Or it's just to have fun and create stuff. Already someone made board full of rooks and called it Rooklyn, and another person made a board full of queens and called it Queens

the game here is to have fun :)

get the most kills, make a cool shape

or take a piece veeeeery far away from home

I'd love to know what individual piece has moved the furthest from it's starting point.

Ah yes good question! Here's some context for you. First off, the way moves work:

(edit: I realized I didn't answer your question. If we receive a captured for a piece we're optimistically tracking that always takes precedence, since once a piece is captured it can't move anymore!)

    * clients send a token with each move
    * they either receive a cancel or accept for each token, depending on if the move is valid. If they receive an accept, it comes with the sequence number of the move (everything has a seqnum) and the ID of the piece they captured, if applicable
    * clients receive batches of captures and moves. if a move captured a piece, it's guaranteed that that capture shows up in the same batch as the move

So when you make a move we:

    * Write down all impacted squares for the move (2 most of the time, 4 if you castle)
    * Write down its move token
    * If you moved a piece that is already tracked optimistically from a prior not-yet-acked-or-canceled move, we note that dependency as well

We maintain this state separate from our ground truth from the server and overlay it on top.

When we receive a new move, we compare it with our optimistic state. If the move occupies the same square as a piece that we've optimistically moved, we ask "is it possible that we inadvertently captured this piece?" That requires that the piece is of the opposite color and that we made a move that could have captured a piece (for example, if you moved a pawn up that is not a valid capturing move).

If there's a conflict - if you moved a piece to a square that is now occupied by a piece of the same color, for example - we back out your optimistically applied move. We then look for any moves that depended on it - moves that touch the same squares or share the same move token (because you optimistically moved a piece twice before receiving a response).

So concretely, imagine you have this state:

    _ _ _ _
    K B _ R

You move the bishop out of the way, and then you castle

    _ _ B _
    _ R K _

Then a piece of the same color moves to where your bishop was! We notice that, revert the bishop move, notice that it used the same square as your castle, and revert that too.

There's some more bookkeeping here. For example, we also have to track the IDs of the pieces that you moved (if you move a bishop and then we receive another move for the same bishop, that move takes precedence).

Returning the captured piece ID from the server ack is essential, because we potentially simulate after-the-fact captures (you move a bishop to a square, a rook of the opposite color moves to that square, we decide you probably captured that rook and don't revert your move). We track that and when we receive our ack, compare that state with the ID of the piece we actually captured.

I think that's most of it? It was a real headache but very satisfying once I got it working.

Yes exactly!

My goal with the board architecture was "just be fast enough that I'm limited by serialization and syscalls for sending back to clients" and go made that really easy to do; I spend a few hundred nanos holding the write lock and ~15k nanos holding the read lock (but obviously I can do that from many readers at once) and that was enough for me.

I definitely have some qualms with it, but after this experience it's hard to imagine using something else for a backend with this shape.

theoretically there's a design for "indestructible" fortress (rhoburb, you are a genius)

1) fill corner board with pieces 2) cover the border (from inside) with pawns 3) cover the promotion square on the border with the king

king can't exit the board, pawns can't walk backward to leave space, filler doesn't allow these 2 to make way

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the real holy grail that will never be achieved I fear