[HN Gopher] What is 5D chess?
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What is 5D chess?
Author : searchableguy
Score : 118 points
Date : 2020-08-04 20:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.chessbase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.chessbase.com)
| ThreeFx wrote:
| This looks amazing! Although I wouldn't be surprised if this was
| a forced first-player win.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Perhaps at an expert level, but given theory debt of even
| normal chess I hardly see how this could be an issue at very
| expert level but that's not for some years (assuming it gets a
| community but it clearly has a good start). It actually looks
| really fun, hopefully there isn't a way to cheese-win as white,
| but barring that it looks really fun and creative.
| dihedral wrote:
| We skipped right over the opportunity for non-integer fractal
| dimensional chess! In all seriousness, this looks super
| interesting. I'd love to see some live gameplay of it.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Hmm, fractal dimensional chess could perhaps be implemented as
| having subboards within each tile of a standard chessboard.
| Completely spitballing over lunch, I propose the following rule
| set:
|
| * Every square of a chessboard is itself a chessboard. This
| applies recursively. The top-level chessboard is named "Prime".
| All other chessboards are named according to the subdivision of
| Prime where they are located. So, the board located one level
| deep at F3 is called "Prime-F3". The board located two levels
| deep at A7 of Prime-F3 is called Prime-F3-A7.
|
| * All infinite chessboards start in the standard board starting
| position.
|
| * Black and white alternate making moves. Each move consists of
| moving a single piece within a single chessboard, following
| standard chess rules.
|
| * The game is won when a player does not have a King located in
| Prime.
|
| So far, this only introduces additional moves that can be made,
| which have no impact on the Prime board. Apart from being
| harder to force a draw, the subboards have no impact. Next up,
| adding rules to allow boards to influence the boards
| above/below them.
|
| * If player X has a piece on board Z in location Y, then all
| pieces belonging to player X in board Z-Y may, in addition to
| their normal move, also move like the piece in board Z. For
| example, at the start of the game, white has a queen on Prime
| at location D1. Therefore, in board Prime-D1 may move like a
| queen, in addition to their normal movement.
|
| * If player X does not have a King in board Z-Y, then their
| opponent may, as their move, move any piece from board Z-Y to
| board Z in location Y. For example, if Black has captured
| White's King on board Prime-D8, then Black may move any piece
| on Prime-D8 to the Prime board at location D8.
|
| Now, there is an incentive to playing on the lower level
| boards. Play here goes much faster, by virtue of having more
| moves available. By investing time into the subboards, you can
| gain additional pieces on the main board. If a subboard is
| being used to funnel more pieces in, then it may be worth
| investing in a subsubboard, in order to pull a king in from the
| subsubboard to the subboard.
| jerf wrote:
| Arguably, that's what this is. The bifurcating timelines are
| better thought of as n-dimensional space. Describing the
| location of a piece requires a description of the bifurcations,
| which won't be a fixed number of numbers but will go up as the
| game progresses. Integer dimensions don't really cover this.
| dihedral wrote:
| Yeah, great point, the dimensionality of the game increases
| as it progresses. I can't tell from the article, is there a
| bound on the number of parallel board timelines that can run
| simultaneously? Theoretically, without a bound, the
| dimensionality could increase indefinitely (there could be
| non-terminating paths that loop between the same game states
| enabling an arbitrary number of bifurcations).
| mxwsn wrote:
| 'From my experience playing a few games on it against decently
| strong opponents has been that at high levels it becomes "Chess,
| but it's much much easier to checkmate, and 2~3 times a game some
| time travel shenanigans happen."
|
| The main reason for that is time traveling and dimension hoping
| come at a tempo disadvantage. When you create a new timeline, you
| make 1 move, but give your opponent 2 moves. You used your turn
| in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in
| the past.
|
| Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much,
| minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them.
|
| It does have more depth than normal chess, but it's not infinity
| deep. I still love it. My biggest concern with high level chess
| matches is that many, many games end in draws. It feels like it's
| impossible to a draw a gam e in 5D chess' [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...
| Yhippa wrote:
| I watched the video at the end three times and still couldn't
| figure it out.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c
| fileeditview wrote:
| Would love to see some GM stream this. Go Nakamura :)
| miloignis wrote:
| It looks amazing, and I really want to play it, but however I
| count I only end up with 4 dimensions. A chess board is 2D, time
| back-and-forth is 3D, and going up/down across universes is 4D.
| What's the 5th? Are they counting real-life-time as the 5th? In
| which case normal chess is 3D, which seems like an abuse of
| terms.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I count it thusly: Ordinary chess is 2D. Adding in the ability
| to bifurcate the timeline and play distinct possibilities in
| parallel is 3D since it is a distinct degree of freedom. Adding
| in the ability to go back and forth along a timeline is 4D.
| Adding in the ability to also jump back and forth to ANY
| timeline (sideways rather than strictly back and forth)
| requires a fifth degree of freedom. So it's 5D as far as I'm
| concerned.
| miloignis wrote:
| Hmm, I think I see what you're saying, but in my opinion the
| way that one bifurcates the timeline is by traveling back and
| forth in time, which is already counted, and moving back and
| forth among bifurcated dimensions is already counted as well,
| so there's not extra dimension there.
|
| For instance, if you have a stick you can push back and forth
| in a groove and count that as one dimension, if you push hard
| enough against an obstacle the stick might break and rotate
| out into the plane, but that's still only two degrees of
| freedom.
| delgaudm wrote:
| If the chess board is 2d, how does the Knight move, doesn't it
| need the third dimension to go "over" other pieces? I assume,
| graphics notwithstanding, the board is logically represented in
| 3 dimensions.
| sukilot wrote:
| Knights tunnel.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but anyways: obviously an
| actual chessboard is indeed 3d - as are all physical objects
| in our world. Yet a chessboard is effectively a 2d space: any
| piece position is completely defined by a row and a column.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It's true that at the beginning and end of each move, every
| piece has a specific coordinate in a 2D space, but it is
| still nice to imagine that knights' moves (and castling)
| involve travelling through a third spatial dimension. And
| yes, the pieces themselves are conventionally thought of as
| volumes in 3D space rather than areas of a 2D plane.
| kanobo wrote:
| I interpreted the description as normal chess board = 2
| dimensions. time = third dimension. moving on the x axis in the
| multiverse as 4th dimension and moving on the y axis in the
| multiverse as 5th dimension. So yes, in this wacky world a
| standard game of chess in progress is 3D.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| Moving along the x axis is the same as time though.
| kanobo wrote:
| You're right, I was confused. This is like deciphering Dark
| on netflix.
| neop wrote:
| It's only 4D. I believe they called it 5D chess because they
| didn't want people to interpret this as 3D chess + time. If I
| recall correctly, the tutorial mentions at some point that the
| 5th dimension is "unused".
| archgoon wrote:
| The 5th dimension is just so tightly curled up that, after
| discretization, just _looks_ like it 's not present.
| thelastinuit wrote:
| You. Nailed. It.
| kmill wrote:
| It would have been nice if 4D only ever meant four spatial
| dimensions, and then we'd have (3+1)D for three spatial
| dimensions and a time dimension. (And (2+2)D for two spatial
| and two time dimensions :-))
| prionassembly wrote:
| 2+2=4D could be for _position_ and _momentum_ in two
| dimensions.
| n3k5 wrote:
| > I only end up with 4 dimensions
|
| I think you're right. Even if we classify classical Chess as 3D
| (2D board + a time axis for game states), time travel re-uses
| that same time dimension.
|
| If you wanted to shift the complexity into ludicrous speed
| (this is inspired by archgoon's comment [0]), you could
| introduce another dimension by putting a classical chess board
| inside each square of the 4D board. The 4D move only succeeds
| if you win the game on the mini-board. Just, please, don't
| bring recursion into this, unless you're captain Kirk and
| absolutely need to nerd-snipe a rogue AI. ("They've gone to
| plaid!")
|
| There's another possibility I've hinted at by calling standard
| Chess 'classical'. On second thought, let's not go to Quantum
| Chess. 'Tis a silly place. (I tried to imagine what a
| Schrodinger's king would look like. I've seen things you people
| wouldn't believe. Queens checked en passant from the future. I
| watched knigths glitter in the parallel time-line near the
| Hadamard Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like
| tears in rain. Time to resign.)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24064974
| Arnavion wrote:
| You are correct that the game is 4D. Every piece's coordinates
| are made up of four numbers - x, y, turn number, and timeline
| number. Depending on the piece, it can manipulate one or more
| of these numbers to go up or down. [1]
|
| However, I would say that real chess is sort of "2.5" D by this
| definition rather than full 3D, since the turn number
| coordinate of every piece can only go up, not down.
|
| [1]: The game's formalism is slightly complicated by the fact
| that a piece could make a move of (x, y, t, T) -> (x, y, t - 1,
| T) which would count as moving one square in one dimension, but
| then the game's "system" automatically transforms that move
| into a (x, y, t - 1, T +/- N) move. (The choice of +/- depends
| on which player made the move. The value of N depends on how
| many other timelines there are at that t.)
| zw123456 wrote:
| I always thought a cool chess variant would be quantum chess
| where you can move a piece to more than one square and assign a
| probability to each position. Your opponent could do the same.
| But I never worked out how it could work from there.
| jaggirs wrote:
| A players mental representation of the game is already that
| (and you use this mental representation to predict future
| outcomes).
|
| If you add probabilistic moves, the optimal way to play would
| be to give each alternative move the same weight (ie
| probability) that you think it will win you the game. You would
| pull this probability out of your mental representation.
|
| Something like, "I think this is the best move, but this one is
| really good too so I will do it as well".
|
| So I guess it could be fun to be able to try out all the moves
| you think are good in this way. But then an easier way to
| achieve this is to just play the game normally and go back to
| an interesting previous position once you have won.
|
| But maybe a set of rules that will allow you to still win the
| game 'in retrospect' after all the 'best' moves were played by
| going through all the alternative superpositions as well.
|
| So basically just play normally, but when you doubt what move
| is best, you make a superposition (and assign probabilities),
| which means you will be going back to this position later.
|
| The winner would be the one who won most often, with each win
| weighed by the probability of that outcome (calculated based on
| the assigned probabilities along the game).
|
| Sounds like fun.
| whelming_wave wrote:
| There's a quantum chess game on Steam, titled Quantum Chess.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| That's wrong you would have to add a fog of war where when the
| pieces interact you reveal the state of the piece. You wouldn't
| know where your pieces are until you move them so all your
| pieces would Have be in a random order.
| sp332 wrote:
| There's a quantum tic-tac-toe variant which makes some
| practical compromises to make the game playable and scoreable.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic-tac-toe
| larryseinfeld wrote:
| ALICE CHESS, through the looking glass we go
| keyle wrote:
| When I was learning about puzzle game making, one of the rules
| was people don't like puzzles. They like puzzles but not the
| feeling like they're doing one.
|
| This is kind of the opposite. So it really competes with Fall
| Guys then...
| nsilvestri wrote:
| Outer Wilds does the whole "puzzle game without feeling like
| one" better than any other game I know.
| hokumguru wrote:
| I bought this game a few weeks ago with a friend and we jumped in
| without any prior knowledge about the game or how it worked.
| After about 3 hours we were finally starting to understand the
| basic principles and I have to say wow, it's an absolute blast to
| play. Many hours in now we've finally begun developing our own
| strategies and it's absolutely insane. I have to say that 5D
| Chess is one of the most creative and innovative games that I've
| played in recent memory and I highly recommend it.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Now I can "checkmate, bitches!" in another timeline... This is
| tremendous
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think that's called "Nothing personnel, kid".
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-...
| dilippkumar wrote:
| I desperately want to go hang out on a forum where people are
| building AI bots to play this game.
| skavi wrote:
| according to searchableguy, that's happening right here:
| https://discord.gg/8kQhp6
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How do you know if you have won? Or is it about avoiding
| checkmate in all possible timelines for all possible time
| travelling moves?
| treis wrote:
| I'd think the same way you know you won regular chess. You
| capture the opponent's king. Checkmate is just an
| acknowledgement that the current player has no way of avoiding
| their opponent from taking their king on the next move.
| rcoveson wrote:
| No, checkmate is the end state of the game, and the king
| cannot be captured. Any action by a player that would allow
| their king to be captured is an illegal move. When one player
| has no more legal moves, the game is over.
| aplummer wrote:
| So checkmate in any one timeline counts? You couldn't do all
| timelines.
| n3k5 wrote:
| > So checkmate in any one timeline counts?
|
| Yes. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065059 )
|
| > You couldn't do all timelines.
|
| How do you reckon that? I mean, it makes sense on an
| intuitive level; however, since now we're not talking about
| Conor Petersen's 5D chess, but the vast space of possible
| multiverse time travel chess variants, it's not obvious how
| one could prove this to be impossible in a somewhat
| rigorous way. For example, what if time-lines end when a
| king is mated (or wioll fore-when haven been mote [0]), but
| you only lose when you can't make a valid move in _any_
| time-line?
|
| [0] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html
| learnstats2 wrote:
| I suppose you would have to avoid the king escaping to
| another timeline?
| nsilvestri wrote:
| You do , which is why it ends up being easier to attack
| kings in the past. Because you can't change the past,
| only create new timelines, attacking a king from any
| previous board state means that the attacking piece must
| be captured.
| n3k5 wrote:
| When there are multiple parallel time-lines, you have to input
| a move for each one before you can advance to the next turn.
| But to win, you have to mate just one of the opponent's kings.
| One player can have multiple kings on one board, because they
| can move through time and between time-lines.
|
| I have no idea what high-level play will end up looking like,
| but the streamer from whom I learned the above [0] said that
| the most common way to win is to mate a king on a board in the
| past. Those already have their options of escaping an attack
| restricted by ordinary chess rules; it gets worse when you can
| make additional threats from the future.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/LOotGsWbaeA
| LegitShady wrote:
| You only know when you've won or lost when the wavefront
| collapses to a 3d point you can experience in a particular
| time.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| The video at the end reminded me of "Imagining the 10th
| dimension" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts
|
| So is this basically visualizing the tree of possibilities from
| any board configuration, overlaid on itself at nodes where
| different sequences of moves can result in the same board
| configuration, allowing you to "jump" to a different "timeline"
| through the 5th dimension?
| searchableguy wrote:
| 3d chess is another popular variant:
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess
|
| Lot of games you could spin up in this manner. I wonder if we are
| going to do that for all the board games with tried and old
| strategies. HN has any suggestions on what those board games
| should be?
|
| Game on steam:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...
|
| There is a discord linked in the game help menu where people are
| discussing lot of things including how to create a bot.
|
| For the lazy: https://discord.gg/8kQhp6
|
| Edit: removed mobile url.
| ansible wrote:
| > _3d chess is another popular variant:_
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess
|
| I was crazy enough as a high-schooler to actually build (with
| the help of my father) a 3D chess "board". It was mostly
| plywood, with eight 8x8 boards stacked vertically. I had
| previously gotten a "3D" chess board which was just three 8x8
| boards. They weren't making Star Trek tri-dimensional chess
| sets back then.
|
| With the 8x8x8 3D board, movement rules for 2D chess have a
| "natural" expansion to 3D, with only a few corner cases. White
| player's non-pawn pieces start out on the bottom board, with
| the pawns on the next board up.
|
| In practice, it was hard to visualize how the game was going in
| general. We were constantly standing up and crouching to see.
| Only one of my friends wanted to play, and he only lasted about
| half a game. :-(
|
| With the failure to interest my friends, I had intended to
| write my own chess program to play it. I had started out with
| the 2D version, and was then intending to expand it later. The
| original was written in BASIC... and that did not go too well.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I imagine it'd be quite hard to trap your opponent with an
| extra dimension to escape in. Perhaps the board should be
| smaller to compensate. Regular (2d) Connect 4 is played on a
| 6x7 board. But 3d Connect 4 is played on a 4x4x4 board.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Non-mobile URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-
| dimensional_chess
| mey wrote:
| Some people are currently playing it on Twitch
| https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/5D%20Chess%20With%20Mul...
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| 90 comments and no Putin joke yet?
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