This is a featured article.

Board Images

What Lee has been doing with the diagrams makes the article(s) on chess look great! Is there a technique available for creating these drawings to illustrate other articles about chess? Eclecticology

I created the diagrams with "xboard" and "Gimp". If you'd like some diagrams for specific things, let me know. The piece movements were already in separate articles. I think they might be better in a single "Rules of chess" article as well, but that would be a lot more work chasing down old links. Maybe after I get the text itself up to shape we can look at a reorganization. --LDC

Great additions and edits to the chess article, Lee, thanks. I'm trying to imitate you to create images for my sample game. GIMP is rad, judging by my first use. I seem to be succeeding, but I wonder why my images have so much larger file size than yours, maybe five times as big. Default GIMP png compression is 6. Should I compress more? TIA --Karl Juhnke

P.S. I am working on Windows, and I find Winboard isn't as good as the (gratis) ChessBase Light program for drawing diagrams, because the latter can highlight squares and add arrows. Of course, this could be done in the GIMP, but would be relatively laborious, whereas in CBL one can bang out diagrams in a minute or two. For example, here is an image of a knight fork:

File:Chess fork knight chessbase.png

But this raises another issue. For the chess pages to look really slick, all the diagrams should look the same, shouldn't they? But that won't happen unless we all use the same tool. And the biggest inducement to using the same tool would be to have an automated generation of diagrams from a description of the position... --Karl Juhnke

Can we hunt down any software which can produce a png out of a position description? I would really like to add some boards to Chess Strategy and Tactics. AxelBoldt

Sounds good. I'll resist my urge to interfere. The first place where I considered adding diagrams was at Chess strategy and tactics to illustrate elementary mating positions, etc. Eclecticology

No no, please do interfere. AxelBoldt

Interference comes in degrees. I'm willing to let people complete a task before I work to screw it up. Any earlier entry is like having the phone ring during sex.

I imagine xboard and gimp might be hacked and scripted to do that, but I'm not sure whether that would get enough use to be worth the effort, or if there might already be something out there. Xboard will read and write game positions in text files. --LDC

If you have gifs of the pieces, here's a cgi script which can create a board on the fly: http://shawn.apocabilly.org/pwg/examples/4ex.html.

There's also a chess style and fonts for LaTeX.

The CGI used Perl's "GD" module, which only creates GIFs, I think. I might also be able to hack something quickly that uses ESR's "sng". --LDC

GD creates png and jpeg but not gif (newer versions, at least). AxelBoldt

A simple VB .Net application can be written to generate PNG (or any other format) chess board images with GUI options for image format, grid numbering, colors and size. If anyone thinks that such an application would be helpful, let me know. The .Net framework would need to be installed on systems in order to run the program though. Robert Lee 13:02 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

Organization of related pages

What I find difficult to accept is why the rules about the movement of the pieces are now in separate articles. If you look at this from the point of view of the potential user he is more likely to want to print out the information to have available beside the chessboard. It is unlikely that he will want to click on a different link for each piece. Eclecticology

I agree that many users will want the rules all in one place. On the other hand, there will also be some users (albeit fewer) who are not interested in playing chess but still want information about an individual piece. For example, I might be writing a poem in which I am playing on the various meanings of knight/night, and want a quick reference on the moves, history, strategic importance, etc. of the chess knight. As the mass of chess material on Wikipedia grows, it seems both advisable and inevitable to have a separate article about each piece.

My question is how much repetition to countenance. My programmer's instinct is say "as close to zero as possible", i.e. do it right in one place and then link from everywhere else. But it would definitely disrupt the flow of Axel's strategy article if the blurb about bishops were moved to the bishop article and linked. Similarly, it will break the flow of reading about a tactics article to link to separate pages on fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, overloading, undermining, interference, underpromotion, zwischenzug, ablenkung, hinlenkung, etc.

Is it possible to put links inside a page, as in HTML? For example, there wouldn't need to be a separate article for forking if one could link directly to the section of the tactics article which deals with forks. That would allow for both readable articles and precise linking. --Karl Juhnke

Right now, that's not possible, but I agree that it would be very desirable. AxelBoldt

A bold black adventurous Knight
Climbed Rooks for the white Queen's delight
Not high Bishop's roar
Nor Pawns at the door
Could save the poor King from this fright.

Your reference to poetry made my descent into doggerel inevitable.

In my view an encyclopedia attempts a balance between long tedious articles one one hand and fragmentation on the other. With specific reference to chess, I consider this long string of separate articles to be fragmentation. May I therefore suggest the following possible organizational outline for this topic

I've moved my subject outline for chess to the main page, and I'm working through the 133 items that "Search" gave me, with a view to making sure that they are all appropriately co-ordinated.

 Eclecticology

No objection to reorganizing the talk. Indeed, I'd be happier if some of the musty comments were simply deleted. The most current comments are presently hardest to find.

On that note, I'm unclear exactly what your outline is suggesting. Are you proposing one article per bullet, or merely one article per top-level bullet, or a single, long, well-organized article? In the balance between fragmentation and tedium, my hunch is that an on-line encyclopedia can afford more fragmentation than a paper encyclopedia, due to the convenience of hyperlinks, although I don't by any means want to deprecate the value of a coherent, contiguous read. --Karl Juhnke

Philosophically I tend to favour longer articles, while breaking off only certain major topics that really merit special treatment such as Strategy and Tactics. Even though chess is not substantively a very controversial subject, there is still a need to find a common ground between the two extremes of presentation, and a way of accomodating that. The subject outline chart would sit at the top of the article. Each division may or may not have a separate article depending on whether there is enough material or somebody willing to write about it. It may stay on the top page for ages until someone dos somthing at which time it will be easy to "wiki" it along. A brief explanatory paragraph can stay behind; this is probably desirable in the case of first level divisions.

Three or four levels of division in an article may be the maximum that is reasonable, but then when it gets that far, the top level division probably needs to be split off anyway, and receive its own subject outline. Eclecticology

For the record, the main reason I broke chess variants off from the main article is because it's such a rich field (there's so many variants and I plan to write about a lot of them!) and well, variants aren't chess! Also, I think the best thing to do is break all of them off with articles. Leave one paragraph about each of them and a link to follow another article for more detail. That way we'll have more content about Chess! Once an article gets long enough, it's not so inviting to edit anymore... --Chuck Smith

Since reference to the game of chess represent an overwhelming proportion of the uses of the word "chess", I felt that setting up a disambiguating page that requires links to "Chess (game)" would be unnecessarily awkward. Other uses of the word are fairly minor, and searchers who want these links need to be informed immediately that they aare in the wrong place without the need to wade through a long article for references that may not even be there. A brief disambiguating note at the beginning seems a small price to pay when a disambiguating page would make everybody's work more complicated.

I'll deal with the placement of the subject overview later. I still believe it should be at the beginning, but I'm willing to listen to arguments. Eclecticology

I think the summary should go after the article because it will take the user to more depth. It's like, ok now you've read the introduction, to go deeper, here's some links. --Chuck Smith

The games of Go and Shogi hold similar places in Asian cultures.

I don't think either Garry Kasparov or Vishwanathan Anand, both Asians of course, would agree that Go and Shogi were preeminent in their countries.

I would change Asian to Oriental, but I get the impression that that's considered pejorative currently in the US. Does anyone have a better term?

--Matthew Woodcraft

• How about Japanese? These two are very particular to Japan. Eclecticology

I think "East Asia" fits better; Go is played in Korea and China, and chinese chess is played in China as well. Hopefully, India doesn't count as East Asia, since they don't play Go or Shogi there. AxelBoldt

Right, East Asia, and eliminate Shogi. It is popular only in Japan, and even in Japan doesn't have the status of go.

Doesn't Deep Blue deserve a mention in the main text?

...Only if Deep Fritz gets more of a mention.

So...write something about it. Eclecticology

Hey uh like if someone could figure out how a user could start from the beginning and enter a move-and so on-we could set up some sweet opening book tables-but we'd need either a page for each move or some kinda java program or whatnot

Lir 16:15 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Isn't there a question here of how deep a coverage you want to give to the openings. Where is the dividing line between a general encyclopaedic work and a specialized book about chess? If I understand your point correctly, it seems as if you want something like what you find in chess playing software. Eclecticology 19:13 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Absolutely. We should go as deep as we can. We should do chess here just like we do normal entries. We should branch and branch and branch and keep going. We should make it a goal to have chess solved on this site. There are two ways to do this. The first method is somewhat wasteful because it involves making a LOT of html pages-the second method is very easy. It just takes somebody taking the time to write a simple program that itnerfaces with wikipedia.

A fantastic idea! You can't put a hotel on Boardwalk until you've built four houses! Still, I look forward to seeing the effects of the "simple" program that you plan to write for doing this Eclecticology 07:08 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

I dont plan to write any program. I don't do compsci.

I agree with a point made earlier: we should have one page which summarizes the rules of chess, self-contained and ready for printing. The current fragmentation is bad. Repetition of material is no big problem. If the page about the bishop repeats information from the rules page and from the strategy and tactics page, that's ok. AxelBoldt 19:54 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Is there anything like a chess wiki? This could be added to the article (discussion to improve the article, but I wouldn´t ask if I wasn´t curious myself :) )

Is there a convention for capitalization of first letter of piece names? In the Chess openings page upper and lower case are mixed. In the end game page I've made them consistently lower case (I think this is easier to read).

I want to know if I can create a page called "chess terminology" and explain some of the chess jargon. Would this make it too much like a dictionary? It is distracting to define all the new terms (like rank and file and minor piece). I'd like someone's opinion because I'm a wikinewbie. Arvindn

There's certainly a lot of chess related technical terms, and it would be very useful, I think, to have a page that gathered them all together. So long as they are all on the one page, and you don't give a separate article to every little thing, there's no danger of it becoming too like a dictionary entry, I think. So good luck with it!

And, yes - I think lower case initials for piece names are much easier to read, and also much more normal in chess literature. --Camembert

This paragraph seems misleading:

These changes collectively helped popularize chess by making the action faster-paced. The game in Europe since that time has been almost the same as is played today. The current rules were completely finalized in the early 19th century.

According to Murray chess was more popular in Medieval Europe than it is today. The modern game developed a more devoted following and was open to deeper analysis. --Jeff 17:10 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

Why was the link to fairy chess removed? -- SGB 2003-03-01

I can't see why either, I'll revert it. Eclecticology

I spent a few hours last night reseaching and composing a page on "fairy chess" only to find that it is synonymous with "fantasy chess variants". As such, fairy chess is not parallel with Baroque Chess, Atomic Chess, and Fischer Random Chess (which are examples of the class) and does not belong in the bulleted list. Rather than create a new page for a synonym for an existing page, I added descriptions of fairy chess to chess variant and chess puzzles. I can't find a description of a unique game fairy chess. Kirkjobsluder 2003-03-01

My understanding is that "fairy chess" is any variations on chess played with fairy pieces - that is, pieces like the grasshopper and the knightrider which do not appear in orthodox chess. Fairy chess should, in my opinion, be given an article - it would be a useful place to gather descriptions of all these unorthodox pieces together. I'll edit the relevant pages to reflect this. If I'm mistaken, I'm sure somebody will revert me. --Camembert

Well, I asked around a bit, and it turns out I was wrong (sort of) so I'm reverting myself. "Fairy chess" is used to mean any variant with unorthodox rules (this could mean using different pieces, but could also mean different boards - like cylindrical boards - or a different number of moves, as in progressive chess). I still think we could have an article called something like fairy chess pieces though, to detail the different pieces found in these variants (I'm making some notes for it). --Camembert

I defer to this responsible outline of themed chess variants:

Chess Variant Pages- Themed Chess Variants

http://www.chessvariants.com/ithemed.html

Note that there are 11 categories in which "fantasy variants" is listed merely as one. "Fairy chess" is not listed as a category, though.

-Derek Nalls

Is there already a list somewhere of other non-English names for chess as it is for example in the article for the Earth? If not and if someone would make it - here are some terms:

de: German das "Schach(spiel)" ((singular) *n)

eo: Esperanto "sxako"

es: Spanish "ajedrez" ((singular) *m)

fr: French "jeu d'Échecs" ??

hr: Croatian "Šah" ((singular) *m)

nl: Dutch "schaken"

pt: Portuguese "xadrez"

ru: Russian "shahmaty" ("шахматы") ((plural) *m)

sl: Slovene "Šah" ((singular) *m)

sv: Swedish "Schack"

sh: Serbocroatian"Šah" ((singular) *m)

sr: Serbian "Šah" ("shah", "шах") ((singular) *m)

Best regards. --XJamRastafire 23:11 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

The following was added recently:

In mathematical terms, chess is a finite complete-information game; thus, it can and has been proven that a winning strategy for the white player exists in theory.

I am pretty sure that this is rubbish i.e. the 'thus' does not follow from the previous line (e.g. tic-tac-toe / noughts and crosses is as 'complete-information' but that doesn't make it a win for crosses!) And I am pretty sure I would've noticed in the papers if someone had solved chess. Pcb21 15:56 26 May 2003 (UTC)

I changed the statement. It can be proved that there is a strategy by which white can either win or force a draw. It's an existence theorem and no one knows what it is. Roadrunner

I removed the following paragraph ( i.e. the paragraph that Roadrunner had just added to replace the initial bogus paragraph --pcb21):

In mathematical terms, chess is a finite complete-information game; thus, it can and has been proven that there is a strategy by which white can either win or draw.

This doesn't follow at all, as far as I can see. Do you have a reference for it? --Zundark 16:41 26 May 2003 (UTC)

You're right, I think, it doesn't follow. Chess is theoretically solvable (there are only a finite number of positions, after all), but that doesn't mean to say white can force a win or draw - for all we know, the starting position might be zugzwang... --Camembert

The opinion of rec.chess.* is the same as yours, Camembert. The possibilty of initial position being zugzwang has not been discounted. Pcb21 18:06 26 May 2003 (UTC)

The opinion at "rec.chess" is incorrect.

Even though the best chess supercomputers remain orders of magnitude away from having the processing might to solve an entire game of standard chess, its initial position is NOT zugzwang for white. In principle, a first-move-of-the-game advantage always exists for white in ALL chess-related games (to varying extents) except those which are unstable (i.e., fatally flawed in design).

It fares well for standard chess that the armies are equal and symmetrical (comparatively, at least) in their initial positions. Furthermore, the opening book and endgame studies, based upon the most effective, known human and/or computer moves and their analyses, have been so exhaustively searched and richly catalogued that most modern chess experts firmly believe if there were ANY advantage for black, it would have discovered and irrefutably, routinely used to achieve a material and/or positional advantage by some definite point in the opening game (regardless of the opening chosen and executed by white).

In expert tournament play, appr. 55% of games which do not end in a draw are victories for white. Although zugzwang for white has not yet been conclusively disproven mathematically, it is exceedingly unlikely to exist since standard chess is a stable game. Although the stability of standard chess has never been proven by mathematical means either, there are no serious design flaws present, easily detectable by experts, to trigger fundamental doubts regarding its stability.

By the way, when standard chess is someday solved by a supercomputer, it will be found to predestine either be a victory for white [most likely] or a draw but NEVER a victory for black.

-Derek Nalls

You said it yourself: "zugzwang for white has not yet been conclusively disproven mathematically". Of course it's unlikely, but it's possible. That's the point. --Camembert

I understand. I guess it depends upon exactly where one judges that the line between a small yet admissible possibility and an impossibility should be drawn. Mathematics will not decide for us. For example, I am 99+% sure that Gawd does not exist. I say that makes me an atheist. My religious friend says that only makes me an agnostic.

-Derek Nalls

This page claims that Chatrang was the first version of chess, and that Shatranj is the same thing. This does not appear to be the case, at least given the outline on chessvariants. They state that the first version was called Chaturanga, and that Shatranj is a different version taken from it in Persia.

Yes, see Talk:Chatrang. (However, chaturanga may not be the first version of chess, though it is the earliest version of which there is any clear record.) I was hoping that someone who knew about these things would write the chaturanga/chatrang/shatranj articles, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen, so I may end up having to do it myself. --Zundark 13:39 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

So little is known about them that it'd probably hard to write a decent article about them. As for chaturanga being the original chess, it really depends on how we define chess, for instance if we class Shogi and Chinese Chess as "chess" (which we don't in this article) then chaturanga without a doubt is not the original version, however the games do share a common ancestor about which we know virtually nothing, although Alex Kraaijeveld is trying to reconstruct it using phylogenetic analysis. I'm not sure how accurate the chessvariants site is, the only one of its given sources I would trust to be reliable is the David Parlett book. --Imran 22:49 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Removed or from earlier board games played in China. Originally used for astrological purposes, it soon became a purely militaristic game involving four major arms: soldiers, elephants, horses and chariots from the article due to its highly speculative nature. --Imran

The chess-related pages all seem to be well-written and well-researched (knowing little more than the basics of the game, I guess I cannot really judge). What I found striking though is that at the beginning of the chess article it is not mentioned what the goal is, i e who the winner is. Could you add this for the benefit of those who read this article because they don't already know the game (shouldn't be a surprise considering this is an encyclopaedia)? --KF 12:57, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Just a little tidbit to add: If you put one grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the next, you end up with (thanks to maple)

sum('2^(k-1)', 'k'=1..64);

18446744073709551615

That's 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 -- 18.4 quintillion grains. I'm going to add that little detail to the article :) →Raul654 07:50, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

I don't mean to be rude... but this doesn't appear to be about chess? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:35, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ack, the problem of sequentially reading ones watchlist... the bit in the article is just about related to chess. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:38, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, just to clarify for those who are reading this. I made the above calculation because the article talks about it. "When the King asked how much we were to pay for it, the inventor said he claimed 1 grain of rice for the first square..." (from the article) →Raul654 09:47, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

We alreay have that somewhere else in myriad of chess article, although exactly where I can't remember. --Imran 10:24, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Found it at Shahnama theory I'm removing it from this page as the one at Shahnama theory is more accurate. --Imran 13:04, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't think the new image is any better than the previous image really, especially as this new image isn't PD/GFDL. --Imran 23:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

---

Opening Moves / White - Black

White

Fantastic article on Chess, esp. the beginning about the # of possible moves, exactly what I was looking for when i entered it in :).

Perhaps the next logical step is to do the opening moves, and it is quite easy to do white:

2*8 possible pawn moves (each of the 8 being moved either 1 or 2 steps) + 2*2 possible knight moves (each knight forking left or right) = 20 possible opening moves for white.

I know many of their names, and I have a few chess webpages bookmarked as well.

Does anyone know how to tackel black's opening moves? Usually they are in response to white's move so its a little more complex. I'll draw up a list of white moves and then we can go from there. --ShaunMacPherson 05:05, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes. see list of chess openings -- "tackling" the moves is extremely complicated. There are no less than 500 "opening categories"; from A00 to E99. Almost nothing has been done with the list, so pick an opening and I'll happilly work on it with you. Lirath Q. Pynnor

I have just made a few changes to the chess entry and when I get done picking my jaw up off the floor I'll finish typing this... `

\
 *

Okay I'm ready now.

I find it very alarming that no mention was made in the overview that each player has 16 of the pieces for his own, only that there were 32 pieces. Would communists assume each player "owns" half the pieces? Yes, nitpicking, that's what we do here, we pick nits. Also no mention is made that the pieces are differentiated (usually by color though not always) and the squares on the board are also differentiated. There are many pictures, but what about the blind? Let me know if I'm too aggressive hunting nits here. To put it bluntly, that overview sucks a$$...

Scrolling down, however, we find over one hundred links to chess history, chess literature, chess moves, chess games, chess people, chess places, chess everything and this *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP* lousy overview.

I think the priorities of people around here are SERIOUSLY out of whack. - Plautus satire 14:54, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)