Ask HN: What would be the best method for communicating chess moves?
It comes down to two questions:
- What is the least amount of signals that someone needs? E.g. direction, coordinates, the piece to move?
- How to transfer these signals unnoticed?
- What is the least amount of signals that someone needs? E.g. direction, coordinates, the piece to move?
- How to transfer these signals unnoticed?
“For example, in chess, if a "node" is considered to be a legal position, the average branching factor has been said to be about 35, and a statistical analysis of over 2.5 million games revealed an average of 31.”
So, if (all) you can assume is that the receiver can write down all legal moves and order them in some way, it seems ≈5 bits are sufficient (so, one letter or digit is more than enough). You should vary code length depending on the number of legal moves (That is less than the 6 bits you need to indicate a single field on the board)
I think ease of understanding of the message and robustness of transmission may be more important than message length, though.
He expressed discomfort at taking Carlson's accusations at face value given that they mentioned needing permission to speak from the person accused (??) but agreed that cheating is having a disastrous effect on the field in general and that it seems to be at some sort of tipping point.
snip for interesting content...
"The Thing was designed by Soviet Russian inventor Leon Theremin,[4] best known for his invention of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument. "
Infrasonics could be a candidate as well.
That's going to highly depend on the player. For a beginner you'd have to spell it out exactly. For a master player, you can shorten whole groups of moves to a few bits (which opening to use), some positions will need only "yes, do the obvious thing", etc. The design would be very different there.
For those missing the reference:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d3w9z/did-hans-neimann-chea...