HACKER Q&A
📣 hubraumhugo

What would be the best method for communicating chess moves?


It comes down to two questions:

- What is the least amount of signals that someone needs? E.g. direction, coordinates, the piece to move?

- How to transfer these signals unnoticed?


  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_factor:

“For example, in chess, if a "node" is considered to be a legal position, the average branching factor has been said to be about 35, and a statistical analysis of over 2.5 million games revealed an average of 31.”

So, if (all) you can assume is that the receiver can write down all legal moves and order them in some way, it seems ≈5 bits are sufficient (so, one letter or digit is more than enough). You should vary code length depending on the number of legal moves (That is less than the 6 bits you need to indicate a single field on the board)

I think ease of understanding of the message and robustness of transmission may be more important than message length, though.


👤 anigbrowl
I watched a grand master interview earlier who said it might be as simple as a code to mention pieces, such as knight or bishop - once a player's attention was tipped off to which had the best move, it would usually be easy to spot it. He said players are already swept for electronic devices but he can only assume that's adequate, saying he didn't know if it could pick tiny things like in-ear receivers.

He expressed discomfort at taking Carlson's accusations at face value given that they mentioned needing permission to speak from the person accused (??) but agreed that cheating is having a disastrous effect on the field in general and that it seems to be at some sort of tipping point.


👤 57FkMytWjyFu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

snip for interesting content...

"The Thing was designed by Soviet Russian inventor Leon Theremin,[4] best known for his invention of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument. "

Infrasonics could be a candidate as well.


👤 viraptor
> What is the least amount of signals that someone needs?

That's going to highly depend on the player. For a beginner you'd have to spell it out exactly. For a master player, you can shorten whole groups of moves to a few bits (which opening to use), some positions will need only "yes, do the obvious thing", etc. The design would be very different there.


👤 joshxyz
Butt plugs vibrations in morse code