For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance.
I.e. the knight is an anti-queen.
[1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129
I think this is fun, but
(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.
Unrelated, but I just realized the horse is not in fact called "horse" like it is in Italian/Spanish.
It is called "Springer" (translates to: jumper) in German. Sometimes "Pferd" or "Ross" is also used (translates to: horse and steed, resp.). That's why "Knight's tour" is called "Springerproblem" or "Rösselsprung" (from "Ross") in German.
Hence the German academic publisher, Springer, which uses a knight as it's logo.
(Not to be confused with the much larger Axel-Springer publishers, nor the American academic Springer publisher.)
Or Dutch
When I was younger, I always believed that the proper name was for the knight was "horse" (my primary language is English). I only figured it out when I was playing chess against my friend, and he was like, "horse? wth is that"
It's been weird/amusing observing how different age groups at my local chess clubs call pieces and concepts. The older group very much stays to the local Dutch terminology for both while the younger group (presumably influenced by youtube) tends to mix Dutch piece names with English concepts. So you can have a koning (king) that is being "skewered" by a koningin (Queen) on the tweede (second) rank.
A swastika shape would make sense for the knight.
I guess there is still a cultural aversion to its use, however.
A swastika?! Not quite, it's more like a cross: ꖅ
Speaking of swastikas, that's very close to an Iron Cross.
...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
A swastika would only cover half of a knight's legal moves.
It would need 8 arms, not 4. (A well-placed Knight meaningfully controlling all of its 8 target squares is actually referred to as an "octopus Knight" sometimes).
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 : )
I also realized that if you defined the pieces like their moves, the knight's shape would be.... Interesting
Wouldn’t it look like four capital tees joined at opposites/right angles at the stem?
I mean, sorta? If you think about it as the "rules of the move," but the actual movement can be drawn as a straight line. See: https://twitter.com/graycrawford/status/1750248031784763639
Ahhh, yes, from that pov, yes totally!
I think I'd be inclined to disambiguate them by making the ends of the bishop pointed and the ends of the rook blunt. When moving along a diagonal you're moving in the direction of square corners, vs faces for moving in ranks and files, so it makes sense in that way, and it also evokes the shapes of the classical pieces.
an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa
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 don't think (b) is really fair. You still call them "pieces" even if you are playing chess on a device/screen.
Yes, the knight is up to 8 squares in a 5x5 grid. https://github.com/vezquex/chess/blob/master/src/game/piece/...
It would be interesting to do an experiment on people playing one another (online) with these pieces vs regular pieces (e.g. one player with a regular set and one player with this set). Because I do feel like I can visualize the state of the board more easily with this approach--but would that translate across people into better play, or is there some point where a more expert player (I don't play very often, though I enjoy playing and have played for years) has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to movement. But that said, it does feel like the difference between font styles in programming, which for me have a very meaningful impact over time.
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're ever going to get the point where you recognize tactics (or anything, for that matter) on the board, how the pieces move must already be internalized and not require any thought. People even especially practice visualizing knight journeys between arbitrary squares to make this more automatic.
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?
Exactly this. Relatives have been trying to choose "fancy-looking" chess sets for me as a gift, and I always hated them. I don't want fancy pieces, I want the standard ones that don't give me cognitive overhead :-).
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
I've gotten so used to 2D knights that it annoys me when people face them forward on a 3D board.
There are flat chess pieces that have the traditional 2D symbols on top. Another question is whether anyone makes 3D knight pieces that are designed to lay flat on the board. Such pieces would fit a "Godfather" themed chess set rather well...
Hell is filled with glass and ornate chess sets, I am convinced.
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?
Blindfolded chess for the better player ;)
The knight shape does seem off. But it avoids the piece being a sun symbol / fascist tribute piece :-)
It shouldn't look like that, its two I's at 90 degrees: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEqoWAFXQAAPRXm?format=jpg&name=...
That's nice. Plus it solves the manufacturing issue if you try to turn this into a physical set (the current knight design is very thinly connected).
That knight looks like it's 12th century and he's heading to Jerusalem.
has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to movement
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.
Not to mention the video where the board is presented in the "wrong" direction, so he enumerates to himself which squares the pieces are on, then closes his eyes so he can see the board clearer.
The more impressive one is where he's matched up against 10 Harvard Law students simultaneously, and is blindfolded. He won all of the games handily.
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.
I still have a set which was sold as "Visual Chess", and you can still find it on eBay for example. The pieces were mostly like traditional design (but kind of "modernized" in 1960s style) but when viewed from the top (i.e. as you play), there was an indication of the allowed move. You can see some examples in the image link below.
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.
I had an updated version of this set (probably from the 90s?). Mine had a better board and I think the tops of the pieces were different, but the text/diagrams were identical:
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.
It doesn't represent the "en passant" rule, nor the castling. :-)
Nor the "promotion" of a pawn that has marched across the board to begin a new life as... a pawn (or anything else that isn't a king -- this almost means a queen, but a promotion to knight can also be useful).
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.
---
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.
and promoted a pawn to a pawn
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)
> and promoted a pawn to a pawn
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
this almost means a queen, but a promotion to knight can also be useful
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.
Great! This will be excellent for beginners. I'm considering teaching chess to my kids. Can I still find it online? My searches on Amazon and Google haven't yielded the results I need.
I'm pretty sure this was the set I had from 1992: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134677808785?hash=item1f5b6c4691:g:...
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.
Here’s a (free) 3D printable version I designed a few years back, for just this reason:
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)
That's the exact set I had. Worked pretty great for learning the game.
Art Deco chess pieces :o
I suspect Josef Hartwig would like a word
Those peaces remain unreasonably expensive on Amazon, btw.
Peace has always come at a high cost. But if it's available on Amazon that still seems like progress.
Won't fix the typo just so others could enjoy your joke
Peace is dead; long live peace.
Good whittling project then.
And it looks so much more reasonable, I would say
Except that this set describes the attack directions, not the motion directions. The difference is in the shape of the pawns. I think this one is quite interesting, as showing lines of threat.
The pawns felt like they were going backwards. Maybe if they had wee arrow heads.
I've built one with Lego.
<https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF1392.jpeg> <https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF2887.jpeg>
So that's where the inspiration for BeOS/HaikuOS came from.
I have the 1924 Bauhaus chess set and it's the most beautiful thing I own.
Always loved how the shape and size of the pieces indicate their moves while still being simple and recognisable.
That is very clever!
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. =/
It's attack direction not movement direction. Pawns are the one piece where there is a difference and I'm not sure which is better ;-)
Also, there's rochade/castling.
Catapart is aware, they're just saying it's unfortunate how it ends up looking.
Yeah, I wonder if it would be a slight improvement to combine move+capture.
So pawns would be
/|\ /|\
\|/ \|/
Also visualizes en-passant in a better way.
It would make sense to have move and capture be different. Like square in front and two lines or points to the diagonal.
It is very clever, except accidental rotation can easily turn rooks into bishops and vice-versa.
Sounds like a fun variant, allowing that as a move... (Remicent of shogi).
You could put each piece on a square base that must remain aligned with the board.
I think change out \/ for:
■ ■
P
■ ■
■ ■
N
■ ■
■ ■
Same. I understand why they're like that but I can't see it any other way than: "Why are pawns going to move in the wrong direction?".
This would be awesome for teaching beginners.
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.
The L is an orthogonalist conspiracy theory. There's no right angles in the knight's movement, wake up sheeple!
Knight's movement is a "Γ" "Gamma" not an L. Some day a brilliant game may pop up, which has several letters and try to match em together, like an L, a Γ, an I and so on.
Agreed. Love the concept, but the knights definitely need clarity.
Learning the movement is by far the easiest part of teaching beginners. It's fine as a design exercise, but its effect in making it easier to learn is close to null.
+1 for making the knights an L. The way it is, the pawns sort of look like knights
I have an overgrown dice pip renderer, so I made the rook "+", knight "L", bishop 4-gram, queen 8-gram, king octagon, and pawn a trapezoid (just to suggest movement direction). https://vezquex.github.io/clock/chess/
As someone who has played a lot of chess I don't find this useful. I'm surprised how many people have positive responses to this.
Consider for a moment the billions of people who have not played a lot of chess. Seems like a cool teaching aid for youngsters especially.
Does it take anyone longer than a game or two to remember the rules of chess? I even taught chess to adults as a child and they caught on within a few moves. Which I guess explains why it remains more popular than FOTM overcomplicated board game #5000. It's not difficult to memorize. IMO this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Knowing the rules and 'seeing' the ways that pieces can move are different things. I could see this being helpful to someone who has a working knowledge of the ways pieces can move, but hasn't yet built their skill of visualization thereof.
So we should delay the development of their visualization skill, because otherwise visualization is useless in chess? This works literally against what chess is about and materializes the least complex aspect of the game into a visual noise all over the board.
Except this doesn't help you visualize it either. I can understand this argument for online boards that, when you click on a piece, highlight all the legal moves. This set doesn't do that, it basically just reminds you how the pieces move.
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.
Off topic, but does anyone know a browser extension that lets you block certain domains from the HN list? I've blocked twitter/x from my DNS, and don't want links to it cluttering the feed.
I'm not aware of one, but if you can insert custom css rules it should be simple with something like
tbody tr.athing:has(.title .titleline a[href*="twitter.com"]),
tbody tr.athing:has(.title .titleline a[href*="twitter.com"]) + tr,
tbody tr.athing:has(.title .titleline a[href\*="twitter.com"]) + tr + tr
{
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 would think you could automatically load the first match's "hide" URL until no more matches appear in the page, but it might trip some kind of rate limiter.
Perfect thank you.
Pay/login-walled sites are common here.
That is... not why I blocked it.
What I enjoy about this design is it exploits the correlation between piece value with the number of ways it can move, resulting in a visual intuition that more visually complex pieces are worth more on average. The knight is perhaps the frustrating exceptions to this.
Piece value is determined by how many squares it can threaten.
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.
Actually the numbers 5 and 3 are not derived from the number of squares attacked.
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.
"This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3"
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.
At least at the level I play at, knights are invaluable because of their ability to jump over walls and threaten multiple pieces at the same time - they're the piece most likely to create a successful fork (threatening two pieces of value at the same time, likely forcing your opponent to pick which thing they're more willing to lose)
I prefer this: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/4746
The pieces resemble the movements in most cases, but also pack together into a rectangle.
The pieces resemble the movements in most cases
I don't see it. Do they really?
The ones with square tops only move horizontally/vertically and the bigger ones move further, the ones with an L-shaped top move in an L shape, the ones with a diagonal top move diagonally. I don't see the King and Queen movements though.
Right, the king and Queen could maybe have 4 or 8 pointy corners instead of just a V, but the other pieces 'mimic' their movement in a sense.
I thought this would be about redesigning their movement to make a new kind of game. But it's only the shape of the pieces.
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.
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.
Exactly, this will reduce readability of a board. It's like highlighting the black key notes on sheet music. You think you're making it easier, but end up just adding too much redundant info and it clutters the page. Or like adding a ton of crufty comments to code ("// this is a loop that ... "). Or like adding a "fill these. with water" post-it notes on an icecube tray. Clever. But worse.
If each movement is broken into a piecemeal function, then a non-standard piece could be assembled, such as a piece that moves like a knight in 3 directions and a bishop northwest and southwest.
This idea is common in Shogi piece designs for those who can't read the traditional Kanji designs.
And the idea is misguided there as well. Kanji are problematic because people who can't read them can't differentiate their shapes. Any unique silhouette -- even a Latin letter -- is preferable to arrow diagrams, which end up unnecessarily similar to one another.
Yeah I had no issue learning Shogi with no knowledge of kanji.
Indeed! Googling "shogi learning set" finds these sets.
They already look like this. Stop tweeting and go start a business!
Already as in yes, the moves are baked in to the standard design -- you just look down at them from the top.
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.
Yea
It would be fun to make up a physical version with lasers and a fog machine.
In the meantime there is Khet board game: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khet_(game) - fog machine not included.
Do you need fog if lasers aiming at the board?
I've wanted to see something like those scope beams, another idea is each square on the board could change colour by how many pieces can "see" it.
I've been wanting the same exact thing! I think for beginners (and mediocre players like myself) it would help a lot to prevent blunders. Being able to visualize the squares attacked by the knight would be especially useful.
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.
As a fellow mediocre player, my sense is that the best way to prevent blunders is to slow down and enumerate the possibilities. Sure, tools will help, just like having the computer suggest the three best lines will help, but it kind of defeats the purpose of trying to be good at the game. If you're frustrated by missing something that you feel you should have seen, slow down and see it next time.
What I find funny about chess it's such an elegantly designed game... except castling. Always seemed like a random thing to me to be in the game, and then I found out that it was added centuries after in medieval europe to the game, makes sense why it feels so out of place.
Wish we had a league without castling for that sole purpose.
It's indeed a relatively recent addition, but the idea that the king would get a special move is a bit older [0].
No-castling variant is a thing. It generally makes taking the King to safety more difficult, encouraging a more aggressive style (in the spirit of "I'll get to yours before you get to mine").
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).
Fun as it may be as a thought/UX experiment, I don't think it's a good design, because half-truth is usually the worst compromise.
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 have a fair amount of experience teaching children and adults how to play chess.
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.
* they can move by 2 squares from their initial file, and only from the initial file
Obviously I meant a rank (horizontal), not a file (vertical), sorry. Cannot edit the comment anymore
If made into a physical set, I could see the bishops and rooks getting confused
Maybe it's just the top down view, but the white king and queen are practically indistinguishable to me.
Pawns are awkward though because movement doesn't align with attack
Yup, the visually dominating pieces end up _feeling_ wrong. It'd really bother me tbh.
Interesting, it seems like we can "dissect" each piece into independent properties like possible directions and possible distances. Then one could generate chess set spaces randomly and have a lot of fun.
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-variants/all-30-piece...
Not that that's an exclusive list either,
I kind of wish the knight was more of a tetris L, but I like the idea overall
8 squares or 8 Ls to show all liberties. One L symbolically.
Curious about the second tweet: are they typically called “liberties” in chess or is that borrowed from Go?
Its not a chess term.
It sure got knight wrong. But then again if done right it would look like swastika ;)
If you take half of its possible moves away then yes
Knight could be a cross of L
I first saw something like this on lishogi (lichess for shogi)
I hardly even play chess, but I do know the rules and how the pieces move, but this wrecks my intuitive sense of how the pieces move entirely, so I think it’d be a hard transition to regular pieces, which kind of kills any supposed benefit.
The Knight would work better as a cross with perpendicular line segments at the end of both sides of each axis.
Several years ago, I wrote a chess-like game where the shape of the pieces showed their potential moves (https://github.com/scottlilly/mogrichess). This was needed because the a capturing piece gained the movement abilities of the piece it could capture, so pieces' movement abilities were always changing.
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.
This is cool! The major online chess sites should add this as an option.
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.
Nice :-) I might make the King round though. Set it apart more.
the rook and bishop are the same shapes tho
Someone told me chess players should design their own pieces and make them look just alien enough for the superior opponent to accept the match.
I had a similar idea: https://imgur.com/a/MccC29V
It's a good idea but looks a bit too bland for my taste, I think a bit more spiky would be better, so based on this I made such a concept:
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
Yea this is the basic premise of chess …
Pawns are missing a rear view mirror for en passant
It’s interesting how people react to these designs. For me, I actually find them more confusing than the actual piece shapes, probably because I have the symbols of knight, rook, etc. burned into my mind from playing chess for thousands of hours as a kid. But it could also be because the geometric shapes are too abstract and lack character, which makes them harder to distinguish from each other.
It brings to mind the idea that everything is ultimately a representation, even the things designed to be as straightforward as possible.
Looks like the peices from the game Ploy. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1591/ploy
Cool idea! Something about this makes me think about chaining moves, like function calls. Is there a version of chess where you get to keep moving if you take a piece?
Gave up on the knights i see.
Ok, but the attack direction is the easiest part of chess to learn. I learnt the rules of chess as a child and despite having played less than 20 games in my life I remember them entirely, including things like en passant.
You can also design the pieces like humans that fight each other in long unskippable animations each time a piece is captured. (Does anyone remember Battle Chess?)
In a sense, chess pieces can already perceived as geometric attack directions. After too much chess I feel frightened by the salt shaker.
This illustration of two knights playing chess from a book written 741 years ago really made me stop and think how old Chess is.
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)
Why? By the time you have understood the game, you know the pieces. There are only six of them, after all.
A piece-set like this would be great for starting chess, and variants. Especially when there are a lot of pieces and different promotions.
cf. Bernard Parham's "Matrix Notation", which uses the same shapes for pawns, bishops, rooks, and (almost) queens: https://www.thechessdrum.net/talkingdrum/TheMatrix/index.htm...
This idea has been around a long time.
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
Learning all the possible moves and attacks in chess is the least difficult part of learning chess.
Lichess also includes a piece set similar to this, although with the notable difference that the Knight is shaped like a greater-than symbol and the pawn is a small square.
a theme for chess.com would be nice !!
Lovely communicative design
This is already incorporated to some extent. Keeping in mind sets vary,
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.
I like it, but the knights still aren't quite right. And I'd probably give all of them square bases, so that the bishop and rooks weren't so easily mistakable with just a 45° turn.
Much like this chess set from 1975 [1]. We picked it up from an auction house about 6years ago, but didnt pay anywhere near the price it reached at bonhams. It is really well designed is "travel ready" put on lid and all pieces stay in place. With only 12 supposedly made it was a great find.
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...
This is fantastic, I would love to try playing a game with these pieces. I think this could improve accessibility and also make the game less intimidating for newcomers.
Now do 3d chess!
I don't know what it was but within 0.5 seconds of looking at the first image my brain had a weird feeling of calmed peace.
Very odd.
This is not a new idea.
isn't this idea about as trivial as it is useless? i can maybe see the appeal as a special edition for elderly homes or hospitals where people with brain injuries are treated but for a healthy person? learning a few rules? how about a simple cheat sheet squiggled on a piece of paper next to the board?
This is why in some rare endgames you might want to promote to a knight instead of a queen to avoid a stalemate!
Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule.
(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.)
Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory.
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...
[4] https://lichess.org/variant/chess960
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.
What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves.
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.
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.)
But who cares if the rules themselves are more elegant if the game they describe is different and worse because of it?
It's like you introduced a bug in refactoring and are insisting on the change because the code looks nicer now.
I do not get this Rosen Trap example you linked to... It's an easy win for blacks, just move the rook to 8th row instead of moving the pawn and it's checkmate. The pawn move seems kind of random, as if it was played by a child.
Generally the attacking side can avoid the stalemate trap but often it happens under time pressure etc so the attacker doesn’t have time to calculate whether the defender has any valid moves.
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.
In that case the stalemated player has no moves. So you can't keep playing
Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.
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.)
This would make the game less elegant, in my view. There are too many endgames that are just trivially winning if you make stalemate a win for the stalemating player.
Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
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.
I dont get it. Queen can do everything a knight can, and then some. How can electing a knight instead of queen can be of any usefulness?
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?
Sometimes it's tactically crucial that the promotion is a check, and in these cases you might need a knight.
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.
A knight can attack squares the queen cannot. There are positions that promoting to a knight is checkmate, but a queen would lose.
Promotion generally happens when there are very few pieces on the board, and often the opponent's king is the only piece they can move, and it often is close to the promotion square since it was likely trying to block it.
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.
In Chinese chess, the horse behaves like the knight in western chess except that (a) it cannot jump over pieces, and (b) the definition of jumping over is that it first move horizontally/vertically 1 step and then diagonally 1 step. It cannot first move diagonally.
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.
Most people think of the knight move as one straight and then one diagonal. However, this is still ambiguous. Imagine one up, then one down left for example, resulting in the square left to the original square. A better description is moving 2 squares straight, not diagonal, into one direction, then moving 1 square into a 90° turned direction.
Most people think of the knight moving 2 and then 1.
Chess players do, yet experience of basically any non-player I have ever heard describing it as "one straight, one diagonal" tells me otherwise. Also "moving two and then one" is ambiguous and would allow moving 3 squares into the same direction.
This probably _heavily_ depends on the country where you live.
I don't know people that think or thought that horses move "one straight, one diagonal".
I've always thought of it as an L
I was taught that a knight moves by going to the opposite corner of a 3x2 rectangle
Both western and Chinese chess knights move to the opposite corner of a 3x2 rectangle.
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.
etc.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.
Forward two steps and the knight falls off his horse.
But you can do the same unambiguously if you are going to involve angles.
"Move one straight and then move one diagonal into a 135° turned direction."
But in Chinese chess, if the knight can't pass other pieces, thinking of it that way would be a rule change.
I'm not a master or anything, but I've always found it interesting that the queen is usually thought of as the most powerful piece while I think it's the knight.
Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
Try playing a game where your opponents knights are replaced with queens. I suspect you will change your mind very quickly.
Knights are prone to getting "trapped". There are limited places a knight can go, so the opponent only has to maintain pressure on those squares. This is the reason why it's generally a bad idea to put a knight near a corner of the board.
Knights are useful but are very much not as difficult to defend against as a queen.
Knights tend to be overrated at lower levels of playing strength, where their irregular moving pattern is indeed challenging for the players, and as a result, Knight moves often get overlooked.
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.
Knights are objectively nowhere near as powerful as queens. However they're underrated in blitz chess, where their visually hard to see moves often catch people unaware.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
A huge difference is that a queen, like a rook, can attack a whole row and column, making it possible to box in an opponent's king. A knight has limited reach and can never attack a square the same colour as the one it is occupying.
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.
You mean a 2-square Chebyshev distance, I think (the Linf norm). A 2-square Manhattan distance (the L1 norm) wouldn't include any of the squares that a knight can get to.
For those that want a visual description there's a blog I serendipitous recently ran into[0]. If you're too lazy to open:
- 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...
That's very much a picture that you learn on the usual mathematics route of learning about these things, yes. More generally, there's a fair amount to be said about how you can derive shapes of unit balls from distance functions and vice versa (in functional analysis in particular).
I think, unfortunately, not many get visual descriptions when learning about these topics. To be fair, these visualizations can harm one's intuitions about how the metrics work in higher dimensions, so I can understand arguments against visualization. But in another example, I think even many people can come out of a Linear Algebra class and not understand that a matrix operating on a vector always performs an affine transformation on that vector (yes, I know we can abuse and get other forms but let's keep general due to context).
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.
Specifically,
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,
https://archive.org/details/geometry0001berg
To add to that, this also makes a knight and queen a very strong attacking combo, because they can uniquely cover the most squares.
Given... they stay... in the same... square?
There was a big discussion of this topic on chess stackexchange[1]. It used to be just universally believed to be true but some modern analysts challenge the idea.
[1] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/27815/why-does-a-k...
In the image above, imagine a knight on H3, which covers g1, g5. Neither a bishop, a pawn or rook can help that way.
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.
It also enables some powerful, well-known attacking patterns, like a smothered checkmate with Queen sacrifice (or Philidor's mate).
Some non-orthodox chess variants have a piece which combines Queen+Knight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(chess)
very old variants often had such compound pieces like for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Acedrex
There's also the knook that combines the Knight and the Rook, which was hilariously invented as a meme on /r/anarchychess: https://anarchychess.fandom.com/wiki/Knook
Here's a whole page of chess variants, many of which include such invented pieces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants
Wherein the hex-knight is the anti-hex-queen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#/media/File:Gl...
I have no source for this but that is the definition for a knight's valid moves, it goes where the queen cannot within that distance
The official definition, as per the FIDE laws of chess [1], article 3.6 is
"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."
[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf
That's a horrendously hard to parse definition. Couldn't they say "3 squares away but not on the same rank/file/diagonal" or something a bit easier?
A very interesting property:
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?
Well, since a knight on a white square can only attack knights on black squares, and half of the 64 squares are white...
Yup that's how they designed it in hexagonal chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#Rules
"the knight may move to any nearest cell not on an orthogonal or diagonal line on which it stands"
The complement-queen I would say
I thought that was the main deal about knights...