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Stanley Random Chess A game information page
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Peter Aronson wrote on Wed, Oct 19, 2005 06:07 AM UTC:
A joke is a joke, but the CVP is the sort of place that likes its humor clearly labeled where it won't get in the way of scholarship. I am beginning to get annoyed to the point of editorial intervention by multiple posts by supposedly different people in the exact same writing style. This sort of thing tempts the editors to a policy of only allowing posts by registered users. If you guys want to practice surrealist humor, do it on your own web pages -- imposing it on us is in dubious taste. And the joke isn’t funny any more.

Somebody wrote on Tue, Oct 18, 2005 10:36 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
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Stanley Random Chess A game information page
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Archr wrote on Tue, Oct 18, 2005 10:30 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
I am agast at some of these comments. Really! Some of the commentors sound like shameless philosophers of the baser sort. Of course Stanley Random Chess exists! If you don't enjoy it, fine, but please don't resort to bald-faced lies (to adopt the terminology of one critic) regarding SRC. I just recently played my first correspondence game at SchemingMind.com. I have not played an OTB game in many years. (In fact, I have not had an SRC library since the Great Des Moines Flood of 1993.) I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Fortunately for me, the game was not rated (I lost). I botched the complicated Butterfly Wing Gambit in the opening. In the middlegame, I simply couldn't gain much ground back. Much of my enjoyment stemmed, however, from seeing the masterful endgame play of my opponent. At one point, he sacked a rook to unstack my pawns and force my king onto a bad square. If that all sounds interesting, great! Play! If you are not interested, fine, don't play. And whether you play SRC or not, just remember: A bad day in chess better than a good day with a stomach flu. Archr aka ChessArchr www.-ChessArchr.blogspot.com

Max Maven wrote on Tue, Oct 18, 2005 04:26 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
I don't see what the fuss about the legitimacy of Stanley Random Chess is all about. Clearly it is a chess variant that is currently playable at the www.schemingmind.com correspondence chess server, there is an active player base, there are annotated games. So it's real. Sure, some of its history is clearly humorous and tongue-in-cheek, but since it is a real game that can genuinely be played online, and there are many people actively playing it, it belongs on this site.

The rules are honestly not that difficult to find out, and most players willing to take the time to play one or two games at schemingmind.com will discover them quickly. Nobody should be allowed to question the authenticity and legitimacy of Stanley Random Chess without first trying the game online at schemingmind.com.

I have personally played several games, and can appreciate and understand the game's appeal! New players should not give up too quickly, and indeed the best way to learn the game is simply play one or two games with experienced players.


Matthew Montchalin wrote on Fri, Oct 7, 2005 06:14 AM UTC:
Say, is there any chance the convention will be heading to my part of the country? I have lots of trouble with Internet, especially that darn 'point to point protocol' as it involves webbrowsing like it does. I doubt I could ever click my way to that 'paper' if it is some kind of an electronic event.

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Fri, Oct 7, 2005 04:41 AM UTC:
lol

Tony Quintanilla wrote on Fri, Oct 7, 2005 03:00 AM UTC:
Obviously, some might gain by attending Austin Lockwood's upcoming paper, 'SRC on the Internet - Fantasy or Reality?' at the annual CCSRC conference in Prague. This is no time for quibbling.

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Thu, Oct 6, 2005 03:04 AM UTC:
yep, most chess players have no sense of humor alright lol
he never said he was going to play the game, so i guess he stills finds it
amusing. i find it amusing, and i find your post amusing too :)
i get the internet, regardless of if i was to play src or not, i don't
really see a cost in it, maybe there is, who cares, and anyway, who would
seriously play src ha ha, but if you did, i think that is great :)
let us know how it goes :)

Matthew Montchalin wrote on Thu, Oct 6, 2005 01:01 AM UTC:
For most of us, Internet costs money, and playing a game of Stanley Random
Chess would certainly be bound to eat up a lot of time, and therefore cost
a lot of money.  Although you said that SRC is amusing, do you really think
it is worth the money to play it?  For instance, let's put the shoe on the
other foot.  Suppose I (or someone you don't know, but whom I were to
approve of, and you had absolutely no way of locating that person) were
the one to define the 'secret rules' behind Stanley Random Chess, and
she alone were to decide on whether your moves were acceptable or not. 
That kind of a setup could certainly have the potential of driving up
costs, don't you think?  Not to mention 'bandwidth' in the form of
noise, or near-noise.

Would you still find the game amusing enough to play for a few months, or
a few years?

(Now for an 'opening the floodgates' argument:)

The next hypothetical offers us even more food for thought:  suppose a
hundred thousand people or more found my version of Stanley Random Chess
(with my own list of approved but anonymous rulemakers) engaging, would
the increased consumption of bandwidth be worth it to you, to call it
amusing?  Or, if the ante is upped to an even higher stake, would it be
worth it to society?  After all, if robots could be programmed to play
Stanley Random Chess - not that they are /that/ creative - and even if
they would be answerable to their owners alone, and not to society, would
you still find it amusing?

Joshua Morris wrote on Wed, Oct 5, 2005 11:13 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
I find SRC amusing. The site contains pages of Chess history, fiction, and poetry - what's wrong with Chess humor? I don't think humor ought to be excluded just because some Chess players are humorless. :)

Matthew Montchalin wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2005 03:10 AM UTC:
Well, there must be something strange about that Richard Potter stuff, as when I clicked that address, my computer again jammed up on me, necessitating a CTRL ALT DEL to get the task turned off. Maybe you could just describe what you think you saw, rather than posting a link and hoping it actually works?

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 11:23 PM UTC:
well, not a complete lack of example games, there is one here.
http://geocities.com/verdrahciretop/src8.html
i havn't checked it out, and i am guessing it teaches you nothing, but
not sure, 
as i havn't looked at it.
At the end of that game, there are another 2 example games, but you must
 be member to see (free membership i think)

Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 09:47 PM UTC:Poor ★
I looked at the mao game and I think that one will be easier to catch than
SRC. Just curious how will the cheating be prevented in such games.

I consider that SRC can not be learned by playing at all.
Else it needs some consistency which does not exist in SRC.
For example white moves 1st d2-d4 does not work every time. How will a SRC
grand master see that in advance? And playing of someone who knows all
rules against someone who does not is quite unfair. At least someone who
knows the rules should says this in advance of a game of SRC. Then the
player not knowing the rules can at least try to learn them.
And another thing is the complete lack of example SRC games.

Another thing is how the client works at www.schemingmind.com.
If a player makes a move, which is illegal in the case of the SRC rule
set, it makes a random move from all available legal moves.

Two players playing SRC who don't know the rules is very funny.

The other game (MC) is just a nonsense. How can someone keep a '125
volume' ruleset in the mind? And what is the playing material for that
game?

make a guess wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 05:26 PM UTC:
I'm not too interested in going to the Brainking server. I was kind of hoping you would just send me 50 cents per move by snailmail, and then I would let you know when I was done playing the game. (No refunds, as that would be cheating; and if the postage rates happen to go up, you'd seriously have to send me more than 50 cents per move.) Is my offer tantalizing enough for you to take it seriously?

Peter Aronson wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 04:12 PM UTC:
Personally, I always thought Mao was a mean-spirited game.

Doug Chatham wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 03:07 PM UTC:
If you don't like Stanley Random Chess, then you'll probably hate the following games, too:

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 01:55 PM UTC:
seriously, you need to spend a weekend with kate moss if you didn;t see the
'tongue in cheek' side of SRC.
anyway, if you started playing this game, you would have to play someone
who knew the rules right?! (lol)
if you started playing say on brainking server or whatever it is called,
would you eventually be able to know all the rules?

make a guess wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 06:25 AM UTC:
Without bothering to go to the website, it sounds a little bit like 'New Eleusis' ported over to the chessboard. 'New Eleusis' or however you spell it was a cardgame popularized in the 1960s, and popularized again in the 1970s by Martin Gardner in his Scientific American column, Mathematical Games. It involved one person, the Rulemaker, and all the others were players or proponents of mathematical rules that would explain which cards could be played on top of, or subsequent to, a starting card. You see, the deck could be shuffled or unshuffled, it didn't matter, as it depended on what the rulemaker approved. Let's just assume they were shuffled. Anyway, the game was started with all the players getting a handful of cards face down that only they could look at, or manage. Nobody could look at the other person's hand. The only cards in plain sight, were those of the tableau, beginning with the first card of the remainder of the deck turned up. You might consider it a form of competitive solitaire, in a way. But the important thing is, the Rulemaker would either say 'yea' or 'nay' on the play of a card. Everything is predicated on the Rulemaker secretly recording a rule - e.g., play a red card after a black card, but anything can be played after a red card - and that was it, that was how the game was played. The object of the game was not just getting rid of your cards (though that was not enough to win, as you just got more cards after that), rather, making a declaration as to what the rule was - and being able to prove it, by looking at the rule that was written down.

With Stanley Random Chess, there appear to be self-appointed prophets having divine knowledge of what the secrets to the game are. How unappealing. For the game to have some kind of real value to it, the rules behind it must be recorded somewhere, and disclosed within a fair amount of time, so nobody has reason to call anybody else a cheat, or the Rulemaker an idiot. Although 'New Eleusis' has value as a mathematical game, I don't see the same thing with a chess game of this kind.

BTW, the difference between 'Eleusis' and 'New Eleusis' was the creation of an extra role - somebody would be a self-declared prophet interceding between the cardplayers and the rulemaker, and so long as his prophecies were correct, he garnered points for himself, and remained prophet.


Greg Strong wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 06:02 AM UTC:
No, it is not obvious that the historical assertions concerning this game
are a joke, since the inventor(s) themselves have denied this very point. 
There is one post here from Gregory Topov dating writings about this game
to 1066.  As I recall, there are more similar claims, but they were posted
before this game had an official page, so they are old comments I do not
know how to get to.

And, by all means, don't do anything, if that is your inclination, but my
rating of 'poor' stands unless someone can make an intelligent argument
on the game's behalf.

Tony Quintanilla wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 05:32 AM UTC:
I don't think the story about SRC's 'origins' should be taken as lies, just as a tongue-in-cheek story. It's really just for fun. It's not serious in that regard. Isn't that obvious? If the rules were revealed (actually fairly simple, despite appearances) the fun would disappear in great part, although not completely. Clearly one can't play this game as one does Chess. If I said anything more, it would spoil the fun. Let's leave it at that; live and let live, let's say.

Greg Strong wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 05:00 AM UTC:

Christine Bagley-Jones says:

so, SRC is funny and on the level
No. Not by a longshot is it 'on the level.' There are rules that the inventors know, the people who call themselves SRC grand-masters know, and the editors of the site know. But we are forbidden from knowing. In no way, shape, or form is this 'on the level.' In fact, the playing field is very un-level. It's not hard to be a grand-master when you are the player who knows the rules. It isn't two blind people fighting, as in Kriegspiel, but one blind player fighting another with perfect vision.

As for the idea of a limited-information game where the rules are what is in question, that is a terrible idea. This eliminates all strategy and all tactics. Period. If you don't even know which pieces are safe from capture, then you can't even think about forming a plan. It is all the randomness of Poker without any of the strategy. So, even in the case that neither player knows the rules, it is basically like the card game 'War' (which no one older than about 8 years old plays.)

And what about all this nonsense about it being older than Chess, and indeed the original form of Chess from which Orthodox Chess is supposedly derived? Preposterous! And the authors have also denied that that aspect is a joke. Promoting a bad game is one thing; there are lots of bad games around here. Deliberately pushing bald-faced lies to promote your own game is quite another.

Since the game can and is being played, the pages should not be deleted. However, the author(s) should clarify what it is and what it isn't, and remove all outright lies. As for the positive ratings the game has gotten by master-level and grand-master-level players, (the only positive ratings from anyone who has actually played it,) it only stands to reason that they would want to premote the game that they understand but refuse to enlighten us about.


Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 03:54 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
ahhhhhhhhhaaaa lol!!
so, SRC is funny and on the level wow, didn't see that coming :)
only one thing to do now, give it an 'excellent' :)
god bless SRC, and please forgive all those doubters he he (*whistles*)
(oh btw, pretty cool idea about the rules being mysterious)

Tony Quintanilla wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 03:29 AM UTC:

Well, since I'm the editor of this page I guess I should add my 2 cents, but not more.

I think this is a serious variant that is very funny. One could say that it is an 'incomplete information' game where instead of the board being partially hidden, like Kriegspiel, the rules are only partially known by the players. The full set of rules are programmed into the Schemingmind.com server if one wants to play the game -- see the links at the bottom of the page (has anyone tried?).

One might divine the compleat rules after much play and systematic testing, but I doubt it. I think at least half the fun is playing in this obscure universe. The game description is meant to be funny to go along with the obscurity.

For the record, as the posting editor, I (and the other editors) know the secret rules (which are also archived in the CVP mail), but I'm not telling. (In fact, I initially also questioned SRC's seriousness before posting the page. Hans did also. And we got a serious reply from the authors. This page was not posted by the authors after all!)

Drop the page? Unthinkable! Besides what would Lord Humberton-Snapf say?! Stanley Random Chess stays!


Derek Nalls wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 12:46 AM UTC:Poor ★
Pity to the poor soul who actually tries to play this game! Remove it.

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Mon, Sep 26, 2005 11:46 PM UTC:
Stanley Random Chess gave me a good laugh when i first read about it, and
this site needs all the laughs it can get. i personally think it should
not be removed.
Next thing you will want to remove 'Gridlock' he he.

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