Idea: How to teach simplified chess to animals

I came up with an idea for how to teach higher animals, especially cats, dogs, birds, and apes, how to play a simplified form of chess. The main idea is that you create an apparatus large enough that relates to the animal in a physical way, rather than expect the animal to take an interest in some tiny, flat, 8x8 grid that is probably irrelevant to the main goals in its life (eating, sleeping, sex, exercise, play, etc.).

For example, you create a small but nice area for a dog to sleep in the middle of that area, except there are two "lanes" on each side of it that look like bowling lanes that come from a fenced off area of equal size, and each lane slowly sends down some small but annoying bowling ball-like apparatus to where the dog sleeps, maybe with a lot of noise, or puffing air, or bad odor, enough to disturb the dog when it's sleeping. The dog must learn on its own that if it places a similar bowling ball in the lane before the offending bowling ball arrives, that the outgoing ball with collide with the incoming ball and nullify it. The dog then learns the basic concept of rooks contesting an open file.

Similarly, while the dog is sleeping, the low ceiling could start to have protruberances that descend, making it annoying for the dog to move around in its bed. The dog must learn on its own that by shifting pedestals over to underneath where the protruberances are descending, that the pedestals will halt the protruberances from descending further. This is like pawns coming head to head with enemy pawns, unable to advance.

Such ideas could be extended to all basic chess moves. Maybe a human could be present to give examples to the dog of how a threat can be nullified. Dogs learn fairly quickly, so a dog could probably learn to make those counter moves after just a few observations.

I'm not suggesting that animals could see beyond 2-ply moves like those, but you never know. It would be interesting to see what happened, and it would be interesting to figure out how to make analogs in real life to the pieces and motions that exist on a chess board.

Dafuq?

Is this like that experiment where they trained some scientists to ring a bell everytime the dogs salivated?

Let me assume that this translates into English as "What would be the purpose of such an experiment?" The answer: insights into animal intelligence.

Why don't you have at it and let us know if you have some chess-playing animals? ;)

Well, I bought a dog and put him in the apparatus but he dropped some foul-smelling Zugschtink on the carpet, so I figured he should learn some other things first.

Oh dear.

 ELOL

But what would be the point of such a game? How would the dog win or lose?

There are two possibilities I thought about: (1) Remove the concept of winning or ending the game activity, so that blocking an opponent's action would be reward enough (such as to sleep in peace); (2) Have the dog win food by similar actions, whether the food were canned dog food or live prey such as a squirrel. For example, possibly the dog could learn to shoot arrows at a running squirrel, or to mechnically lift away the squirrel's sheltering objects.

Interesting idea. Has anyone here read Flowers for Algernon?

10100

Have A Nice One .     

They made us read "Flowers for Algernon" in middle school.

By the way, there is another point to my experiment: it converts chess situations into real-life situations, which creates an awareness (among humans) of how chess and real life are related.

I think chess is A great way to excercise the mind,  creative because you are givin situations and problems you have never seen before, Openings can be mastered by anyone with A good memory just like most math problems taught in schools.

Y el mizmo para me. In it, a mouse is taught to run a maze not through trial and error, but through logic. Something like that could be done...

I read it, but I think it was meant to be more about human intelligence than animal intelligence, and the mouse was just being used for experiments relating to human intelligence.