Chess is Bad !!!!

For too long now the good name of Chess has been dragged through the mud. The game once played by kings is now more generally associated with nerdish hermits and dodgy Guy Richie movies. Well, we're here to tell you that Chess is actually a pretty bad ass game with a rich and fascinating history. Here are just a few reasons

                                  Chess is Bad !!!!  Ass!!!!

Chess is old as %$#$%! The game is thought to have emerged from 6th century India by some scholards, however, some researchers have traced the game go as far back as 2nd century China.

The word checkmate is a translation from the Persian phrase shah mat, meaning the king is defeated. Yes, there was a lot more to the Persians than the godless warmongers portrayed in 300

The rook derives its name from the Arabic word rukh, meaning chariot, reflecting its ability to move quickly in straight lines, but not leap over obstacles. During the Middle Ages, when chariots were no longer in use, the rook was modified to look more like the turret of a castle.

The folding chess board was invented in 1125 by a chess-playing priest. The Church forbid priests to play chess, so he hid his chess board by making it look like two books lying together.

The piece that is now the Queen originally was the King's adviser. Europeans changed it to a queen, and it became the strongest piece on the board in the 1400s.

A number of math theory problems have emerged from the mathematical study of chess. The Knight's Tour, which has found application in systems theory and computer science, first appeared in a classical Sanskrit poem as early as 900 B. C. Other mathematical concepts developed by studying chess include the Eight Queens Problem , the Mutilated Chessboard Problem , Rook Polynomials , and the Rook Reciprocity Theorem , which have variously contributed to areas of number theory, matrix theory, computer science, and algorithm studies.

In 1950, information theorist Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories wanted to find out whether a computer could be programmed to play chess. He calculated the number of possible moves* in chess to be 10,120, which became known as the Shannon Number. By the way, that's more than the number of all atoms in the universe (estimated between 4x 1079 and 1081). Shannon wrote that "a machine operating at the rate of one variation per micro-second would require over 1090 years to calculate the first move!

I just love this article and i wish that I could say I wrote it but alas I did not here is the web for those interested :)

http://www.malignantplanet.com/Chess.html

very interesting tales!!!

^ power 10^120 atoms seems low

avogadros number 6.023 X 10^23= 1 mole

1 gram of hydrogen= 1mole of hydrogen=6.023X10^23 atoms of hydrogen

Holy moly, and I thought it was just a simple board game 

you thought wrong dude :D 20 bucks if you can name the movie

oh man, I would like to get that 20 bucks 

 hahhahaa atleast someone is trying to incorporate chess with chemistry ! :D Good Job Dude!

just name the movie :) 

chessica chess is all about chemistry ;)

you have me stumped....

back to the future 3. 

I also thought the number 10, 120 was too low ... for both the possible number of moves in chess and for the number of atoms in the universe.

So I GOOGLEd it ... the number should have been written as:

"10^43 and 10^50 with a game tree complexity of 10^123" ... math peeps will know what the ^ means.

Also, according to Google: "there are 318,979,564,000 ways to play ... THE FIRST FOUR MOVES ... of Chess" ... ... ouch !!

Also, I think the dates for its origin are confusing because the game of chess is actually a collaboration of several games, ranging from the Oriental game of Go (as opposed to "Asian game of Go" because Asia is most commonly associated with East India now .. for some reason), to the Eastern Indian game of Shantarang and anther two other games either of Gypsie or Egyptian origin. I only say that because I remember reading a story about an archeologist who discovered an Egyptian tomb in which a game of chess ... or a game similar to it ... was left unfinished ... that is, it was left in the Mid-Game. I could be wrong on that but that's just drawing from quick memory. Chess as we know it was not "officiated" with its own rule book until the 17th or 18th century, or maybe even earlier.

An interesting article and title otherwise !!

I actually thought this article was going to say Chess was bad (as in ... not good).

Pretty neat, pretty neat. Pretty cool, pretty cool.

thanks for the 411 on the movie

mad dog tells marty then shoots him, but marty outsmarts him with a boiler plate. oldie but a goodie

it is an interesting article

@ Kevin......Where was chess in that movie hmmmmmm?

@ Patriotic Groove........The grobe did a forum on number of chess moves maybe he will ring in?

@ Nestor Carlos it is interesting I liked it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjYqNEaZ9pY

ummmmmm welll uuuuuuuuhhhh   chess is life baby, chess is life

deep huh :)

Chemistry 11!

(10^120)/(6.023 x 10^23) > (10^120)/(10^24)=10^96. That is 10^120 atoms is more than 10^96 moles. That's not big enough for you?

Yes, you're wrong. Was the story a movie? There's a very interesting page on ancient games at http://nabataea.net/games3.html, which mentions Ancient Egypt.

It is true that the Vikings played chess quite early in its history - I am not sure if any of their conquests were caused by them being bad losers over the board. 

Anyhow, chess is way, way more recent than ancient Egypt. And there is very little relationship between Go (a much older game than chess) and chess-like games. The rules have hardly anything in common (eg different board size, you can't move the one kind of piece in Go, aim of games not similar)

Chaturanga is definitely the root of chess, and close relatives of chess are Shogi (Japanese chess) and Makruk (Thai chess), with Indian chess being an almost extinct game rather closely related to modern chess. I understand that Xiangqi (Chinese chess), and Janggi (Korean chess) are considered to be relatives of Chaturanga rather than chess, but that the family tree becomes unclear any further back than these three games.

revolver. directed by guy ritchie and they play a lot of chess. pretty good movie though