"Endless" Chess Idea
Everybody (even people who dont know how to play chess) knows, what chessboard consists from checked black and white squares.
People who knows the chess game, knows what a lot of different pieces are situated on this
board, and they can move on it horisontally, vertically using diffirent rules. All this wonderful
gamesplay ends on the borders of the board - it is impossible to move through the borders.
But it is very easy to eliminate the borders of the board: you should
"glue" them vertically - sides a and h:
This manipulation is very simple and effective. Pieces can move according to the same rules, no any conflicts
in the rules appear, but you get a lot of additional possibilities. The piece, what dissapeared bihind one of the
borders, appears from the other and so on.
This cylinder board is possible to change to flat surface. In this case you have the
following:
You add boards left and right of the original board (so verticals a and
h touch each other) and all this configuration continues endless.
In all these boards we have the same pieces position, and the same moves, but
thouching edges of the boards are not taking in account so you can move from one vertical
to another.
As we could think, it is easy to finish this board transformation by
"glueing" 1st and 8th horisontal and so change board to toroid:
In analogy with "one-time" transform this "two-time" glueing can be illustrated by this picture:
Unfortunately, this nice mathematical result is completely useless for real chessplay.
If we use standard starting setup, each king is under 4-times check and mate just before
the first move.
If we wish to transform board in both directions, we should find some other way
to do this. For example, we can "glue" each border - white and black with itself, so we can make something like
globe with parallels and meridians. But here is one problem: we have tho "poles", and at these poles the square
structure of board changes. so we cannot move at the poles using the usual rules. So it seems, no way exists to
make the appropriate board, but ...
We have the same structure of cylinder board horisontally, but vertically each border thouchs himself but turning from left to right. And magically all the problems disappear! White and black squares are in order, any piece can move as usually, starting position works fine. But the board is now endless, and we can have new endless possibilities in this old game.
Written by Alexander Iglitzky (email removed contact us for address) l.ru
Translated into english by Pavel Tikhomirov
WWW page created: May 03, 2000.