I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
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Even the pawns had a nice design which clearly indicated that movement of one square forward (normally), or attacking on the diagonal, were both allowed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/c1ri78/t...
Not all of the moves were the clearest, but it was still handy while trying to learn.
Displaying usual the moves on the pieces is certainly super-handy for beginners to understand the moves, but as you've pointed out: Chess also has other nuances.
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I was showing off one night and, at the tail end of an end game, and promoted a pawn to a pawn once it reached the far rank. It didn't really help in that game (although I can envision corner cases where it could be helpful as a blocker, but any other promotion is equally useful a blocker), but I had a move that I could afford to burn and it was fun to do so I did it.
It was a fun game. 10/10, did repeat other fun (and absurd) chess games.
umm. Commendably warped, but I'm not sure that's legal?
(BTW many years ago I experimented creating chess variants, before I even knew it was a thing. I invented a number which all felt contrived, but one actually felt right and an improvement, which is the ability to take your own pieces, as well as the enemy's. Turns out that somebody's already invented it (search for 'self eliminator chess') and they considered it to have potential. The value of it was it allows you to trade off position for pieces. It really changed how the game felt for the better. FYI anyway, YMMV)
> umm. Commendably warped, but I'm not sure that's legal?
Interesting point. Here is what the FIDE handbook says about it (emphasis mine):
“When a pawn reaches the rank furthest from its starting position it must be exchanged as part of the same move on the same square for a new queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same colour. The player’s choice is not restricted to pieces that have been captured previously. This exchange of a pawn for another piece is called ‘promotion’ and the effect of the new piece is immediate.”
Source: Article 3.7.e of https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf
I mean: We're not playing ranked games here. It's supposed to be fun, and it was a fun game.
Self eliminator chess sounds like an interesting dynamic. I'll have to check it out. Some of the games where my thinking feels best (if that makes sense) are the games where a ravenous opponent has shewdly eaten most of my pieces.
I hope SE chess lives up to its promise! It felt right and somehow freeing not to be always hemmed in by your own pieces.
If chess is a war simulation, then: It seems like it is both brutal and useful to deliberately destroy one's own units.
(It's bad PR, always, but I'm both the PR department and the native public audience. It'll be fine on my side of the board, and it might even frighten the enemy.)
So can a promotion to rook or a bishop, if for example promotion would cause a stalemate, especially if you're in a zugzwang.
Although such situations in actual real-world chess are _exceedingly_ rare, they make for a good puzzle material.
There's a lot of other versions sold under "chess teacher", this seems to be the most modern: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266236564204?hash=item3dfcef92ec:g:...
It appears that it was originally sold as "The Educator": https://www.ebay.com/itm/325899664936?hash=item4be1223e28:g:...
Not affiliated with any of those and they probably aren't the best prices (just the first ones I found), but should give you enough to track one down.
https://sketchfab.com/cook4986/collections/instructional-che...
The Knight was by far the hardest to design, but the 3D aspect helps visualize movement across two planes (I.e., jumps)
I.e. the knight is an anti-queen.
[1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129
very old variants often had such compound pieces like for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Acedrex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#/media/File:Gl...
- n-square Chebyshev distance forms concentric squares around your starting point
- n-square Manhattan Distance forms diamonds (meaning up/down/left/right = 1 space away but all diagonals are 2 spaces away)
We could also say the Knight can go everywhere a queen can't in the 3-square Manhattan distance and this might be more useful since it is all points along that boundary except the corners! (We got an in the wild "2 problems in computer science" with an "off by 1" error :)
[0] https://chris3606.github.io/GoRogue/articles/grid_components...
I think this is something math education can improve on since we are highly visual creatures. But it is always a tough balance since that same tool to help learning can decrease generalization if internalized improperly. But that can also be said about anything and is why I dislike the common test focused paradigm of education. As I think we've been doing it long enough that students have found studying for the test -- as opposed to study for learning -- is optimal. Goodhart always wins lol
A simple matrix multiplication only performs a linear transformation. To get a nonlinear affine transformation you need to augment the matrix and vector with extra dimensions containing carefully selected extra ones and zeros in addition to the translation. The end result is still a linear transformation of the supplied vector, but looks like an affine transformation if you ignore the final dimension.
But yes, I did not pick that up in linear algebra. It wasn't even mentioned there. All the fun stuff was taught in computer graphics.
https://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/ila5/linearalgebra5_1...
For more on the underlying geometry, see, e.g.,
https://archive.org/details/elementarymathem0000klei/page/70...
or, for a more modern, abstract formulation,
(And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot.
So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves, it loses in attacking spirit.)
The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess variant would help to revitalise the game given how computer evaluation has affected theory.[3] There were also a couple of no-castling tournaments played, but like chess960[4], opinions were very much divided about whether or not it was actually any kind of improvement.
[1] Even though I pretty much always fall into stalemate traps in blitz.
[2] Former world champion and lately old guy shouting at clouds about cheating
[3] https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik...
I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.)
So to make chess more elegant in how the rules are formulated (but probably not a better game, mind you), I would suggest removing all special rules around check and checkmate. Just replace it with the rule that you lose when your king gets captured (and obviously, keep Zugzwang).
Sorry, I was not clear that I also wanted to remove special handling of check and checkmate.
(Btw, this feels very similar to the rules against self-sacrifice in Go.)
There is a Chess game that does this. It's Chinese Chess (which is just as old as Western Chess, and has the same origin in India). In Chinese Chess, the objective is to capture (or as the Chinese say, "eat") the king. There is no prohibition against putting your King in check. It works just fine, unless the only pieces left are Kings. The main problem is players doing checks forever or chasing pieces around forever: the rule is that if you do that you lose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi
Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation.
> Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
I would favour that rule as well, but keep in mind that even in Go that is a very modern formulation / variation of this rule. Past formulations were about as clunky as chess's stalemate rules, and even left some situation (that were extremely rare in practice) without a satisfactory resolution.
Btw, in Go the 'board' isn't the only state the game has: you also count prisoners. After a complicated ko exchange, the board might look the same, but the prisoner count has gone up for both players. I assume the rules probably only care about the difference in prisoner counts (and board state) to determine whether a state has been repeated; not the absolute prisoner count.
Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Which in turn makes only the most boring openings viable.
Now every game is boring.
Also, in tournament play, finishing your game early just means you have to wait longer until the next round, even in a round robin event. Because chess tournaments pretty much never start a round until the previous round is completely over. Not since adjournments stopped being a thing.
> Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating).
(I mention the zero sum game, because eg real life war is not a zero sum game. So it's perfectly possible for certain actions, like starting to shoot medics, to be bad for both parties. But in chess, what's bad for one party is automatically good for the other.)
> [..] which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game.
You know that the other guy gets to have a vote on this, too?
You can also have a look at the Eastern chess variations (Shogi etc) that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141452 mentions that don't have check rules, and see whether for them every game is boring?
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation of the impact of no-check-rules on western chess. It doesn't make everything boring.
> Stalemate=win chess has little effect on the opening and middlegame play, mostly affecting the evaluation of certain endgames. As such, it does not increase decisiveness of the game by much, as it seems to almost always be possible to defend without relying on stalemate as a drawing resource. Therefore, this chess variant is not likely to be useful for sidestepping known theory or for making the game substantially more decisive at the high level. The overall effect of the change seems to be minor.
This does not seem to support your suggestion that eliminating check rules and ending the game with the capture of the king, would make all games boring.
(However, they had really good computers play, who do not get stressed out, albeit they do make worse moves on shorter time controls.)
The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate).
Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate because there's only a 2×2 square left and nowhere else for the kings to go except within each others' attack range.
That's what I was asking - do they get to "pass" and the other side gets to move? This is how it works in the game of go for instance. In chess that would be more or less equivalent to the non-stalemated player winning, because in many stalemate positions if you had an extra move you could checkmate.
The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
I'm not seriously entertaining your Fortnite rule. That is such a radical departure from the game of chess as not to be the same at all, so you could have that as a chess variant or whatever but it's fundamentally a different game.
[1] https://youtu.be/YB_LLivPlY8?si=dWl2bEAEeRmzhBiC
[2] Defending king in the corner with the opposing queen a knight's move away and no other legal moves for the defender. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-analysis/the-rosen-tra...
As said elsewhere, I would suggest removing rules against putting yourself in check.
> The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
That's why I was careful in saying that the proposed change would make the rules more elegant, less clunky. I did not say anything about this making chess a better game. Sometimes adding weird corner cases to your rules can make the game better.
Just look at all the weird rules that you can find in Skat or Doppelkopf. (Though Mü is an example of a game with much cleaner rules that captures a similar spirit.)
It's like you introduced a bug in refactoring and are insisting on the change because the code looks nicer now.
However, I don't actually think that removing check rules make chess worse. But that's subject to experiment.
See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for exactly such experiments.
If you run out of legal moves then that seems like an outright loss condition, no? My understanding of "stalemate" is when you can move but there's no way to actually force a win (e.g. kings chasing each other around the board). I ain't a chess expert, so maybe I'm using the wrong terminology.
1. The threefold repetition rule: if a board position repeats 3 times either side may claim a draw. In online chess this is automatic but in over the board chess people may not always realise the position has repeated especially if there is a gap between repetitions.
2. The 50 move rule: if 50 moves pass without a pawn moving or a capture being made then it is a draw.
3. Insufficient material: if neither side has sufficient material to checkmate then it is a draw. In some rule systems [1] it has to be sufficient material to force checkmate in some it's just sufficient material to mate[2] (ie the defending side can blunder into it). So if there are no pawns and both sides just have a lone king, or it is king and knight vs king or king and bishop vs king then it's always a draw. In USCF and chess.com king and 2 knights is a draw in FIDE tournaments or on lichess it's not. King and 2 bishops on up is not a draw because you can force checkmate.
4. Draw by agreement: the two sides can agree a draw. In some tournament situations this is only allowed after a certain move but there are ways the players can deliberately go into some sort of situation which is a known theoretical draw and just repeat 3 times by tacit agreement. Including amusingly/notoriously (depending on your pov) the Carlsen/Nakamura "double bongcloud" game [3]
[1] US Chess federation and chess.com in particular
[2] FIDE and I think lichess
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/18/bongcloud-meme...
But they also have weird rules that both (A) forbid putting your king in check, and (B) hand you a draw when you are out of legal moves.
A simpler version of chess would actually play until the king is captured, and allow people to move into check.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf reports on some experiments with variants like this.
Another interesting thing to try out is to allow players to capture their own pieces. Or to abolish castling.
If the only two pieces left are kings, that is a stalemate. It is not even a legal move for two kings to come within one square of each other.
Then that side loses. If they can't move, it's because any move would put them in check and therefore captured next turn. If they're in that position, they've obviously lost.
Passing makes no sense since it contradicts the rule that says chess players must always make a move during their turns. There is no contradiction with stalemates: since they must make a move and any move puts the king in check, it is hopeless and they lose.
> Neither seems at all satisfactory.
Can't be worse than drawing a game because the clearly beaten opponent can't legally move into a check.
This is an actual strategy. Refuse to resign and try to get the opponent to blunder his pieces into a stalemate in the end game thereby drawing the game. It's asinine but sometimes it actually works, especially at my noobish level.
Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?
If the promoting piece can't check but immediately blocks the last movement squares for that king, as a queen may easily accidentally do, the player who has only the king gets a stalemate draw out of a technically lost position.
Making a knight to avoid stalemate is actually extremely rare, because very often a knight isn't enough to win. Making a rook is more common there, but even that's rare.
This also leads to situations where two knights can be positioned amongst other pieces such that one knight is able to capture the other but not vice versa.
However in western chess, it doesn't matter what pieces are in the other 4 locations of the 3x2 rectangle.
In Chinese chess, you can only move from A to B if X is unoccupied. The locations marked "-" don't matter if they are occupied or not.
A X -
- - B
A -
X -
- B
- - B
A X -
- A
- X
B -
Of course, all the other pieces have their own rules as well, so it's a significantly different game. There is no queen, the elephant is sort of like a bishop but must move 2 squares at a time, the cannon moves horizontally and vertically but cannot kill without having exactly one (not zero) piece in-between, the "guards" and king all cannot leave the king's palace which is a 3x3 box, the pawns can move sideways after they cross the river in the middle of the board, etc. Come to think of it the only piece that has the exact same rules are the 2 "chariots" which are positioned in the same place as western rooks and function exactly like western rooks.
I don't know people that think or thought that horses move "one straight, one diagonal".
"Move one straight and then move one diagonal into a 135° turned direction."
[1] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/27815/why-does-a-k...
After one move, it can go to f4 where it can add on as a second attacker to the queen on 4 squares. After another move it can go to d3, where it can again cover squares the queen cant (e2,e5).
So I guess its both because it has a lot of alignment in doubling as an attack, and covering nearby squares the queen cannot.
"the knight may move to any nearest cell not on an orthogonal or diagonal line on which it stands"
Knights have odd-even parity, i.e., they attack only opposite colored squares.
Pop quiz: How many knights can you place on a board so that they don't attack each other?
Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
Another is that a queen, like a rook, can reach any unblocked square in at most two moves. A Knight can require up to six moves!
Add to this the ability to move and attack diagonally like a bishop, but without the restriction of staying on the same colour of squares...
The queen is immensely powerful.
However, once a player becomes more proficient, not only the obvious superiority of the Queen, but even of the Bishop (other things being equal, Bishops are thought to be actually somewhat more valuable, especially as a pair) starts becoming apparent.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
The complement-queen I would say
"The knight may move to one of the squares nearest to that on which it stands but not on the same rank, file or diagonal."
(a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point.
(b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make the bishop look like it is "sniping" along the diagonals while the rook looks more "sweeping" maybe?
(c) don't make the king a little-queen. Make the king a little square to emphasize "it can only threaten the neighboring square," then it looks more visually distinctive.
The pawns are fun though.
This was my first thought too. If the "feet" of all of the pieces were "flat", or parallel to the rows of the board, you could more easily tell their proper orientation.
I guess there is still a cultural aversion to its use, however.
...anyway so people can see it better, that actual character is a pretty close representation of the knight's movement, it's just a little hard to tell the 2-then-1 distances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EA%96%85
It is also opinionated, in the sense that the vectors for Knight moves is [2, 1] and [1, 2] (whereby in both cases negative numbers can be used)... so whether you visualize a Knight move towards the left top corner as an L (x-1 first, then y-2), or as an ꓶ (y-2 first, then x-1) is an arbitrary decision.
It might be my OCD side coming out, but any design prioritizing one of these perspectives over the equally valid alternative doesn't feel "clean" to me somehow : )
(Not to be confused with the much larger Axel-Springer publishers, nor the American academic Springer publisher.)
This design doesn't account for many special qualities and behaviors pieces exhibit. It doesn't indicate that
* while pawns do capture diagonally (forward), they are pushed forward in straight line
* they can capture en passant
* they can move by 2 squares from their initial file, and only from the initial file
* they can be promoted to another piece
* Knight moves are not inhibited by the presence of other pieces (unlike any other piece, a Knight can "jump over" pieces)
* castling
* special status of the King (unless it's conveyed by that circle in the middle, but it's not nearly as readable a symbol as a crown)
So this design kind of works if you already have complete information from elsewhere, but isn't that great if it were your first source of info.
It also loses the poetic aesthetics of the traditional pieces, with queens and kings and bishops etc.
I've almost never seen a beginner mess up the basics of how the pieces move(what this piece set displays). Probably 95% of confusion about rules in new players is about the things you mention. Especially en passant and castling rules.
The rule on castling through check is especially confusing, and I've seen even master strength players believe that you can't castle long if b1 or b8 is attacked. Another common mistake is forgetting the rook or king has previously moved.
En passant is also very confusing for beginners because there's no indication of it being possible in the current board state. It depends on the previous ply.
Repetition is also a major footgun in tournament play. It's often referred to as repetition of moves, but it's actually repetition of the position(which is typically reached via repetition of moves, but doesn't have to). And there's a very specific procedure in tournament chess for claiming a repetition. You have to write down your move, stop the clock and call the arbiter without making the move. If you make the move and hit the clock, now your opponent has every right to make another move, creating a new position. The repetition no longer counts when that happens(so you can't claim e.g oh the position repeated a 3rd time 15 moves ago, gimme a draw).
I actually lost a game this way when I had a repetition in a losing position.
Obviously I meant a rank (horizontal), not a file (vertical), sorry. Cannot edit the comment anymore
But I hate the way the pawns face. Makes sense! But it still reads, to me, like one of those "color, but the text is in a different color" things. Feels like the pawns should be facing the opposite direction. =/
So pawns would be
/|\ /|\
\|/ \|/
■ ■
P
■ ■
■ ■
N
■ ■
■ ■
Edit: Though good point to the parallel commenters, the knight shape is harder to differentiate and kind of throws me off. But maybe tweaks there.
If you ask an experienced player to use a weird piece set, you will only be introducing error and cognitive overhead. If you ask someone naive to the game to use the piece set, do they internalize how the pieces move more quickly and get over the impedance when they start to use a normal set?
Going at a tangent to your idea, maybe it is possible to construct a set that aids the performance of a naive player, but which degrades the performance of a more experienced opponent. Could that handicap be as great as a club player offering pawn odds against a naive opponent?
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
Blindfolded chess for the better player ;)
Magnus Carlson, considered one of - if not the - best chess players of all time has a famous video of him playing three chess matches simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning all three.
Once you get to a certain point not only the movements but also entire gameplay strategies become internalized.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.
Knight's profile is the L-shape.
Rook has four parapets (and four gaps).
Bishop has a diagonal slit.
King has 8 stubby protrusions in his crown.
Queen has 8 pointy protrusions in her crown.
Pawns are most basic (ironic considering their qualities are most byzantine). I guess it's nice to have a baseline piece for aesthetics.
Always loved how the shape and size of the pieces indicate their moves while still being simple and recognisable.
<https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF1392.jpeg> <https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF2887.jpeg>
That said, I'd use a square for the rooks so they don't get confused with the bishops as they get moved and maybe an L shape for the knights. It would definitely make it easy for beginners to learn how each piece moves.
Which is more or less the easiest part of the game to learn, and one which pretty much anybody will have down after one or maybe two games.
It's a clever little idea to share on Twitter but in practice I think it would make the board slower to read for advanced players, because so many pieces look similar.
Recognizing the pieces is the easiest part of chess. And distinct symbolic forms are actually easier than representational forms like these. Similarly, iconic phonetic notation not a good replacement for the Latin alphabet
Unfortunately, I never got around to writing a good AI so you could play against the computer. At some point, I'd like to get back to that project.
I don't think anyone that actually plays or teaches chess thinks this is a good set design. Honestly amazed by how many people called this clever. I also find it weird that OP claims it makes the board "easier to probe", when it does the exact opposite. This is a textbook example of making up a problem, rather than a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#/media/File:KnightsTempl...
(To be clear, its much older than 741 years, but the way the board is crystal clear and instantly recognisable in that illustration is really striking)
This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3, despite both having apparently equal freedom of movement (just rotated 45 degrees). The bishop will be able to access strictly fewer squares than the rook even in the best case, and usually much fewer. And the bishop is stuck on one color.
They denote the power of pieces in relation to eachother, as a general rule with lots of exceptions, and reflects many material imbalances that are often comparable in strength(usually in the endgame). The unit of measurement here is the material value of a single pawn.
3(3x1) pawns are often enough compensation for for a knight(3) or a bishop(3 + ε).
3 minor pieces(3×3) are often sufficient compensation for a queen(9).
One minor piece and 2 pawns(3+2) are often sufficient for a rook(5).
Two rooks(2x5) are typically slightly stronger than a queen(9).
Two minor pieces(2x3) are typically slightly stronger than a rook(5).
There are different systems that are derived from number of squares attacked. One thing to note about these systems is that pawns are not created equal. Rook pawns attack one squares less than other pawns, for instance.
Such evaluations are only a rule of thumb intended for beginners.
It's all context dependent. There are positions where a Bishop is more powerful than a Rook. Other things being equal, Bishops tend to be preferred over Knights in serious play (especially when you've got a Bishop pair, which is synergically more powerful than one Bishop times two), even though both are theoretically "worth" 3 pawns. Two minor pieces are usually worth more than a Rook and a pawn, and more often than not it isn't a good idea to exchange the former for the latter, even though the total value appears the same (3+3 = 5+1). And so on.
The pieces resemble the movements in most cases, but also pack together into a rectangle.
I don't see it. Do they really?
https://i.imgur.com/mXd0L3P.png (also blue-vs-red, to give it a bit of color)
Non-colored version: https://i.imgur.com/A1Vofpz.png
Wish we had a league without castling for that sole purpose.
Kramnik revived the idea during his collaboration with DeepMind (where he tested several chess variants, revolving around only minor, albeit impactful adjustments to the ruleset).
One potential problem with no castling is that players may end up castling "manually", which takes several moves and becomes a mundane "housekeeping" task, actually sucking some dynamics out of the game. That was probably the reason why it was invented in the first place, to sort of automate the obvious thing away.
By the way, European chess added much more to the original version beyond just castling. The Queen would originally move in the same manner as the King (only by one square), the "mad Queen" thing is a European invention. So is the pawns' ability to move forward by 2 squares from their initial position. (And I'm guessing the incentive for that was of similar nature as above - to speed the game up).
It brings to mind the idea that everything is ultimately a representation, even the things designed to be as straightforward as possible.
The lines don't need to be so thick I think, which would allow little arrow heads to make it even more obvious. And while we're at it, they don't even need to look like actual physical pieces, so the knight could be designed to show how it hops over squares by having blank spots in its icon.
edit:forgot to mention who made it Ove Arup (who founded the Arup group)
[1]https://www.bonhams.com/auction/19097/lot/49/a-prototype-arc...
I'd probably go with circle for the king, and maybe an L or a sideways H for the knight, even though they break the original design rule. Otherwise K/Q/N just look too similar.
Not that that's an exclusive list either,
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/75/8a/79758a3355c2bed372aa...
Yes, queen already had 8 point hat wide because whole board, king eight point cross, small for one step.
Bishop has a diagonal cut in its cap.
Knight as a horse, the long nose and ears are the knight move.
Castle with a plus cut in the ramparts.
Pawn is a dot for its usual move, with the ring collar for the optional second step.
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display: none;
}
This will leave "holes" in the numbering of the list of items as the numbers are not calculated based on the structure of the document but are rather hardcoded. You could definitely fix this with some more funky css rules if needed.
I've thought about having the squares show light shades of primary colors so you could see which side is attacking a square, and the composite colors would highlight contested ones, darker shades would mean more attackers. Like red/blue/purple or yellow/red/orange.
Very odd.
Lovely communicative design