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3-Dimensional Eight Level ChessA game information page
. TRUE 3D Chess on an 8 x 8 x 8 board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Iago wrote on Thu, May 6, 2004 04:43 AM UTC:
I have played competition-level chess myself for many years so I can claim
some measure of experience if not actual expertise.
It's fun to see people trying out new ways to 'invigorate' or
'rejuvenate' the game but this particular variation is SO incredibly
over the top that I wanted to offer one small observation why we maybe
should not bother:
A while ago I saw a variation where someone had created a 10x10 board
while only adding 3 or 4 new pieces [one was an extended version of the
knight residing in an off-the-board extra field. The designers had strived
to keep the rules governing these new pieces very limited and the game was
actually quite playable, they even created a program to play that kind of
chess, which worked very well and was very sensible. Very commendable
effort.
There was one factor however which effectively stopped it from ever being
adopted as a new way of playing chess. Playing the computer, even for a
scrappy game, took an unbelievable amount of moves. I ended up playing a
game of about 250 moves, and I meekly accept the software's imperfections
compounded by my own inexperience.
Anyone who has ever played chess will know that a 4 to 6 hour game would
come around to about 70-80 odd moves for each side in a VERY long game [as
an average, I'm not making any claims as to statistical accuracy here,
I'm only refering to 20 years of actual chess competition experience, you
will no doubt have a different experience].
Suppose a club were to seriously embrace this game and make the kind of
concerted effort of developing chess theory [because all the existing
theory - save for the basics about managing a game - goes out the window]
and training on this game, people would find themselves playing for VAST
amounts of time for a single game and long games would take well over 300
moves. It would be interesting to see how many actual moves you could make
in this scenario. Although manageable it would not actually be feasible to
have people play this game in a tournament because the tournament would
last several times the amount of time that it takes to play one now.

Now somebody developed a 3D game and because the original game is not
complex enough, they added new pieces with quaint rules AND differently
coloured squares distributed over -count 'em- 8 levels. If you overcame
all this and would devote some time getting comfortable with the game and
found someone willing to go through the same effort [which would be a
challenge all by itself] so that you would have someone to play, how many
moves would it take to play a single game when both players would make a
determined effort to win? How long would a single game take? How long
would a serious competition last? Who would want to play chess THAT bad
that a meaningful chunk of their life would be spent playing this game?

Just wondering.

If it is worth mentioning at all, the positive side would be that you
would probably need a quantum computer to compute the permutations. Which
leads me to the point that computers don't actually play chess, which is
outside the scope of this post so I'll shut up already.

Can't believe you made it this far down.