

If you cannt picture algebraic in your mind then thats just a lack of practice.

I can do both and algebraic is inherently more logical and easier to grasp because of the lack of conflicts.