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5D chess game where pieces time travel
- jelliclesfarm 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_Chess_with_Multiverse_Time_Travel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_Chess_with_Multiverse_Tim...
- jwilk 6y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_Chess_with_Multiverse_Time_Travel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_Chess_with_Multiverse_Time_...
- tripplyons 6y agoIt's fun and was worth buying, but I'm pretty sure it's 4D. In the in game manual, it even says that there is an unused spacial dimension in the in-game rulebook. First, you have the 2 dimensions that pieces can move in in regular chess. The third dimension is the fact that pieces can move back in time a certain amount of boards depending on the move, creating a different timeline. The fourth dimension is how pieces can move into different timelines using one their movement dimensions.
- ecpottinger 6y agoThat looks 4D to me too.
- bitdizzy 6y agoWhy, the 5th dimension is your imagination of course!
- tantalor 6y agoMaybe the real 5th dimension is the friends we make along the way...
- leetcrew 6y agoisn't regular chess already a 3D game? you have two spacial dimensions (rank and file) and then wouldn't the sequence of turns constitute a temporal dimension? maybe the turns are conventionally ignored (and not counted), since all games have them?
- 8note 6y agoChess also has 3 spatial dimensions. The knight can jump over pieces
- leetcrew 6y agoor phase directly through them ;)
- Sebb767 6y agoIt's probably more 2,5D as jumping is the only "ability" able to use this and even then only temporary.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> jumping is the only "ability" I assume, then, that your definition of "jumping" includes whatever it is the rook and king are doing when the player castles.
- danaur 6y agoJumping is a human approximation for the move, chess in terms of gameplay has no jumping.
- bluedino 6y agoWhen castling, does the King jump over the Rook, or vice versa?
- dane-pgp 6y agoMaybe he digs a tunnel.
- adrianmonk 6y agoMaybe 5D is a joking one-up reference to a certain politician's supposed, metaphorical 4D abilities. (Or simply a desire to avoid 3D and 4D, which already have meanings.)
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- the8472 6y agoThe playing higher-dimensional version of a board game idea predates that politician. TOS had 3D chess. And there are various memes about some character archetypes metaphorically engaging in similar games. https://imgur.com/IfZiaNf https://imgur.com/IfZiaNf
- snuxoll 6y agoGotta say, a hikaru no go meme was not something I expected to see on HN...ever.
- shard 6y agoIs this an actual part of Hikaru no Go, or is it fan made? It doesn't seem to fit with the style of the story (although I've only seen the beginning few seasons of the animation).
- adrianmonk 6y ago> TOS had 3D chess. For anyone who didn't catch this, I think this means Star Trek (_T_he _O_riginal _S_eries). https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoIt has fourth and fifth dimension which are more novel but not third dimension which is like meh.
- ldiracdelta 6y agoWhy limit to 5 dimensions. Each piece type could be its own basis vector! Now we're in 10 dimensions! Wow!
- forgotpwd16 6y agoI'm waiting the n-dimensional variant.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoIn a move you can increase a dimension.
- hateful 6y agoI think it's 5D because it just skips the "our" 3rd dimension. Just because Chess movements are in a 2D space, doesn't make the 3rd dimension temporal. You can move in 2 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal one (the 4th), but when you move through the temporal one you create a split in the 4th one... "5 - a split" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ca4miMMaCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ca4miMMaCE Of course I'm assuming you're all playing the game in the same universe I am! In other words - the game USES 4 dimensions, but is PLAYED in 5D.
- gibspaulding 6y agoOne could argue that traditional Chess still has 3 dimensions since knights wouldn't be able to "jump" in true 2-space.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoThe knight is just a little more polite than the other pieces and so can readily scoot past them.
- tutfbhuf 6y agoYou can even play chess without any physical or digital 2D or 3D board. Blindfold Chess is a thing. The chess board in my mind is 3D, but this may vary from person to person. Game position and moves can be stored in 1D, just text. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Game_Notation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Game_Notation
- munk-a 6y agoEeeh I'm not buying 1D - by the same logic all shapes can be stored in 1D by writing their descriptive formulae in a linear series of text.
- tutfbhuf 6y agoWell you cannot play football, because this requires physical activity. But I think, yes, for games that just require 1D information exchange and thought, that's all it needs. Any 2D, 3D, 4D representation of that 1D information is just optional e.g. for convenience reasons, because people like to move around physical 3D chess pieces instead of having to remember chess positions and playing blindfold.
- jrootabega 6y agoMaybe the fifth dimension is the release number
- lmilcin 6y agoIf you don't know why it is called 5D then you need to watch the video that best explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY Hint: 4D is spatial + time, 5D is spatial + all possible timelines.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago... but chess doesn't have 3 spatial dimensions.
- deeteecee 6y agoyep, im pretty sure they're just calling it 3D because of playing on a physical chess board but we can obviously play it in 2D. if i was creating the game, i would've done the same because of all those jokes about playing chess in multiple dimensions
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- pmoriarty 6y agoI've enjoyed Alice Chess[1], which is played with two boards and on each move a piece on one board goes "through the looking glass" to wind up on the corresponding position on the other board. Also fun was Suicide Chess[2], where the winner is the first to get all their own pieces captured. About 20 years ago, I found a book in The Strand which had collected something like 300 chess variants... I'm sure by now there are many more. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_chess [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess
- shagie 6y agoWithin 5d chess, there's a mode called "Timeline invasion". In this mode, there are 2x 5x5 boards. On one board, you have BRKBN and five pawns, and I only have five pawns. On the other board, I have BRKBN and five pawns and you only have five pawns. These two boards are parallel dimensions that then follow the rest of the rules.
- jrootabega 6y agoDamnit, now Neal Stephenson is gonna roll a new crypto standard based on this
- adrianmonk 6y agoThe press kit section of the page says it has AI opponents. At first this didn't seem remarkable to me since it's a standard feature of most chess games. But, how would that work? Would they have to create a new AI implementation? An off-the-shelf chess AI presumably doesn't understand the best strategies for multiverses. Unless there is some trick to apply an off-the-shelf AI to this.
- thomasahle 6y agoThere is no trick, but game AI is pretty well understood, and it would probably only take a couple of weeks to get a decent AI.
- repiret 6y agoOff the shelf techniques for zero sum games of perfect knowledge would work though. Minimax and Monte Carlo Tree Search and reinforcement learning from self-play. Leela has been adopted to play both go and chess, I suspect it would be practical to adopt it to play any game.
- fctorial 6y agoDoesn't chess AI just create a tree of all possible moves (up to a certain depth (limited by difficulty setting and computer resources)) and choose the best one. As long as the board mutation rules are well defined, it should be straightforward to create an AI.
- samfriedman 6y agoQuite an interesting puzzle game, but it's not all that similar to chess given the extra dimension. This means that a knight might move two spaces forward and one back in time: a lot of patterns you may be used to seeing & responding to in normal chess will need to be rethought or thrown out. With that in mind it is a lot of fun to figure out new strategies and patterns!
- juped 6y agoThis is a weird little game - regular checkmates are often not, because the king can just escape back in time or across timelines, but threatening a king's past self is pretty easy - it can't escape having been where it was. And you only need one checkmate to win, because you have to make a move on all boards where it's your turn (even if you have no pieces there - you have to move one there!). You can also give check with a king, because of the quirk that only "the present" can threaten check. At least, I think that's why it works.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe alpha go team is working with Chess grandmasters to determine which variations to the rules of chess result in a larger state space with more complexity. They believe this will allow them to find a game that has more space for human creativity (since most games now are very constrained in the first 40 moves or so). Would be cool to submit this game to see where it falls :)
- forgotpwd16 6y agoI guess that's the Time Lords' chess variant. /jk This is interesting but it will be nice if a short description was on site.
- ggggtez 6y agoNo, apparently timelords just play the Towers of Hanoi. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3DHlYgfSdY2RlXkS2KwjtKK/the-fourth-dimension#:~:text=THE%20CURSED%20GAME,the%20completion%20of%20the%20serial https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3DHlYgfSdY2RlXkS2K....
- fctorial 6y agoYeah, I is totally smart enough to play this.
- netsectoday 6y agoThis is just the same as playing the computer and hitting "Undo" when you get screwed until you find where it all went wrong. Then you play that new timeline and can "Undo" again to create another timeline. This is a cool way to visualize "Undo" in chess.
- gridspy 6y agoWell sure. However in this version you can send your queens from the version of the board where you are winning to the boards where you're having difficulties.
- juped 6y agoThe multiple timelines can interact, however.
- shagie 6y ago"Undo chess" is a single timeline that a (human) player can rewind to a previous board state. Movements in time are constrained to moving the board state. Pieces cannot move independently of the board state in time. Additionally, you still play all the timelines that have been created. In 5D chess, the knight moves two spaces in one dimension and one space in another. In a 2d board, this is the description of how a knight moves. In 5d chess, a knight can move one space back in time and two spaces in the Y dimension on the board two one space back in time. That is fundamentally different than Undo chess. Additionally, this puts a new knight on the board timeline that is forked off of the previous move - so there are now three knights. Lastly, as pieces can move through time as well as space, one of the standard wins is a piece that is attacking the king in the past. I had a game where I moved the queen to the same file as the king (which was currently protected) - it was five spaces away. I moved another piece, and then won as the queen was now attacking the king five turns in the past. The timeline for that board is https://slack-files.com/T0VD96U9G-F01A45YRLTG-cf2d776bd3 https://slack-files.com/T0VD96U9G-F01A45YRLTG-cf2d776bd3 . You can see that there is no piece at [T-1, Y+1], [T-2, Y+2], [T-3, Y+3], ... until the king at [T-5, Y+5].
- MperorM 6y agonot at all the same. I can mate you by having your king in check in a board in the current timeline, while checking your king 6 moves in the past as well. I can abandon a board where I'm losing, by moving the king to another dimension where it is less threatened.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoPreviously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054313
- angel_j 6y agoY'all are not going to grok this, but time is not a dimension.
- malux85 6y agoIn this context it is, it's defined as the bi-directional line between game state transitions, and can be measured quantitively like any other spatial dimension. I'm talking specifically about time in the context of this game, which is what this thread is about, not time in the universe.
- angel_j 6y agoThose lines are an aspect of the dimensions of the board, not an addition to them. The measure of time does not make it a dimension (we can measure time in the universe too).
- malux85 6y agoAdding another dimension to an n dimensional array -- [0,0,0] becoming [0,0,0,0], the extra zero is another dimension. It doesn't matter what the numbers represent, x,y,z + time, or whatever - so we can describe the position of a particle using 4 numbers, x, y, z spatial co-ordinates and time. The same with this game of chess, board coordinates and time to describe the positions of the pieces. Is that right? I've always read "dimension" used in this way in arxiv papers on math and comp sci, time is another dimension when it is used to describe internal state.
- angel_j 6y agoYou read the papers correctly, bc those are abstract dimensions, neither time nor space nor precise facial features. Adding another element to an array is changing it's arity, as arguments to a function (which nobody confuses as a function's dimensions). The chessboard case is an example of mixing disparate, concrete properties, and calling them all dimensions. But that is exactly the error in saying that time is the 4th dimension: mixing the concrete concept of dimension with the abstract one. Blame physicists, for they seem to really think time is our forth dimension, ergo fundamental, whereas time is an emergent property not of spatial dimensions alone, but motion in that space. Here is an example of purely abstract dimensions. When the researchers at OpenAI want to add the position of words in a sentence, they literally add time, in form of co/sines, to the data. They don't "add" as-in append/concat another dimension to the data, the add as-in sum the existing data with the co/sines, changing the data. They literally merge time into the dimensions of the input. Before and after are temporal, for clocks and words in a string (ie their relative position gives meaningful relativity to the concepts the words represent, or we are lost), but really ALL time is a position WITHIN the dimensions, and the changing of time is the change of position. Ergo time is not additional dimension to the space. We would not experience time if there was no motion, and objects moving faster experience faster time relative to a slow moving object, as Einstein proved.
- scubbo 6y agoThis marks the first repost I've ever seen on HN, having been using it for nearly seven years. Not bad going!
- bashallah 6y agoIt’s only 5D if you are allowed +5 to -5 moves each move. Your result in 3D would always be an approximate