Telegraph chess: A 19th century tech marvel
spectrum.ieee.org30 points by sohkamyung 7 days ago
30 points by sohkamyung 7 days 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 (?)
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?)
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.
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.)
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:
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
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.
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.