Regium: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

@Mi5ter_t yes I remember having read somewhere when Thibault explained that he found it on the web and decided to use it :)

@ProfDrHack #920 They've done it already
www.kickstarter.com/projects/infivention/square-off-worlds-smartest-chess-board-relaunched

As others in this thread have pointed out, quite a lot of money must have gone into the regium scheme even before the kickstarter launched:

Marketing, including:
- professional "prototype" video
- sponsoring the banter blitz event
- full page ad in a chess magazine
- multi-lingual homepage

... and maybe some real engineering and developing work - in case the goal was not a full-out fraud, but to develop *some* product similar to an automatic chess board.

An interesting question then is: Who may have already invested in this project before the kickstarter? And were the investors themselves victims of a scam, or did they contribute fully aware of the "creative" marketing methods?

I'm really proud of lichess community to denounce this, and the quick official positions of rival platforms, chess.com probably the first one, giving credits to lichess community and preventing more chess lovers to be cheated like this. Great work all!

@Mi5ter_t @rfw I tracked it down a while ago

www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/576091

There's a bunch of other pictures by the artist in the same style.

I don't see anything about a license, hopefully it was paid for.

The comments translated are

"Oh, it's interesting ... The girl's left foot is good! The chair is going to move on its own."

gia: "I tried to make me feel like I was secretly poking under the desk w It seemed to be transmitted and I was happy as much as possible w ('∀) This chair will follow everywhere w"

Dang I just realized in that picture Black's King is on the second rank. That bot's playing the Bongcloud! r/AnarchyChess where you at?

@Panagrellus this tweet talks about regium's former investor with close ties to chess24, no idea who they are talking about.

twitter.com/Bodenseeperlen/status/1232567644617920512

It has dropped two backers, down to 59.

@h2b2 - very good detective work :) didn;t know that artistic site - 10 years ago i knew a girl with a similar foot that showed me the great community of deviantart artists and they works - i am very impressed by that and this pixiv artistic community - there were also trainings of how to draw examples - very good work.

Regarding the "Regium" - you can clearly register it as there is no legal company in about on that page, legal representation, no trademark - only some fake video of sth to be.

But it would be better not to take it and only refer to this situation, to what happened.

So the number of supporters for this project is still falling on Kickstarter, nice.
But what in the living heck has to happen for Kickstarter to take that thing down?
Does anybody have an idea of what Kickstarter considers a no no?
I never supported any project via Kickstarter and now I'm pretty sure I never will.

At this point, we don't need more evidence that the Regium videos are not showing what they pretend to show, but just out of curiosity I'd like to mention something else in the promo video (apologies if this was discovered already in one of the 930 comments above...):

Have a look at the knight moves.
1. around min. 1.15, black pawn captures white Knight: the knight moves to the edge of the board, without turning its head. So far so good.

2. min 1.37, Bishop captures Knight. Again, the knight moves to the edge of the board, but this time, it turns its head by 90° in the process to look into the camera.

3. min 3:09 (the "live transmission" game): again, the knight turns its head into an optically more pleasing position.

Now, this could be some super-sophisticated steering by electromagnets to rotate the knight's head into the aesthetically most pleasing position. But how likely is that? Usually, if electromagnets drag the pieces across the board, I would not expect them to rotate in the process.