Real Time Chess – A physical chess board without the concept of turns

> so this should be a pretty uncontroversial minor rules update

My kind of humor.

Always found it an interesting aspect of chess that the most "common sense" rules (Players take turns; no skipping; one move per turn) result in the most unintuitive outcomes and a massive increase in complexity: Suddenly you can reason about the pieces a player won't be able to move in a turn, you can double-bind players, you get draws where its provably impossible for any player to win, etc.

(In that sense, chess is a bit like the IntercalScript language earlier today: All features are superficially reasonable and in the service of simplicity, yet result in the weirdest outcomes)

Wouldn't all this be gone for chess without turns?

Or would strategies become even more intricate, e.g. taking into account the minimum time you'd require to physically move a piece?

The strategies will change, but it is not certain to be more “intricate”, it could go both way.

It is probably more likely that adding the other physical limitation of the human body causes one strategy to be vastly more effective, and the game becomes less intricate. The reason is fairly simple: a game does not become “intricate” or “interesting” by accident. We iterated through a lot variations before we settled down on this version of chess that has the suitable intricacy for us. Adding a new factor probably needs a couple more decades/ centuries of refinement before we get to a version that has similar property to the current one.

The similar situation in Starcraft: for machines that plays the game, certain units just become the only way to play (mostly long range high damage units). Human can’t choose 100 targets at once, machines can. If you balance the game for machines, then those units would be useless for human players

If you like the humor you should watch the linked video!

> you can reason about the pieces a player won't be able to move in a turn

Zugzwang [1].

(Also works if you get blessed with a competitor who acts impulsively when confused or flustered.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang

> Wouldn't all this be gone for chess without turns?

The video goes into this a little bit. Turns out forking isn’t that useful since your opponent can just move both pieces!

In addition to the per-piece cool downs, there should be a per-playet global cooldow of say 10 seconds

Maybe.

My first thought was that this would essentially devolve to speed chess, because any player who waited longer to move than their cooldown would put themself at a disadvantage.

But I think there is a strategic property that could make the game interesting, namely the "phase shift" between the players' turns: When the cooldowns are interleaved, the game becomes turn-based speed chess. But when the cooldowns sync up, you might get something Diplomacy-like, where both players have 10 seconds to guess the other's next move, then both will move almost simultaneously.

This shift will slowly change throughout the game and can even be changed intentionally if one player waits longer with their turn than they'd have to.