Topic by Deviance

Seeing as how there are less than 300 grandmasters in the world, the odds of finding one of them on this or any forum not related to chess are pretty low. If you are looking to practice your chess game against similarly rated players, I suggest the Internet Chess Club (http://www.chessclub.com). It's the largest online chess community in the world. Many GMs, IMs, FMs, and newbies alike are members.

Posted: 10/5/2004 8:57 AM

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Kilu

Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 64
Location: Finland

I probably play chess once a year :) Twice on a good year.

Posted: 10/5/2004 2:08 PM

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VirtualAlex

Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 464
Location: Minnesota

I read openings books, and try really hard. But I will still move my queen into a really stupid spot and lose her...

JXQ's biggest fan.

Posted: 10/5/2004 4:17 PM
(Edited: 8/16/2021 9:57 AM)

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Deviance

Former player

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 706

Posted: 10/5/2004 10:12 PM

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feitclub

Former player

Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN

I play chess on occasion. I have one secret move, which I have used to great success in the past. But once you know it's coming, the surprise is gone and it doesn't work. I'm sure it has a name, because I can't believe I invented a chess move.

Do Not Talk About Feitclub http://www.feitclub.com

Posted: 10/5/2004 11:07 PM

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todd

Joined: 4/4/2004
Posts: 66

I haven't been active in tournaments for quite some time, but I do still travel to over-the-board tournaments to play bughouse and blitz. I plan to return to tournament play at the HB Global Chess Challenge (a new, $500,000 prize fund open tournament: see http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1913) and Chicago Open next year. I think it would be neat to meet people from this community in real life! Until then, maybe we can play online. I usually play at FICS (http://www.freechess.org - I'm toddmf), but I can be spotted at almost every chess server on occasion, including the ICC mentioned by xebra.

Posted: 10/6/2004 5:39 AM

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nesrocks

He/Him

Player (241)

Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil

i have a good iq but i dont have patience for chess, i play rush chess and i dont play often so i just suck :P

aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:18 AM

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Blublu

Player (67)

Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland

air__devil wrote:

In that case... Boco, I challenge you for worst chess player on this forum.

That's silly. Everyone knows I suck the most.

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:25 AM

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Mazzic

Joined: 8/31/2004
Posts: 298
Location: Falun, Sweden

Blublu wrote:

That's silly. Everyone knows I suck the most.

If that's the case I'd like to play against you so I can feel lika a master for once.

Bein' away for like five years, and not a single new post in the ZSNES forum... :'-(

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:28 AM

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Bisqwit

Editor, Active player (296)

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth

One thing you should try once is Suicide Chess (also known as Losing Chess). Suicide Chess is a variant of normal chess. It is played on the same board and uses the same pieces. Here is a list of the differences. 1. The object of the game is to get to a position where you have no legal moves. This is usually accomplished by losing all of your pieces. Sometimes, the game can end when you still have some pawns on the board, but they are blocked and cannot move. The general rule is if a player has no legal moves, the game is over. The winner is the player with fewer pieces on the board. This is almost always the same player that had no moves, but not always. 2. In suicide chess, piece captures are compulsory. If a player can capture an opponent's piece, he is required to do so. If he can capture more than one of the opponent's pieces or can capture one piece with more than one of his own pieces, he can choose which capture to play. 3. The king is not significant. There is no concept of check and the king can be captured. 4. Because of rule 3, pawns are allowed to promote to a king. 5. Castling is not allowed.

Posted: 10/6/2004 2:48 PM
(Edited: 8/16/2021 9:57 AM)

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Deviance

Former player

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 706

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:15 PM

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Bob_Whoops

Former player

Joined: 3/19/2004
Posts: 710
Location: USA

Yeah, suicide chess is pretty good. I like my chess version better though: teleport chess. 4/5 moves (or whatever, you can choose), you pick a piece, then have a random number generator pick a spot on the board, and your piece teleports there. The other 1/5 of a move, you can move your pieces normally. You can take your own pieces. You win by killing all of the oponent's pieces. Stupid, but fun once or twice. After that, it sucks.

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:19 PM

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todd

Joined: 4/4/2004
Posts: 66

I love chess variants! My favorite is bughouse, a fast-paced 4-player game played on 2 boards. Your partner sits next to you, and your two opponents sit across from you. If you are playing white, then your partner plays black, and vice versa. The fun begins when your partner captures some pieces. These pieces are now yours, and you can drop them almost anywhere on your board! A neat thing about Suicide Chess and Bughouse is that communities of dedicated players have formed, and they travel long distances to meet in real life. I've probably travelled across the US more than 10 times just to play bughouse!

Posted: 10/6/2004 7:22 PM

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todd

Joined: 4/4/2004
Posts: 66

What other games do you all play? I know there are some Go players here. I play Go sometimes, but my two main games are chess and poker.

Posted: 10/6/2004 11:44 PM
(Edited: 8/16/2021 9:32 AM)

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Deviance

Former player

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 706

I used to play Bughouse all the time.

Posted: 10/7/2004 1:35 AM

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Ramzi

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 459

Deviance wrote:

The best chess variants I've seen are Capablanca Chess and Fischer Random Chess. Both are created in response to chess becoming too simple or more a matter of memorization than ability. Anyone who's memorized a 20 move main line in the Sicilian Defense can probably sympathize. :|

Haha. I was wayyy into chess a few years ago. I came up with Fischer Random Chess and thought I was brilliant. "Why hasn't anyone else thought of this before?" I wondered. Well, then I found out that someone had, and his name was Fischer. At one time I thought I possessed great skill at the game. It's because I had a computer chess program... Well, I used to be able to beat it up to level 3 or 4, and then stopped playing it. I just played real people. After a few months of playing a friend, he told me he beat level 27 (the highest.) Skeptical, I set the difficulty to 27 and won. I couldn't believe it. I was brilliant. We found out that we could be the game on level 27, but we couldn't on Level 5. You could imagine how funny it was for us, to think that we were grandmasters because we could beat it on the "hardest" setting, only to find out a short while later that we couldn't beat it on the medium setting. Chess still intrigues me because of the math and AI behind it, also the brilliance of the structure of a grandmaster's brain. Those interests kinda subsided when I found out there were more possible moves than number of atoms in the universe. So it could never truly be solved. Correct me if I'm wrong about it. In the Zelda thread, I recall, a discussion of something similiar. Are there any possible heuristics to be discovered in the future to "solve" chess, or is it proven that it cannot be solved? I'm not a mathematician (or very good at math, period) but what do they mean by NP-hard. I had the notion that it meant unsolvable. Am I right?

Posted: 10/7/2004 1:51 AM

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Deviance

Former player

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 706

Are there any possible heuristics to be discovered in the future to "solve" chess, or is it proven that it cannot be solved?

There are at least: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board positions. and that's just for a 40 move game!

Posted: 10/7/2004 2:06 AM

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Bob_Whoops

Former player

Joined: 3/19/2004
Posts: 710
Location: USA

Eh? Chess is not NP-hard. The definition to NP-Hard is quite complex. I don't claim to be an expert, but the defintion of NP-Hard is something like:the set of the hardest NP problems to solve that all happen to be just as hard. Or something crazy like that. And NP means non-determenistic polynomial time. Ah whatever, you are probably better off looking it up. I've probably already messed up. I could have sworn there was a slashdot article on this about a month ago, but I can't seem to find it now.

Posted: 10/7/2004 7:15 AM

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xebra

Joined: 5/3/2004
Posts: 1203

I am studying mathematics in college, but my are of interest is complex analysis, which despite the name has nothing to do with complexity theory. That being said, I do know a bit about complexity theory, enough to say I don't think Chess is NP-complete (it's probably harder). To my knowledge, NP-complete problems are characterized by a few easily understood statements: 1) Given a solution to an NP-complete problem, it is easy to verify the solution is correct. 2a) Spontaneously generating solutions to NP-complete problems is very difficult. 2b) In fact, the difficulty of generating soutions using a deterministic computational model (more on this later) grows faster than any polynomial as you increase the amount of information in the problem. In general, chess fails condition #1. Only in a small proportion of contrived circumstances is it easy to check that any given position is a solution (a win), those being forced mates. About deterministic computational models: - When using a deterministic computational model, when the computer is faced with an option, it chooses one (thus a branch in computation is determined). The computer can only consider one option at a time. - When using a nondeterministic computational model, when the computer is faced with an option, it continues calculating in parallel along all possible paths (thus a branch in computation is not determined). Whenever a solution is encountered along any of the paths, the computation is finished. I offer without proof or proper explanation that NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time in a nondeterministic computational model. It is clear however, that chess cannot be solved easily even in nondeterministic model. Even supposing there were ways to implement nondeterministic computational algorithms in polynomial time in the real world (which there are not), the only way to solve a nontrivial position is to first explore all the branchings of all the possible subsequent positions, and then to analyze which branch at each step has the most winning terminal paths, accounting for repeated positions and path intersections, each of which there are in general an infinite number, etc. It's difficult.

Posted: 10/7/2004 9:50 AM

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todd

Joined: 4/4/2004
Posts: 66

I mostly play limit hold 'em. Now is a good time to be playing any kind of poker, though. There are tons of very profitable games filled with people who saw poker on TV and figured they'd give it a try.

Posted: 10/11/2004 8:11 AM

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OmnipotentEntity

He/Him

Player (36)

Joined: 9/11/2004
Posts: 2624

Quantum Chess is the bombdiggity. Rule are same as chess. However, any unobserved piece can move to any other unobserved square instead of making a regular move. Being observed of course means that an opponents piece could attack you next turn (it can see you in other words). You are still observed if a piece would normally be allowed to attack you but cannot next turn for some reason. (Like his King being in check or being put in check through capturing the piece in question).

Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.

Posted: 10/17/2004 3:13 AM

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Nach

Emulator Coder

Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers

Deviance: catch me online sometime, and you can have a challenging game of Chess ;)

Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.