Telegraph chess: A 19th century tech marvel

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telegraph-chess

44•sohkamyung•1mo ago

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kenjackson•1mo ago

When i was growing up “correspondence chess” was a thing. Where you submitted your next move to your opponent over snail mail. Even back then I thought this was too slow for me, but I later understood that people would play many different game simultaneously.

kqr•1mo ago

It's still a thing and they even have world championships in it. Everyone always draws because it's basically just Stockfish vs. Stockfish. (Okay in the most recent one there were actually a shared first place, a shared second place, and one person in third place. The latter died during the tournament, and whether the others ended up in first or second place depended on whether they had drawn with third place before he died or if they won on time.)

eterm•1mo ago

That sounds like satire but is actually true:

It appears that in the latest championship, a full 10 players shared first place, because one person died:

https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104

All other games were drawn.

What a rather unserious organisation.

anthk•1mo ago

Is Freechess.org safe from Stockfish/Gnuchess and the like?

oneeyedpigeon•1mo ago

lichess.org still calls a casual remote game 'correspondence'. My partner and I often play from either end of the same sofa :)

b00ty4breakfast•1mo ago

There were (maybe still are? I couldn't locate any active clubs with a cursory search) ham radio chess clubs that would play chess on-air over cw/radiotelegraphy.

pettertb•1mo ago

That is perhaps the most deeply nerdy thing I have heard of

anthk•1mo ago

On par of Microchess https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html and Nanochess https://nanochess.org from Óscar Toledo.

Microchess has a C-port with an emulated MOS 6502 inside. That's it, you are actually simulating a barebones Kim-1 with Microchess as the bundled "ROM" already in RAM.

I might port the C port to its transputer with Micro-C if I'm bored.

b00ty4breakfast•1mo ago

the triply-nested niche of geekdom

qsort•1mo ago

I got nerd sniped and tried to reconstruct the games. The notation is weird and they aren't using modern conventions (a1 is dark, queens on the d-file, kings on the e-file, white goes first.)

Also, as the article mentions there are a few errors. With a bit of deduction this is my best attempt at reconstructing the first one:

https://lichess.org/HzzfuyWv

In keeping with the theme of exciting new technology, I tried giving the problem to Opus 4.5 but it seems to hallucinate badly: https://claude.ai/share/299fb10e-8465-41b3-bad5-85500291ed67

gorgoiler•1mo ago

”There are records of games played over radio, on telephone lines, satellite, … forums, and email.”

My father went to a boarding school. In defiance of his housemaster’s nightly curfew, he and his friend would play cross-dormitory chess using the heating pipes as a medium for Morse code tapped out on the radiators.

It was just the two of them playing through a wall. It would be a fun exercise to implement a fully manual pipe tapping protocol that implements addressing, collision avoidance, retransmission, and distributed consensus. So much fun in fact — and I think this site is definitely a safe space to admit one’s sense of “fun” being quite niche — that it surely must have been done already. TCP/IP/Ethernet: The board game (?)

kqr•1mo ago

Did they somehow find a way to make a long tap (e.g. slide something against the radiator for a continuous signal) or did they agree on two different kinds of short taps? (Or do the pipes resonate for long but can be dampened by hand to produce a short tap?)

cwillu•1mo ago

I believe the usual thing is to essentially encode it by the spaces between the taps, rather than the taps themselves.

kqr•1mo ago

But then how does one distinguish between letters? Something like "ETA" would be difficult to tell apart from "II".

qingcharles•1mo ago

I used this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code

zkmon•1mo ago

Electronic communications came out of blue, outpacing the traditional messengers at blitz speeds, heralding the arrival of aliens that do not recognize distance between locations, lack time duration to do work and create clones. They can build a retail shop that available everywhere in the world all the time. with cloned salesmen.

Aliens from quantum world. Quite unearthly and unhuman.

anthk•1mo ago

Microchess for the Kim-Uno: https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html

busfahrer•1mo ago

Slightly related, Video Chess is a Chess game for the Atari VCS/2600, very technically impressive since the VCS only has 128 bytes(!) of RAM. Another technical limitation are the VCS's rudimentary sprites, that wouldn't even allow to draw all of the pieces' symbols in the same row, the had to interlace the game pieces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess

anthk•1mo ago

Not an issue for the Kim-1, as it just displayed the output as three hex numbers (color-piece start-square end-square). But later it got a serial interface.

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Telegraph chess: A 19th century tech marvel

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