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Questions tagged [chess]

Mathematical questions in one way or another related to the game of chess.

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18 votes
0 answers
987 views

Are the moves/rules of standard chess delicately balanced?

           (While the world chess championship is in progress in Sochi...) Is there mathematical evidence that standard chess is somehow ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
15 votes
0 answers
487 views

Does the Angel have to be really smart?

My question is about the computational complexity of the Angel's strategy in the Angels and Devils game, tl;dr does the Angel have a polynomial time strategy. I'm a big Conway fan, so as you can ...
Ville Salo's user avatar
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9 votes
0 answers
355 views

The $n$ queens problem with no three on a line

The $n$ queens problem asks if we can place $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ chessboard such that no two queens attack one another. For example, when $n=8$, here are two solutions (images taken from ...
ho boon suan's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
535 views

Variants of the Angel problem

The original Angel problem, first proposed by Conway, Berlekamp, and Guy has two players: the devil and the angel. The angel is placed at the origin of an infinite $2$-D chessboard. The angel's ...
Paul Burchett's user avatar
7 votes
0 answers
2k views

Is there a chess position equivalent to the Collatz conjecture?

Suppose we have an infinite board with a finite number of chess pieces. The question is whether white can checkmate black (without the after 50 moves it is a draw rule). Can you give an explicit ...
domotorp's user avatar
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2 votes
0 answers
238 views

Chess pieces metrics in higher dimensions

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about applying the knight (the well-known piece of chess) metric to any cubic lattice $\mathbb{N}^k$, $k \in \mathbb{N}-\{0,1\}$. I suddenly realized that, from $k ...
Marco Ripà's user avatar
  • 1,451
1 vote
0 answers
203 views

Search strategy for Babson task in chess

I asked this on a computer chess forum (programmers hang out there, etc.) and got no substantive answers, which makes me think it's a research question. Whether it's sufficiently mathematical is ...
anonymous's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
144 views

Number of open tours by a biased rook on a specific $f(n)\times 1$ board which end on a $k$-th cell from the right

We have a simple structure - biased rook of the two types. Biased rook of the first kind which make open tours on a specific $f(n)\times 1$ board where $f(n) = \left\lfloor\log_2{2n}\right\rfloor + 1$ ...
Notamathematician's user avatar