how was chess invented?

Ajedrez, de Jorge Luis Borges

I

En su grave rincón, los jugadores
rigen las lentas piezas. El tablero
los demora hasta el alba en su severo
ámbito en que se odian dos colores.

Adentro irradian mágicos rigores
las formas: torre homérica, ligero
caballo, armada reina, rey postrero,
oblicuo alfil y peones agresores.

Cuando los jugadores se hayan ido,
cuando el tiempo los haya consumido,
ciertamente no habrá cesado el rito.

En el Oriente se encendió esta guerra
cuyo anfiteatro es hoy toda la Tierra.
Como el otro, este juego es infinito.

II

Tenue rey, sesgo alfil, encarnizada
reina, torre directa y peón ladino
sobre lo negro y blanco del camino
buscan y libran su batalla armada.

No saben que la mano señalada
del jugador gobierna su destino,
no saben que un rigor adamantino
sujeta su albedrío y su jornada.

También el jugador es prisionero
(la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero
de negras noches y de blancos días.

Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza.
¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonía?

CHESS by Jorge Luis Borges

1.

Seated in their serious corners, the players
Align the slow pieces. The board
Holds them until dawn in its severe
Enclosure, two colours hating each other.

The game magically enforces discipline
Upon its forms: Homeric castle, light-
Footed knight, warring queen, the king
In the rear, his bishop at a slant, pawns advancing.

When the players have gone away,
When time at last consumes them,
The ritual is certainly not over.

It was the Orient that sparked this war
And now the whole earth is its theatre.
As with that other game, this one is forever.

2.

Frail king, slippery bishop, bloody-minded
Queen, single-minded rook, smooth-tongued
Pawn, both the black and the white, seek the path
That finds the other out, armed to the teeth.

What they do not know is that the pointing
Hand of the player is governor of destiny.
Nor do they know what adamantine ways
Bind their will and shape their journey.

The player, however, is also a prisoner
(The saying of Omar’s) of yet another
Checkerboard of nights and days.

God moves the player as he the pieces
But what god behind God plots the advent
Of dust and time and dreams and agonies?

Ok so what now >???

@hydroshadow check out this blog I found-lichess.org/@/Kabir_1304/blog/the-origins-of-chess/QOZK3Zr1

Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree and a knight fell on his head.

@DCMetropolisChess said in #36:
> @RoundMoundOfUnsound You're statment is definetely has a point. Chess in not infinite. The 7 piece tablebase. All of which are agreeable. Except for this.
> The comparison of Video games, Checkers, tic tac toe to chess is a very different story. Unlike checkers, tic tac toe, video games. Chess is by far more superior in terms of complexity. It is true that chess is limited and not infinite, similar to video games and checkers which follow certain pattern.
> However, how many patterns are there in chess?

About 150 basic ones from which all the complex ones are built. Maybe a few dozen in each niche. Fischer reduced it to next to nothing even without computers we still had +/= etc.

> 10^120 more than the atoms in the universe.
> Thats an unccountable times more than checkers or tic tac toe!

Doesn't matter if you figure out that 1 e4 leads to a draw then 1 e5.

In my opening system I analyze every line until I find -1.00 or better by force. That score is a forced draw even if we don't have the technique yet. We're getting there at warp speed thanks to the engines and online play.

> It took the 7 piece tablebase 7 years before it was solved.

That's a processing issue not a math issue. Matter of time before it gets to 32. Checkers went the other way from move one.

Is 1 e4 a forced draw? 1 e4 e5? 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3?

I use 1 d3 and 2 Nd2 because I can play it against anything and by move six I've cut the number of plausible winning lines to almost zero. From there it's a matter of technique. I've improved about 120 Elo points a year for seven straight years with what led to this and peaked so far at 2276. In 2019 I beat Anton Korobov (2688 FIDE #42 in the world) in fifteen moves on the Black side of the QGA with a line straight from the engines (and in my book). In 2021 Korobov beat Kasparov in 17 moves with White.

If I can do that the game is in serious trouble. I'm 1899 USCF (from 1991).

> The number of unique legal 7-piece positions is 423,836,835,667,331. Syzygy tablebases store all their information in 18.4 TB, so at around 0.35 bits per position. This is much more compact than the proprietary 100 TB Lomonosov tablebases.
> 423.836,835,667,331 possibilities in the 7 tablepiece endgame.
> That's just seven piece. Imagine counting every chess piece.

Capablanca played nearly flawless endgames without a machine. Rules of thumb are all one needs, then some scripting.

We're no more than 3-5 years away at this point. It's why I'm publishing my work: the information will be worthless (or even more so than it is now). Just too many people making money teaching a dinosaur game to stop.