Home * Chess

		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.
Mark Wilkinson, Chess [3]

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 (Computer Chess related)
• 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 ^[4]
• Shatranj
• Shogi (Japanese Chess)
• Shuffle Chess
• Suicide Chess (Losing Chess)

Chess Problems

• Chess Problems, Compositions and Studies
• Retrograde Analysis

Chess and Mathematics

• 1. Albrecht Heeffer
  2. Butterfly Boards
  3. De Bruijn sequence
  4. Flipping Mirroring and Rotating
  5. General Setwise Operations
  6. Influence Quantity of Pieces
  7. Intersection Squares
  8. Mathematician
  9. Moscow State University
  10. Traversing Subsets of a Set
  11. Workshop Chess and Mathematics

Chess Maxima

• 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]}
  

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Chess and Psychology

• 1. Adriaan de Groot
  2. Alex de Voogt
  3. Alexandre Linhares
  4. Chess Psychology Booklist
  5. CHREST
  6. Christopher Chabris
  7. Cognition
  8. Eliot Hearst
  9. Eyal Reingold
  10. Herbert Simon
  11. Ivan Bratko
  12. Jean Retschitzki
  13. Judith Spencer Olson
  14. Kevin J. Gilmartin
  15. Merim Bilalić
  16. Michael Barenfeld
  17. Neil Charness
  18. Oleg K. Tichomirov
  19. Pertti Saariluoma
  20. Peter Lane
  21. Philippe Chassy
  22. Psychology
  23. Robert I. Reynolds
  24. Robert W. Howard
  25. Ruslan Hajiev
  26. Russell M. Church
  27. Sarah E. Goldin
  28. Simona Tancig
  29. Tei Laine
  30. 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 201x by Filip Höfer
• Chess-64 by Fabien Letouzey
• Chess 7.0 by Larry Atkin

See also

• Anti-Computerchess
• Arts
• Cartoons
• Chess Databases
• Chess Engines
• Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaya goryachka)
• Chess legends
• 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. Technical University of Łódź, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Supervisor Maciej Szmit, zipped pdf, pdf
• Henk Mannen, Marco Wiering (2004). Learning to play chess using TD(λ)-learning with database games. Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, Utrecht University, Benelearn’04

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]

2010 ...

• Christian Hesse (2011). The Joys of Chess - Heroes, Battles & Brilliancies. ISBN: 978-90-5691-355-7, New In Chess ^[18]
• 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 ^[19]
• 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 ^[20]
• 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 ^[21] » Neural Networks
• Lyudmil Tsvetkov (2017). The Secret of Chess. ^[22]
• 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

Forum Posts

1989

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

1990 ...

• 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

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

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. ^[23]
• 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
  
• Marcel Duchamp on Chess, YouTube Video
  

References

1. ^ Shirish Chinchalkar (1996). An Upper Bound for the Number of Reachable Positions. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 181-183
2. ^ Victor Allis (1994). Searching for Solutions in Games and Artificial Intelligence. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Limburg, pdf, 6.3.9 Chess pp. 171
3. ^ Tableaux ayant pour sujet les échecs
4. ^ Seirawan chess from Wikipedia
5. ^ Eero Bonsdorff, Karl Fabel, Olvai Riihimaa (1966) Schach und Zahl - Unterhaltsame Schachmathematik. Seite 11-13, Walter Rau Verlag, Düsseldorf (German)
6. ^ 50-Züge-Regel - Schachmathematik from Wikipedia.de (German)
7. ^ Defending Humanity's Honor by Tim Krabbé, see game NewRival - Faile with 493 moves, and playing 402 moves with bare kings!
8. ^ Shirish Chinchalkar (1996). An Upper Bound for the Number of Reachable Positions. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3
9. ^ John's Chess Playground - Number of chess diagrams and positions
10. ^ Re: Total possible chess positions? by Álvaro Begué, CCC, March 26, 2014
11. ^ Does this position blow up your program? by Mike Byrne, CCC, December 23, 2002
12. ^ Subject: Maximum Number of Legal Moves by Andrew Shapira, CCC, May 08, 2005
13. ^ Philosophy Looks at Chess by Benjamin Hale
14. ^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Chess by Edward Winter
15. ^ Chess Metaphors – Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, ChessBase News, January 28, 2010
16. ^ Zipf's law from WIkipedia
17. ^ Machine creativity: what it is and what it isn't by Albert Silver, ChessBase News, August 28, 2016
18. ^ The joys of chess – and the value of the pieces, ChessBase News, December 21, 2011
19. ^ Re: Tony's positional test suite by Louis Zulli, CCC, August 01, 2017
20. ^ Progressive chess from Wikipedia
21. ^ Using GAN to play chess by Evgeniy Zheltonozhskiy, CCC, February 23, 2017
22. ^ The Secret of Chess by Lyudmil Tsvetkov, CCC, August 01, 2017
23. ^ BBC Computer Chess Radio Programme by Harvey Williamson, Hiarcs Forum, September 11, 2010

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