A Chess Game

I’m bored. I’m jobless. And I’m home alone. I slap both my hands to my cheeks and go ‘aaaaaa’! Not anymore.

Short of having Greg House come into my home to steal my dalmations, I play chess. With the computer.

Chess is a relatively finite game (when you compare it with other strategy games, like Warcraft III). There is no issue of balance, because both sides have the exact same units with the same exact rules. Also, it’s a game of perfect information, because both players know what their opponent is doing (but not necessarily know what the opponent is up to).

So I sat down and began to think of ways to improve chess. My aim was to make chess gameplay more complicated, but still simple enough to play, unlike quantum mechanics chess (which is supremely awesome, but the perfect information part of a chess board spoils everything). I also only want to use existing chess pieces, unlike other games of chess, like quantum chess, where there are new pieces introduced.

One of the first things I’d like to do is to remove perfect information – so that the opponent doesn’t know what a player is doing. One way is to play chess like the game Battleships – with two different boards, but that would spoil the fun of chess.

The second best way to do it is to introduce an uncertainty to the game. And what better way to do it than to introduce Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (or Chewxy’s understanding of it) to a simple game of chess?

The Heisenberg Chess Game (or you can call it the Shroedinger Chess Game)

Equipment needed: Chess game, and a large coin that is good for flipping.

Rules: Exactly the same as the rules of a normal chess game, with one exception.

Exception Rule: When an opponent captures a piece, both pieces go into Heisenberg Uncertainty zone. For example, if A uses a pawn to capture B’s knight, the knight doesn’t gets captured. Instead, both pawn and knight will be occupying the same space at the same time (which is impossible, unless Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is evoked).

To resolve this problem, a coin is flipped, and immediately covered, and calls are made. B proceeds to play. On A’s next turn, A may choose to collapse the probability waveform by checking the result of the coinflip. If the results favors A, then the pawn captures the knight. But if the results favors B, the capture is unsuccessful, but A may place his pawn (or any other unit) anywhere on the board he wishes, except in a case that causes an immediate check or checkmate.

What do you think of it? I’ve got another version of chess, which is based on the Rock-Paper-Scissors method of game play, but I’ll leave that to another day.

In the mean time, I shall bore you with random geeky stuff about me and old age:

Chewxy says:
hey! Printf is no longer in Windows command prompt

cfgt says:
really? what about cout?

^This is a sign of old age for the both of us. Printf and cout are commands for C++, not DOS. A moment of muddle there.

Chewxy says:
dun think any commands like rm or md works anymore

Chewxy says:
Checking now…

Chewxy says:
Nope, rm and md doesn’t work

cfgt says:
er, isn’t rm and md Linux commands, not windows?

cfgt says:
they never worked in Windows you dumbbolt

Chewxy says:
Gaaaa! I’m mixing up Windows and Linux commands!

Chewxy says:
Maybe I should make Lindows.

Chewxy says:
Oh wait, they’ve made that. The creators got sued or something.

I was like.. shiiiiit. This is the problem – doing too many things at once. One moment I’m SSH-ing into a xbox running xebian, and I use Linux commands, next moment I’m on Windows (technically I’ve always been in Windows) messing around with the command prompt, and I thought some commands were removed.

Still, I put this up to growing older. I used to be able to multitask like that without confusing the syntaxes between systems.

Then there is the whole language debate I had with cfgt:

Chewxy says:
Given the choice between Jython and IronPython, I’ll still choose IronPython.

Chewxy says:
Coz I love .NET

… some time later …

Chewxy says:
Never wrote for Linux before. Must be monstrous.

Chewxy says:
#include <Some random Linux library!>

Chewxy says:
#include <even more manual tedious insertion of random libraries>

cfgt says:
as I said, all you have to do is replace your slow Microsoft libraries with faster ANSI/ISO standard libraries

Sorry if you don’t get the whole thing. But a lot of the joke was context sensitive, and I’ve removed a lot of the context because they are private and confidential, but I think you may still be able to catch some of the funny parts (I mean, who doesn’t get Microsoft jokes).

Ah well, this is getting stale. Tell me what you think of the chess game.