> Second - thank you to the person who actually made this. This is incredibly hilarious

Hey there, thank you, I'm the creator of this.

> I'm gonna go ahead an assume they have an account here

I have an account here, but I don't use ycombinator this much. Just got notified by someone that a thread about my project is getting some attention here

> Lastly - I know that this is a joke project, but one thing I'm not understanding: how does the system read the current state of the chess board?

It gets the state of the board though a manually inputted FEN code. Unless the user of this would hook it up with a camera and scan the board in real time, it's assumed that whoever is using this has someone helping them. So the helper would operate the backend, input the board, and send it to the end-user