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2 votes
3 answers
1k views

Strategy-stealing in chess

Is it proved that white can guarantee at least draw in chess? A while ago I was told that it was proved using strategy-stealing, but I cannot find a reference. Postscript. Please accept my apology ---...
Anton Petrunin's user avatar
15 votes
0 answers
488 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
  • 6,652
47 votes
3 answers
5k views

Does knight behave like a king in his infinite odyssey?

The Knight's Tour is a well-known mathematical chess problem. There is an extensive amount of research concerning this question in two/higher dimensional finite boards. Here, I would like to tackle ...
Morteza Azad's user avatar
69 votes
7 answers
17k views

What is a chess piece mathematically?

Historically, the current "standard" set of chess pieces wasn't the only existing alternative or even the standard one. For instance, the famous Al-Suli's Diamond Problem (which remained ...
Morteza Azad's user avatar
40 votes
6 answers
5k views

Can one make high-level proofs about chess positions?

I realize this question is risky (as the title and the tags indicate), but hopefully I can make it acceptable. If not, and the question cannot be salvaged, I'm sorry and ready to delete it or accept ...
Michał Masny's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
530 views

Is it possible to create an infinite sequence in which no subsequence is repeated 3 times in a row?

In Chess, there is the Threefold Repetition rule where if a sequence of moves is repeated 3 times in a row, either player can claim a draw. Say two players wanted to play a legal, infinite game of ...
user2727's user avatar
  • 133
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
7 votes
3 answers
839 views

Decidability of the winning-position problem in an infinity chess with a finite number of short-range pieces only

Definitions Long-range pieces: queens, rooks, bishops. Short-range pieces: pawns, knights, kings. We can extend the definition of short-range pieces to include also fairy pieces like: Berolina ...
Waldemar's user avatar
  • 1,107
0 votes
1 answer
495 views

Infinite board games: sentences about

As a unified approach if we have an ( read any) infinite board game described as $\mathcal{G}$ using a particular axiom set A.. can a sentence be devised in A which automatically answers the basic ...
ARi's user avatar
  • 851
17 votes
3 answers
2k views

Traversing the infinite square grid

Starting somewhere on an infinite square grid, is it possible to visit every square exactly once, if at move $n$, one must jump $a_n$ steps in one of the directions north,south,east or west, and mark ...
mmm's user avatar
  • 171
22 votes
5 answers
3k views

Irreversible chess

Suppose we play a chess-variant, where any finite number of pieces are allowed, and the board is as large as we wish, but only two kings in total. And there is no 50 move-rule, no castling and no ...
GM2001's user avatar
  • 223
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
  • 19.1k
128 votes
13 answers
24k views

Checkmate in $\omega$ moves?

Is there a chess position with a finite number of pieces on the infinite chess board $\mathbb{Z}^2$ such that White to move has a forced win, but Black can stave off mate for at least $n$ moves for ...
Johan Wästlund's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
1k views

Probability theory and measuring the true strength of chessplayers

If you wanted to measure the strength of, say, a chess player, the best way would involve knowing the true value of each position: then you could compute the frequency $W$ with which the player finds ...
David Feldman's user avatar
67 votes
5 answers
10k views

Decidability of chess on an infinite board

The recent question Do there exist chess positions that require exponentially many moves to reach? of Tim Chow reminds me of a problem I have been interested in. Is chess with finitely many men on an ...
Richard Stanley's user avatar
52 votes
4 answers
10k views

Do there exist chess positions that require exponentially many moves to reach?

By "chess" here I mean chess played on an $n\times n$ board with an unbounded number of (non-king) pieces. Some care is needed if you want to generalize some of the subtler rules of chess to an $n\...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 82.7k