Chess

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Chess ¹

Chess,
a two-player zero-sum abstract strategy board game with perfect information as classified by John von Neumann. Chess has an estimated state-space complexity of 1046 ¹ , the estimated game tree complexity of 10123 is based on an average branching factor of 35 and an average game length of 80 ply ² . This page is about the basic chess items, chessboard, pieces and moves, and how they are considered or encoded inside a chess program, to either represent a chess position inside its search and to play the game of chess. It sub-pages intersect with evaluation, board representation and even search topics.

Board and Squares

• Chessboard
• Squares
• Ranks
• Files
• Diagonals
• Anti-Diagonals
• Rays as subset of Lines

Pieces and Moves

• Moves
• Pieces
• Trajectory

Color and Side

• Color
• Side to move

The Game of Chess

• Chess Game
• Chess Position
• Chess Server
• Game Notation
• Match Statistics
• Playing Strength
• Rules of Chess
• Time Management

During the Game

• Blockade
• Check
• Fortress
• Strategy
• Tactics
• Tempo
• Transposition

The End

• Checkmate
• Draw

Chess Variants

• Antichess (Losing Chess)
• Atomic Chess
• Capablanca Chess
• Chess960 or Fischer Random Chess (FRC)
• Chinese Chess
• Crazyhouse
• Gothic Chess
• Kinglet
• Knightmate Chess
• Losing Chess
• Nightrider Chess
• Seirawan Chess ³
• Shatranj
• Shogi (Japanese Chess)
• Shuffle Chess
• Suicide Chess (Losing Chess)

Chess Problems

• Chess Problems, Compositions and Studies
• Retrograde Analysis

Chess and Mathematics

• Albrecht Heeffer
• Butterfly Boards
• De Bruijn Sequence
• Flipping Mirroring and Rotating
• General Setwise Operations
• Influence Quantity of Pieces
• Intersection Squares
• Mathematician
• Traversing Subsets of a Set
• Workshop Chess and Mathematics

Chess Maxima

• In 1950 Claude Shannon gave a conservative lower bound (the Shannon number) of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10^120 (possible games), and 10^43 for the amount of possible positions.⁴
• In 1966, Eero Bonsdorff, Karl Fabel, and Olvai Riihimaa gave 5899 as the maximum number of moves in a chess game ^{5 6 7}
• Shirish Chinchalkar has determined a state-space complexity of 1046.25 as upper bound for the number of reachable chess positions ⁸, John Tromp gives about 10^45.888 ^{9 10}
• The maximum number of moves per chess position seems 218 ^{11 12}

R6R/3Q4/1Q4Q1/4Q3/2Q4Q/Q4Q2/pp1Q4/kBNN1KB1 w - - 0 1

Chess and Psychology

• Adriaan de Groot
• Alex de Voogt
• Alexandre Linhares
• CHREST
• Christopher Chabris
• Cognition
• Eliot Hearst
• Eyal Reingold
• Herbert Simon
• Ivan Bratko
• Jean Retschitzki
• Judith Spencer Olson
• Kevin J. Gilmartin
• Merim Bilalić
• Michael Barenfeld
• Neil Charness
• Oleg K. Tichomirov
• Pertti Saariluoma
• Peter Lane
• Philippe Chassy
• Psychology
• Robert I. Reynolds
• Robert W. Howard
• Ruslan Hajiev
• Russell M. Church
• Sarah E. Goldin
• Simona Tancig
• Tei Laine
• William Chase

Chess and Philosophy

Quote from Philosophy Looks at Chess ¹³ :

The game of chess has endured since at least the sixth century. Its earliest variant, the Indian game of Chaturanga, was from the beginning a game for thinkers. Since its inception, scholars, statesmen, strategists, and warriors have been fascinated by the game and its variants. German philosopher Emanuel Lasker and famed French artist Marcel Duchamp were both Grandmasters at chess. Karl Marx played chess avidly, as did Sir Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the logical positivist Max Black. Jean-Jacques Rousseau ¹⁴ mentions in his Confessions that, at the time, he "had another expedient, not less solid, in the game of chess, to which I regularly dedicated, at Maugis's, the evenings on which I did not go to the theater. I became acquainted with M. de Légal, M. Husson, Philidor, and all the great chess players of the day, without making the least improvement in the game." More recently, philosopher Stuart Rachels reports that his father, the late philosopher and prominent ethicist James Rachels, received a bribe from a Russian Grandmaster while he was the chair of the U.S. Chess Federation's Ethics committee. 

Chess Programs called Chess

• Chess the Northwestern University Chess Program by Larry Atkin and David Slate
• Chess 0.5 by Larry Atkin and Peter W. Frey
• Chess 0.5X by Wim Elsenaar
• Chess 2001, Dedicated Chess Computers
• Chess 20xx by Filip Höfer
• Chess-64 by Fabien Letouzey
• Chess 7.0 by Larry Atkin

Categories

• Category: Chess Suffix
• Category: Chess Program (CP) Suffix
• Category: Chess Legends

See also

• Anti-Computerchess
• Cartoons
• Chess Databases
• Chess Engines
• Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaya goryachka)
• Chess Query Language
• Cognition
• Computer Chess - A Movie
• Computer Chess and AI
• Knowledge
• Learning
• Psychology

Publications

1949

• Claude Shannon (1949). Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. pdf from The Computer History Museum

1950 ...

• Claude Shannon (1950). A Chess-Playing Machine. Scientific American, Vol. 182 (No. 2, February 1950), pp. 48-51. Reprinted in The World of Mathematics, edited by James R. Newman, Simon & Schuster, NY, Vol. 4, 1956, pp. 2124-2133. Included in Part B
• J. B. S. Haldane (1952). The mechanical chess-player. British Journal of Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 10
• Alan Turing (1953). Chess. part of the collection Digital Computers Applied to Games. in Bertram Vivian Bowden (editor), Faster Than Thought, a symposium on digital computing machines, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium, reprinted 2004 in Chapter 16 of The Essential Turing.

1955 ...

• Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam (1957). Experiments in chess on electronic computing machines. Chess Review, 13 January 1957.
• James Kister, Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam, William Walden, Mark Wells (1957). Experiments in Chess. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 2
• Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, Herbert Simon (1958). Chess Playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity. IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 320-335
• Alex Bernstein, Michael de V. Roberts (1958). Computer vs. Chess-Player. Scientific American, Vol. 198, pp. 96-105. pdf from The Computer History Museum, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium
• Alex Bernstein, Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle, Martin Belsky (1958). A chess playing program for the IBM 704. Proceedings of the 1958 Western Joint Computer Conference, pp. 157-159, Los Angeles, California. pdf from The Computer History Museum

1960 ...

• Alan Kotok (1962). A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090, B.S. Thesis, MIT, AI Project Memo 41, Computation Center, Cambridge MA. pdf

1965 ...

• Jack Good (1968). A Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess. Machine Intelligence Vol. 2, pp. 110-115
• Mikhail Botvinnik (1968). Algoritm igry v shakhmaty. (The algorithm of chess)

1970 ...

• Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bitman, Alexander Zhivotovsky, Anatoly Uskov (1970). Programming a Computer to Play Chess. Russian Mathematical Surveys, Vol. 25, pp. 221-262.

1975 ...

• Ron Atkin, Ian H. Witten (1975). A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Positional Chess. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Vol. 7, No. 6
• Ron Atkin, William Hartston, Ian H. Witten (1976). Fred CHAMP, Positional-Chess Analyst. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Vol. 8, No. 5
• Donald Michie (1976). An Advice-Taking System for Computer Chess. Computer Bulletin, Ser. 2, Vol. 10, pp. 12-14. ISSN 0010-4531.

1980 ...

• Aviezri Fraenkel, David Lichtenstein (1981). Computing a Perfect Strategy for n x n Chess Requires Time Exponential in N. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Ser. A, Vol. 31, No. 2

1985 ...

• Ingo Althöfer (1985). Das 3-Hirn - Entscheidungsteilung im Schach. Computerschach und Spiele, pp. 20-22 (German)
• Ingo Althöfer (1989). A Survey of Some Results in Theoretical Game Tree Search and the 'Dreihirn'-experiment. Proceedings Workshop on New Directions in Game-tree Search, pp. 16-32. Edmonton, Canada.

1990 ...

• Ingo Althöfer (1991). Selective trees and majority systems: two experiments with commercial chess computers. Advances in Computer Chess 6
• Robert Levinson, Feng-hsiung Hsu, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, David Wilkins (1991). The Role of Chess in Artificial Intelligence Research. IJCAI 1991, pdf, also in ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 153-161, pdf
• Fernand Gobet, Peter Jansen (1994). Towards a Chess Program Based on a Model of Human Memory. Advances in Computer Chess 7

1995 ...

• Ingo Althöfer (1997). A Symbiosis of Man and Machine Beats Grandmaster Timoshchenko. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1
• Ingo Althöfer (1997). On the k-best Mode in Computer Chess: Measuring the Similarity of Move Proposals. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3
• Ingo Althöfer (1998). LIST-3-HIRN vs. Grandmaster Yusupov. - A Report on a Very Experimental Match, Part I: The Games. ICCA Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1
• Ingo Althöfer (1998). 13 Jahre 3-Hirn – Meine Schach-Experimente mit Mensch-Maschinen-Kombinationen. ISBN 3-00-003100-6. (German)

2000 ...

• Ingo Althöfer (2001). Grandmaster Chess with one-sided Computer Help. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No.4
• Marek Strejczek (2004). Some aspects of chess programming. M.Sc. thesis, Technical University of Łódź
• Henk Mannen, Marco Wiering (2004). Learning to play chess using TD(λ)-learning with database games. Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, Utrecht University, Benelearn’04, pdf

2005 ...

• Fernand Gobet, Peter Jansen (2005). Training in Chess: A Scientific Approach. pdf
• Aviezri Fraenkel (2006). Nim is Easy, Chess is Hard – But Why?? ICGA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4, pdf
• Diego Rasskin-Gutman (2009). Chess Metaphors - Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. ISBN-13: 978-0-262-18267-6, translated by Deborah Klosky, MIT Press ¹⁵
• Bernd Blasius, Ralf Tönjes (2009). Zipf's Law in the Popularity Distribution of Chess Openings. Physical Review Letters, 103, 218701, pdf ¹⁶
• Shay Bushinsky (2009). Deus Ex Machina— A Higher Creative Species in the Game of Chess. AI Magazine, Vol. 30, No. 3 » Machine Creativity ¹⁷
• Stephen Muggleton, Aline Paes, Vítor Santos Costa, Gerson Zaverucha (2009). Chess Revision: Acquiring the Rules of Chess Variants through FOL Theory Revision from Examples. ILP 2009, pdf ¹⁸

2010 ...

• Christian Hesse (2011). The Joys of Chess - Heroes, Battles & Brilliancies. ISBN: 978-90-5691-355-7, New In Chess ¹⁹
• Frédéric Prost (2012). On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess. Turing-100. The Alan Turing Centenary, EPiC Volume 10
• Matej Guid, Ivan Bratko (2012). Detecting Fortresses in Chess. Elektrotehniški vestnik, Vol. 79, Nos. 1-2, pdf » Rybka, Houdini ²⁰
• Kristian Spoerer, Toshihisa Okaneya, Kokolo Ikeda, Hiroyuki Iida (2013). Further Investigations of 3-Member Simple Majority Voting for Chess. CG 2013
• Katja Grace (2013). Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains. Technical report 2013-3, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Berkeley, CA, pdf, 5 Game Playing, 5.1 Chess, 5.2 Go, 9 Machine Learning
• Nick Pelling (2013). Chess Superminiatures. eBook, Kindle edition, Amazon
• John Nunn (2014). Maths and Chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4
• Kenneth W. Regan, Tamal T. Biswas, Jason Zhou (2014). Human and Computer Preferences at Chess. pdf

2015 ...

• Tamal T. Biswas, Kenneth W. Regan (2015). Measuring Level-K Reasoning, Satisficing, and Human Error in Game-Play Data. IEEE ICMLA 2015, pdf preprint
• Vito Janko, Matej Guid (2015). Development of a Program for Playing Progressive Chess. Advances in Computer Games 14 ²¹
• Guy Haworth, Tamal T. Biswas, Kenneth W. Regan (2015). A Comparative Review of Skill Assessment: Performance, Prediction and Profiling. Advances in Computer Games 14
• Muthuraman Chidambaram, Yanjun Qi (2017). Style Transfer Generative Adversarial Networks: Learning to Play Chess Differently. arXiv:1702.06762v1 ²² » Neural Networks
• Lyudmil Tsvetkov (2017). The Secret of Chess. ²³
• David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, Arthur Guez, Marc Lanctot, Laurent Sifre, Dharshan Kumaran, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, Karen Simonyan, Demis Hassabis (2017). Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm. arXiv:1712.01815 » AlphaZero
• David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, Arthur Guez, Marc Lanctot, Laurent Sifre, Dharshan Kumaran, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, Karen Simonyan, Demis Hassabis (2018). A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play. Science, Vol. 362, No. 6419 ²⁴
• Garry Kasparov (2018). Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning. Science, Vol. 362, No. 6419
• Jaap van den Herik (2018). Computer chess: From idea to DeepMind. ICGA Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3
• Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Thomas Hubert, Karen Simonyan, Laurent Sifre, Simon Schmitt, Arthur Guez, Edward Lockhart, Demis Hassabis, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, David Silver (2019). Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model. arXiv:1911.08265 ²⁵
• Vladimir Vargas-Calderón (2019). Are Armageddon chess games implemented fairly? ICGA Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4 ²⁶

2020 ...

• Manuel Cristóbal López-Michelone, Jorge Luis Ortega-Arjona (2020). A description language for chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1
• Nenad Tomašev, Ulrich Paquet, Demis Hassabis, Vladimir Kramnik (2020). Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess. arXiv:2009.04374 » AlphaZero
• Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Thomas Hubert, Karen Simonyan, Laurent Sifre, Simon Schmitt, Arthur Guez, Edward Lockhart, Demis Hassabis, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, David Silver (2020). Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model. Nature, Vol. 588 ²⁷
• Monty Newborn (2021). Mad Monty Chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1
• Maximilian Alexander Gehrke (2021). Assessing Popular Chess Variants Using Deep Reinforcement Learning. Master thesis, TU Darmstadt, pdf » CrazyAra
• Dominik Klein (2021). Neural Networks For Chess. Release Version 1.1 · GitHub ²⁸
• Guy Haworth (2021). Chess without draws. ICGA Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2
• Thomas McGrath, Andrei Kapishnikov, Nenad Tomašev, Adam Pearce, Demis Hassabis, Been Kim, Ulrich Paquet, Vladimir Kramnik (2021). Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero. arXiv:2111.09259 » AlphaZero ²⁹
• Miha Bizjak, Matej Guid (2021). Automatic Recognition of Similar Chess Motifs. Advances in Computer Games 17
• Nenad Tomašev, Ulrich Paquet, Demis Hassabis, Vladimir Kramnik (2022). Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 65, No. 2 » AlphaZero

Forum Posts

1989

• Can Chess Help Adapt to Life? by Mike Valvo, rgc, September 06, 1989

1990 ...

• Chess is not solvable by Teri A. Meyers, rgc, September 23, 1992
• Solvability by Teri A. Meyers, rgc, September 30, 1992
• Is chess in NP? by Antti Juhani Ylikoski, rec.games.programmer, May 26, 1997

2000 ...

• Does this position blow up your program? by Mike Byrne, CCC, December 23, 2002
• Subject: Maximum Number of Legal Moves by Andrew Shapira, CCC, May 08, 2005
• Variants and Board Size by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, October 25, 2007

2010 ...

• max amount of moves from a position? by Srdja Matovic, CCC, June 10, 2011
• Contest: Find Position with the most moves by Charles Roberson, CCC, December 09, 2011
• New chess variants by Ferdinand Mosca, CCC, March 03, 2012 » Chess Variants
• Chess and the "Golden Ratio"... by Steve Maughan, CCC, December 19, 2012
• Chess with incomplete information by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, December 13, 2013

2014

• Total possible chess positions? by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, March 26, 2014
• for Chess-variant authors by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, September 17, 2014 » Chess Engine Communication Protocol, WinBoard, XBoard
• XBoard and chess variants by Evert Glebbeek, CCC, October 28, 2014
• UCCI2WB by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, October 27, 2014 » Chinese Chess (Universal Chinese Chess Interface, UCCI)
• UCI protocol for chess variants by Evert Glebbeek, CCC, October 28, 2014 » UCI

2015 ...

• Most common chess variant? by Stefano Gemma, CCC, April 15, 2015 » Chess Variants
• The future of chess and elo ratings by Larry Kaufman, CCC, September 20, 2015 » Match Statistics, Opening Book
• Winboard 4.8.0b and Amazon chess variant by Ferdinand Mosca, CCC, December 05, 2015 » WinBoard
• Matibay an amazon chess variant engine by Ferdinand Mosca, CCC, December 08, 2015
• Masipag, a nightrider chess variant engine by Ferdinand Mosca, CCC, December 09, 2015

2016

• Grande Acedrex by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, January 04, 2016
• Tamerlane Chess by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, January 28, 2016
• New chess variant by Evert Glebbeek, CCC, June 06, 2016 » Chess Variants
• Max moves in a position by Laurie Tunnicliffe, CCC, October 22, 2016 » Chess Maxima

2017

• Winboard variants online by Erin Dame, CCC, March 22, 2017 » Chess Variants, WinBoard
• The Peace-Chess Challenge by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, September 24, 2017 » Chess Variants
• Weakly vs strongly solving chess by Greg Simpson, CCC, September 26, 2017
• best board representation for variants (javascript) ? by Mahmoud Uthman, CCC, December 10, 2017 » Board Representation, JavaScript
• One idea to solve chess? by Mario Carbonell, CCC, December 13, 2017

2018

• Is modern chess software lossless or lossy? by Meni Rosenfeld, CCC, January 10, 2018 » Playing Strength, Selectivity
• Is chess still 99% tactics? by Alvaro Cardoso, CCC, January 11, 2018 » Tactics
• A Chess variant with low draw rate by Kai Laskos, CCC, January 19, 2018 » Chess Variants

2019

• The Plan-9 to finally solve chess :) by Sergei S. Markoff, CCC, May 11, 2019

2020 ...

• Transhuman Chess with NN and RL... by Srdja Matovic, CCC, October 30, 2020 » NN, RL
• New PGN Tag: VariantFamily by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, November 03, 2020 » Chess Variants, PGN

2021

• correspondence chess in the age of NNUE by Larry Kaufman, CCC, January 21, 2021 » NNUE
• On the number of chess positions by John Tromp, CCC, July 09, 2021 » Chess Position
• Open Chess Game Database Standard (OCGDB) by Nguyen Pham, CCC, October 20, 2021 » Chess Databases

2022

• Re: On the number of chess positions by John Tromp, CCC, April 02, 2022 » Chess Position

2023

• The Next Big Thing in Computer Chess? by Srdja Matovic, CCC, April 12, 2023 » Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Hardware

Re: The Next Big Thing in Computer Chess? by Srdja Matovic, CCC, August 20, 2023

• Is there any project coming to solve chess? by Jouni, CCC, November 06, 2023

External Links

Wikipedia

• Chess from Wikipedia

Chess theory from Wikipedia

Computer chess from Wikipedia

First-move advantage in chess from Wikipedia

Outline of chess from Wikipedia

Rules of Chess from Wikipedia

School of chess from Wikipedia

Solving chess from Wikipedia

Glossary of chess from Wikipedia

Chess

• Chess from Wikibooks
• Welcome to the Chess Museum - Links
• Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms by Edward Winter
• Chess History Center - Chess Notes by Edward Winter
• Chess from MathWorld - A Wolfram Web Resource by Eric W. Weisstein

Chess Variants

• Chess variant from Wikipedia
• The Chess Variant Pages by Hans L. Bodlaender
• Fairy chess from Wikipedia
• Fairy chess piece from Wikipedia
• Betza notation and XBoard » Moves, XBoard

Misc

• CHESS - Microsoft Research a tool for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in concurrent programs.
• Chess (musical) from Wikipedia
• BBC World Service Programmes - The Friday Documentary: Seeking The Endgame, by Simon Terrington, with statements by David Levy et al. ³⁰
• BBC - Future - The cyborg chess players that can’t be beaten by Chris Baraniuk, December 04, 2015 » David Levy, Boris Alterman, Shay Bushinsky, Mark Lefler
• Mathematics and Chess Page
• SFE - The Science Fiction Encyclopedia - Chess
• Anthony Braxton Interview - Chess, Math & Music, YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

• Marcel Duchamp on Chess, YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

References