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