Real Time Chess – A physical chess board without the concept of turns
github.com
github.com
If anyone has any questions about the engineering process/game itself I'd be happy to answer.
Also, is there a rule about moving one piece at a time? I was surprised I didn't see anyone two-handing it. If it were me, my opening move would be to grab 4 pawns at one (2 in each hand) and shifting them all forward two spaces. That would have been my first instinct.
As for moving multiple pieces at once, the rule I have is only one hand and one piece at a time. This goes a long way towards preventing accidental bumps into other pieces and weird board states where there are multiple pieces in the process of being moved at once.
Congrats on such a cool build and for making the front page.
If we’re doing a line-level read, though, it did take me a lot of reading to understand what the project was. Nothing that couldn’t be addressed with one more massage of your subhead “a physical chess board without the concept of turns”!
Super cool project, incredible execution, and you’re so personable—thank you for this work and your video!
How do you handle the interaction between 2 pieces being moved at the same time ? Can I dodge a capture by picking up a piece ? Say 2 rooks are facing each other, how do you handle a mutual capture attempt ?
I have solved this problem, but still in a turn based setting :
* Both player choose their move, and moves are resolved simultaneously
* A piece cannot be moved 2 turns in a row (discrete cooldown time)
* When 2 pieces land at the same place, they are both considered captured.
* If they move in straight lines, in opposite direction, they are also both captured.
* NO CAPTURE for pieces crossing each other path / knights can exchange their positions.
* No pat. A player can skip his turn.
* the goal is to capture the oposite king obviosuly, not to checkmake it.
With a low blitz time, it solves the same fundamental problem as RT chess, but it can only be played online.
From a few test game, it looks like basic chess structure is preserved. But then there is the question of finding the Nash equilibirum of the game ! 2by2-simultaneous-move-chess with both rook and king leads to some sort of rock-paper-scissor.
The physical board and magnets definitely add a cool factor to it as does the physical dexterity element. Nice project!
My kind of humor.
Always found it an interesting aspect of chess that the most "common sense" rules (Players take turns; no skipping; one move per turn) result in the most unintuitive outcomes and a massive increase in complexity: Suddenly you can reason about the pieces a player won't be able to move in a turn, you can double-bind players, you get draws where its provably impossible for any player to win, etc.
(In that sense, chess is a bit like the IntercalScript language earlier today: All features are superficially reasonable and in the service of simplicity, yet result in the weirdest outcomes)
Wouldn't all this be gone for chess without turns?
Or would strategies become even more intricate, e.g. taking into account the minimum time you'd require to physically move a piece?
It is probably more likely that adding the other physical limitation of the human body causes one strategy to be vastly more effective, and the game becomes less intricate. The reason is fairly simple: a game does not become “intricate” or “interesting” by accident. We iterated through a lot variations before we settled down on this version of chess that has the suitable intricacy for us. Adding a new factor probably needs a couple more decades/ centuries of refinement before we get to a version that has similar property to the current one.
The similar situation in Starcraft: for machines that plays the game, certain units just become the only way to play (mostly long range high damage units). Human can’t choose 100 targets at once, machines can. If you balance the game for machines, then those units would be useless for human players
Zugzwang [1].
(Also works if you get blessed with a competitor who acts impulsively when confused or flustered.)
The video goes into this a little bit. Turns out forking isn’t that useful since your opponent can just move both pieces!
My first thought was that this would essentially devolve to speed chess, because any player who waited longer to move than their cooldown would put themself at a disadvantage.
But I think there is a strategic property that could make the game interesting, namely the "phase shift" between the players' turns: When the cooldowns are interleaved, the game becomes turn-based speed chess. But when the cooldowns sync up, you might get something Diplomacy-like, where both players have 10 seconds to guess the other's next move, then both will move almost simultaneously.
This shift will slowly change throughout the game and can even be changed intentionally if one player waits longer with their turn than they'd have to.
As a fellow engineer, I am in awe - I wonder what his full time colleagues think when he walks in as an intern with that kind of github presence.
How do you handle the interaction between 2 pieces being moved at the same time ? Can I dodge a capture by picking up a piece ? Say 2 rooks are facing each other, how do you handle a mutual capture attempt ?
I have solved this problem, but still in a turn based setting :
* Both player choose their move, and moves are resolved simultaneously
* A piece cannot be moved 2 turns in a row (discrete cooldown time)
* When 2 pieces land at the same place, they are both considered captured.
* If they move in straight lines, in opposite direction, they are also both captured.
* NO CAPTURE for pieces crossing each other path / knights can exchange their positions.
* No pat. A player can skip his turn.
* the goal is to capture the oposite king obviosuly, not to checkmake it.
With a low blitz time, it solves the same fundamental problem as RT chess, but it can only be played online.
From a few test game, it looks like basic chess structure is preserved. But then there is the question of finding the Nash equilibirum of the game ! 2by2-simultaneous-move-chess with both rook and king leads to some sort of rock-paper-scissor.
I wish I could find the link but trying to search YT for relevant results older than a couple years is just trash.
(There's zero evidence it actually was an anal device; no one knows how he might've cheated if he indeed cheated. It just became a big meme.)
I do think Niemann may have cheated in OTB chess before. But not at the Sinquefield Cup, I just don't see it. And the only evidence is insinuations from a sore loser who's well known for throwing tantrums when he doesn't get his way.
The buttplug stuff was really just a joke from reddit, no one's seriously suggested anyone is actually cheating using a buttplug. Doesn't even make sense as a way of cheating, really. It would be extremely obvious.
The idea that Carlsen can't stand losing is a theory from people who don't know about chess. His lose rate is about 15%. All GMs lose games all the time. It's keeping the win rate as high as possible that makes them the best.
The notion that any GM would get so upset simply about losing a single game is just nonsense.
And GMs have had plenty of bad reactions to losses throughout the history of chess. It definitely happens. Chess is an emotionally taxing game. You spend many hours of exhausting effort at the board only to lose due to a momentary brainfart. It's infuriating. GMs are humans too. Hell, fairly recently there was an incident when GM Christopher Yoo punched a photographer after losing a game at a tournament in St Louis.
Specifically, move 19. Qd3! [2], appears to hang the knight. When asked how he'd respond if his opponent simply took the knight (19... dxc4), he says he is "completely winning", then proceeds to give some moves that lead to a flat-out losing position. (Eg: Any GM or sufficiently strong engine agrees that r2q1rk1/1pbn1p2/2p1b1pB/p3P3/P1p2P2/2P3QP/1P4P1/3RRBK1 b - - 0 1 is lost for White.)
To be fair, he's been playing incredibly well recently, and no other evidence of cheating came out, so I'm inclined to believe it was just a "bad interview."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI9jAU0jhJU
[2] https://www.chess.com/events/2022-sinquefield-cup/04/Niemann...
Man that'd be fun to watch
Nope. You are boring (and feel free to be). Chess is not boring. That's it.