Quantum Chess

Quantum Chess

Quantum Chess, a variant of the chess game invented by Selim Akl, uses the weird properties of quantum physics. Unlike the chess pieces of the conventional game, where a pawn is a pawn, and a rook is a rook, a quantum chess piece is a superposition of "states", each state representing a different conventional piece. In Quantum Chess, a player does not know the identity of a piece (that is, whether it is a pawn, a rook, a bishop, and so on) until the piece is selected for a move. Once a piece is selected it elects to behave as one of its constituent conventional pieces, but soon recovers its quantum state and returns to being a superposition of two or more pieces. Why Quantum Chess? Conventional chess is a game of complete information, and thanks to their raw power and clever algorithms, computers reign supreme when pitted against human players. The idea behind Quantum Chess is to introduce an element of unpredictability into chess, and thereby place the computer and the human on a more equal footing. Because a true quantum board may be a few years in the future, for her summer project, Alice Wismath, an undergraduate in the School of Computing, and a summer NSERC student working with Dr. Akl, created a program to model one variation of Quantum Chess, as well as a computer strategy to play the game. See:http://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/akl/techreports/quantumchessTR.pdf   for Dr. Akl’s paper “On the Importance of Being Quantum”.

Why don't they just use dice with chess? If chess was a game of "complete information", then it would be solved already, wouldn't it?

No dice.

Yes, the whole thing smacks of gimmick.

Another attempt to take the skill factor out of chess, and turn it into Candyland, where the winner is determined randomly.

Old post but just googled it.

I wonder, could such a game be simulated on a classical computer where each piece has some probability to be one out of the six pieces?

And what's the point playing a game where you can't decide before playing since every piece will be in superposition? How can one possibly win this game?

Why don't people who come up with these ideas just walk away from chess and play Dungeons and Dragons instead?

Chris Cantwell, also created a version of quantum chess (staring in a recent chess article) said that he created quantum chess so that people could get an instinctive understanding of the quantum world.

here's the link if anyone's interested:

http://quantumrealmgames.com/

Love the idea!

You know, according to the author the idea behind quantum chess is not about making another candy-game, but to illustrate the principles and works of quantum mechanics through common sense. If you want to understand basic principles of quantum mechanics definitely give it a shot! There is a game at steam against CPU, wish there was an online version to play with human player.