Much the same for me. I was told the rules much earlier in life, but with no one to play with it didn’t really matter. And maintaining focus on something that really was uninteresting to me was an unpleasant chore.
I realized the pointlessness of even trying when I when I was kindly entertaining an older relative by playing chess with him. We had nothing in common really, but he was a nice old guy and I put some effort into playing a game with him. As the game went on I managed to find a couple of moves that made it a little interesting for him, but very quickly lost any sense of continuity and a few moves later it was over. And that pretty much describes the best game of chess I’d ever achieve.
My oldest sister wanted someone to play chess against. She taught me when I was 4 and it took. I stay with it lightly until 6th grade when I joined the chess club. Played a lot from 6th to 12th grade and then largely dropped it.
I never got really good, just a 1600 rating or so. My High School Team did win the Nationals, that was pretty amazing. I was very happy to be a part of it.
But of course (and will do so here just in case anyone else would like to know). The simplest way seems to be to go to Chess Board Editor - Apronus.com then click the “position setup” button - you can then click on the pieces on the board and click again on any other square to ‘move’ them, or click the ‘empty’ button to start from an empty board. You add pieces by clicking on them above the board and then clicking the square on which you wish to place them. To remove a piece, click on the blank square above the board then click a piece that is on the board. I don’t know what all the functions do but I found it reasonably intuitive.
Once you’ve set up your desired position, you can click the “legal moves only” button to ‘play’ against yourself as you wish. Then a “link to share” button appears that will put a link that you can copy and paste (like I did) in the box on the right. Technical note - unsurprisingly, it doesn’t check if the position you have set up is legal (I think that would require far more programming than can reasonably be expected from a free program). Do modern chess programs perform this function, out of interest?
My brother taught me chess at the age of 6. In the beginning, I remember being suicidally reckless with my pieces, and the checkered battlefield was littered with the corpses of my loyal but grossly misused soldiers. Of course, I learned over time, but I have never lost my aggressive nature which, ironically, has turned out to serve me well over the board.
Thanks - yeah, I’ve seen some YouTube videos of obviously illegal positions. I was more wondering if a program like Fritz or Shredder has a function to assess a constructed position for legality (and perhaps even give a proof game). If not, it’s just possible this is a niche corner of chess in which humans still beat computers (if only because no-one has yet bothered to program a chess engine to do it).
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that isn’t built into any computer program.
I haven’t given it much thought, but wouldn’t that require computation similar to solving chess itself? Perhaps even more?
There are obviously some heuristics a computer could use (2 kings, not adjacent; no pawns that have moved backwards or more than 8 pawns per color; no more “extra” pieces than promoted pawns). But that’s just scratching the surface.
I don’t think so: to do this, you just have to see whether the given position can be traced back to the starting position by any series of legal moves. To completely solve chess, you have to do that for every conceivable chess position. Also, as you allude to, you tend to look at the pawn moves first, as these have a lot fewer ways to achieve the final result. Likewise, any captures. A complicating factor is that the solution is not going to be unique - indeed for most positions there will be many possible ways to get there. Admittedly, I have no idea what all that looks like computationally.
I believe we had a thread on that topic very recently.
The conclusion being that while of course there are a number of heuristics that could quickly eliminate a given board position as illegal, and if you can trace back to the starting position, then it’s legal, there is no general algorithm. There is no general algorithm (other than brute force) to tell definitively that a given legal-looking board position is actually illegal.
My family had a lot of games including Chess, Sorry, Life, etc.
My dad taught me how to play. This was around 8 or so. We played until I started winning and then he didn’t want to play anymore (sore loser?).
Then it was a friend that lived across the street and chess books from the library.
We had a class chess championship in 6th grade. I won that. (I also won the checkers tournament).
I was 2nd on the chess team at a large high school.
Then I didn’t have anybody to play against and stopped playing. I still remember rules and strategies, but it’s been years since I played against anybody that’s good so I’m probably not that good anymore.
I learned the rules when I was under 10, and played a couple of times with my friends, but none of us were serious players and we didn’t even get all the rules right. I remember my best friend at the time checkmated me in one game, but did not understand that checkmate ended the game immediately and insisted that my king make a move so that he could capture it. We also knew there was such a thing as castling, but didn’t really know how it worked.
When I really got interested in chess was as a senior in college when I had a chessplaying program for my PC that I messed around with occasionally. Even by the standards of the day (1991), to say nothing of modern standards, the program was laughably weak, but it kept beating me. One day I realized that the program was making his king really vulnerable in an attempt to avoid losing a piece, and I checkmated it. I was astonished. I had sacrificed a piece to deliver the mate, which was so immensely satisfying that I went to the college library to look up books about chess and discovered that there was literally an entire shelf devoted to the subject. I read a bunch of them, and even though I wasn’t a good enough player to understand most of them, at least I learned about popular openings and that sort of thing.
When I went to law school I started going to my university’s chess club, where I was pretty much the weakest player, and started playing tournament chess. At that point I still didn’t really have any idea what I was doing, but I was young and my brain still functioned fairly well so I sometimes beat people who were equally inept. In retrospect it seems like I blundered a lot less back then than I did in later years, so even though I didn’t understand chess at all I still won sometimes.
In the years since my interest in chess has been cyclical. I’ll get into it for a few years, and then will eventually stop playing when I get frustrated that I’m not getting any better. In the last few years I finally noticed some significant improvement, but not because I understand subtle strategies better, just because constant play has helped me blunder less. I’ll be 52 this month and play or study chess more than an hour a day so further improvement is unlikely, which is frustrating. It’s hard to get skunked by a seven year old who’s been playing for a year or two and is already better than you’re ever going to get. And it happens a lot.