51–60 of 108 posts
I always thought a cool chess variant would be quantum chess where you can move a piece to more than one square and assign a probability to each position. Your opponent could do the same. But I never worked out how it could work from there.
How do you know if you have won? Or is it about avoiding checkmate in all possible timelines for all possible time travelling moves?
I'd think the same way you know you won regular chess. You capture the opponent's king. Checkmate is just an acknowledgement that the current player has no way of avoiding their opponent from taking their king on the next move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the chess board is 2d, how does the Knight move, doesn't it need the third dimension to go "over" other pieces? I assume, graphics notwithstanding, the board is logically represented in 3 dimensions.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but anyways: obviously an actual chessboard is indeed 3d - as are all physical objects in our world. Yet a chessboard is effectively a 2d space: any piece position is completely defined by a row and a column.
Now I can "checkmate, bitches!" in another timeline... This is tremendous
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-...
The main reason for that is time traveling and dimension hoping come at a tempo disadvantage. When you create a new timeline, you make 1 move, but give your opponent 2 moves. You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in the past.
Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much, minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them.
It does have more depth than normal chess, but it's not infinity deep. I still love it. My biggest concern with high level chess matches is that many, many games end in draws. It feels like it's impossible to a draw a gam e in 5D chess' [0]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...
We skipped right over the opportunity for non-integer fractal dimensional chess! In all seriousness, this looks super interesting. I’d love to see some live gameplay of it.
Arguably, that's what this is. The bifurcating timelines are better thought of as n-dimensional space. Describing the location of a piece requires a description of the bifurcations, which won't be a fixed number of numbers but will go up as the game progresses. Integer dimensions don't really cover this.
It looks amazing, and I really want to play it, but however I count I only end up with 4 dimensions. A chess board is 2D, time back-and-forth is 3D, and going up/down across universes is 4D. What's the 5th? Are they counting real-life-time as the 5th? In which case normal chess is 3D, which seems like an abuse of terms.
However, I would say that real chess is sort of "2.5" D by this definition rather than full 3D, since the turn number coordinate of every piece can only go up, not down.
[1]: The game's formalism is slightly complicated by the fact that a piece could make a move of (x, y, t, L) -> (x, y, t - 1, L) which would count as moving one square in one dimension, but then the game's "system" automatically transforms that move into a (x, y, t - 1, L +/- N) move. (The choice of +/- depends on which player made the move. The value of N depends on how many other timelines there are at that t.) This happens because of the rule that the past cannot be changed, so altering the past requires branching the timeline.
Similar things also happen with a move of (x, y, t, L) -> (x, y, t, L2), because within a single turn there is a concept of whether the board has already had a move played on it or not. So if the board at L2 has already had a move played on it, this new move is instead transformed into (x, y, t, L3). So it counts as a move of (L2 - T) squares for the purpose of validity, but is actually a move of (L3 - T) squares.
So is this basically visualizing the tree of possibilities from any board configuration, overlaid on itself at nodes where different sequences of moves can result in the same board configuration, allowing you to "jump" to a different "timeline" through the 5th dimension?
It looks amazing, and I really want to play it, but however I count I only end up with 4 dimensions. A chess board is 2D, time back-and-forth is 3D, and going up/down across universes is 4D. What's the 5th? Are they counting real-life-time as the 5th? In which case normal chess is 3D, which seems like an abuse of terms.
If the chess board is 2d, how does the Knight move, doesn't it need the third dimension to go "over" other pieces? I assume, graphics notwithstanding, the board is logically represented in 3 dimensions.