Chess
Chess is a strategy two-player board game. It's modern form was created in Spain in the 1400s, but it is based on a game from India called chaturanga which dates back to the 300s CE. The game is quite popular worldwide among intellectuals, especially in Western culture, and it has been used as inspiration in a large number of works.
The game has spawned a large number of play variants and related games and puzzles as well as academic papers on the mathematics of the game. For the first half century of development into computers, an important goal was to create a chess-playing artificial intelligence superior to the best human players, a goal which has since been achieved.
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Personal
When I was around 5-years-old, my father taught me the basics of playing chess. My mother also had a wooden set which she helped teach me to play on, and I used it to play various games with my family. Being the youngest, I always lost, which led me to become disinterested in the game. When I was around ten-years-old, my father bought the 3D chess game from the Star Trek series, and I remember he and my brother playing it, though I never did, although I found it fascinating. As someone who grew up appreciating intellectualism, I always liked the idea of chess, but I never played it enough to become good at it. I still like attractive chess sets, and I enjoy various forms of media based on the game, and I like learning about the programming involved in creating a chess AI.
Related
Due to the game's popularity, a number of works have been created where chess is a major theme. Here, I list several that are important to me.
| Work | Date | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knight's tour | 800s | Puzzle | A puzzle to find a route where a knight travels to every square on a chess board only once. |
| Eight queens puzzle | 1848 | Puzzle | A puzzle to place eight queens on a chessboard so that none threaten the others. |
| Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There | 1871-12-27 | Book | Several of the book's characters are chess pieces. |
| Battle Chess | 1988-10-?? | Video Game | A chess video game which uses animated combat. |
| Knight Moves | 1992-01-22 | Film | A thriller about a serial killer terrorizing a famous chess player. |
| Searching for Bobby Fischer | 1993-08-11 | Film | A movie about a chess prodigy and the difficulty he and his family face because of it. |
| Deep Blue | 1996-02-10 | AI | The first chess AI to beat a world champion chess player. |
| Stockfish | 2008-11-02 | AI | One of the most powerful open source chess AIs. |
Media
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