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1D Chess

rowan441.github.io

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Re: 1D Chess

#51

Post by teiferer »

al_borland wrote: post #27
quuxplusone wrote: post #14

Mentioned in TFA: This version of chess is given by Martin Gardner in his "Mathematical Games" column of July 1980 (pages 27 and 31) — https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966361 — and the analysis of White's mate is given in the column of August 1980 (page 18) — https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966383 . I do wonder how things would change if the board were 9 cells long; 10 cells long; etc. Also, it seems "in the spirit" to…

Maybe I'm not good enough at chess to understand the strategy here, but how would castling be useful in this 1-D game? Castling in a normal game protects your King and activates the Rook. In this 1-D game, your King starts out protected behind the Rook. If you castle and end up in a _ R K N position, your king is exposed and your Rook is trapped behind the King, useless, with no way to ever get it back out. The Rook…

Exactly. Feels like R K N would be a more suitable initial position in which castling would swap the king into safety, provided it has not moved and is not in check...

Though maybe in that case the best first move for both is to castle and we are non the wiser (back to the original starting position)

Re: 1D Chess

#52

Post by jandrese »

al_borland wrote: post #29
Fabricio20 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very good at chess, but I dont get why most things are considered a stalemate? I strategically remove all pieces of the enemy, leaving only the king against my rook/tower whatever its called, the king has nowhere to run. In my eyes it's a checkmate. The game just calls it a stalemate. Would be a stalemate if I couldn't do anything, but I can kill the enemy king.

It's a stalemate because while the king can't move, he isn't under active attack. There is nowhere he can legally move, but he's safe where he's at.

That rule caught me up too. In regular chess if it is your opponents turn and their only pieces are a king in the 1,8 square and a pawn that is pressed up against one of your pawns and you have rooks in the 2,1 and 8,7 squares that counts as a victory does it not?

Re: 1D Chess

#54

Post by School-Cotton »

jandrese wrote: post #52
al_borland wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a stalemate because while the king can't move, he isn't under active attack. There is nowhere he can legally move, but he's safe where he's at.

That rule caught me up too. In regular chess if it is your opponents turn and their only pieces are a king in the 1,8 square and a pawn that is pressed up against one of your pawns and you have rooks in the 2,1 and 8,7 squares that counts as a victory does it not?

No. That is a draw assuming it is the player with only a king’s turn to move.

Translating your notation to normal chess notation:

White king on h1, black rooks on a2 and g8, black king in some random other place, white to move.

That is a draw, because white is NOT in check, but has no legal moves. That scenario is called stalemate. If white were in check, it would be checkmate and a win for black. Set it up on any chess analysis board website and it will say the game is a draw.

Re: 1D Chess

#58

Post by dhosek »

moffkalast wrote: post #26
asibahi wrote: post #5

This is really nice. Incidentally, there is an actual 1D game that is one of the most popular games on the planet: Backgammon.

Backgammon, the game everyone's seen and at the same time nobody knows how to play :P

My brother and I once took a train trip from L.A. to Omaha and back for a friend’s wedding and played backgammon for most of the trip. For weeks afterwards, I saw backgammon everywhere (most notably when reading dialogue-heavy books with lots of 1-line paragraphs).

Re: 1D Chess

#60

Post by tromp »

1D Go is also interesting and doesn't require any change in rules or starting position. TIL that it is known as Alak [1]. One of the open problems in our Combinatorics of Go paper [2] is whether you can play a game that goes through all possible legal 1xn positions for any n>2, which we were only able to verify up to n=7.

[1] https://senseis.xmp.net/?Alak

[2] https://tromp.github.io/go/gostate.pdf

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