motorized chess

[Rusted Iron]

Here's the concept:

Electric motor scooters, (the kind you ride standing up), turned into chess pieces, with the playa as our board.

Anyone want to join in?

R. Iron

[koontar]

this sounds like a pretty damn good idea.. I mean I think it would be tight as hell.. perhaps like have a event for signup.. and have a game a day or something.. someone would perhaps need to help provide scooters (i dont got one).. walky talkies.. pencils.. portable notepads for keeping track of shit.. then there two big problems I can think of

1.. whos doing the moving..
2.. how the hell do you turn brc into a chessboard?

Matthew

[Peacekeeper]

problems you say?

no, this idea is tooooooo cool to ever have any problems.....

[Rusted Iron]

Wish I could provide scooters, but I can't do that.

I've considered doing it with bikes, but it doesn't seem right to have the pieces sitting down.

How to make the board? Two ideas:

1) sketch it in the playa... it's temporary anyway.

2) turn the city into a giant board... a bit anarchistic, you have to trust pieces who've been killed to stay dead. Okay, that probably won't work.

[spectabillis]

can i bite the heads off all the pawns?

[PAWalker13]

Wish I could provide scooters, but I can't do that.

I've considered doing it with bikes, but it doesn't seem right to have the pieces sitting down.

How to make the board? Two ideas:

1) sketch it in the playa... it's temporary anyway.

2) turn the city into a giant board... a bit anarchistic, you have to trust pieces who've been killed to stay dead. Okay, that probably won't work.

Hello R-I,

Your idea does sound like a fun art project that would fit the 2K6 theme.

The Playa is a moving entity, so why not use giant tarp(s) as the chess board, can be moved to different locales when necessary... then restake.

Players create their pieces as masks or headress - elaborate or simple...

Who/What motivates the Players? Futuristic chess game...

[dragonfly Jafe]

why not use the entire city without petty limits such as black or white ground? Anytime you come across an opposing piece (or just another piece), make your move! All the better if you jump out of hiding. I think if done with discretion this could be hilarious at certain camps (think; Monte Python meets BM)

[capjbadger]

why not use the entire city without petty limits such as black or white ground? Anytime you come across an opposing piece (or just another piece), make your move! All the better if you jump out of hiding. I think if done with discretion this could be hilarious at certain camps (think; Monte Python meets BM)

Screw chess... That sounds more like a city-wide game of "Killer"!
http://www.sjgames.com/killer/

(Don't get me wrong, I love playing chess. )

[dragonfly Jafe]

why not use the entire city without petty limits such as black or white ground? Anytime you come across an opposing piece (or just another piece), make your move! All the better if you jump out of hiding. I think if done with discretion this could be hilarious at certain camps (think; Monte Python meets BM)

Screw chess... That sounds more like a city-wide game of "Killer"!
http://www.sjgames.com/killer/

(Don't get me wrong, I love playing chess. )

Yes, but you would be wearing huge heads that limit your ability to move and see (kind of like a rhino in a china shop trying to hide)

[capjbadger]

*mentaly pictures 32 people running around the city in those huge head masks* hehehe Least you'd know who's playing!

And then have the 2 Queens battle it out at the end in Thunderdome!

...Oh wait, that already happened last year...

[Curmudgeon]

Wish I could provide scooters, but I can't do that.

I've considered doing it with bikes, but it doesn't seem right to have the pieces sitting down.

How to make the board? Two ideas:

1) sketch it in the playa... it's temporary anyway.

2) turn the city into a giant board... a bit anarchistic, you have to trust pieces who've been killed to stay dead. Okay, that probably won't work.

3. Revise the rules of the game so that you don't need squares, any more. All you would need would be four posts marking the field of play, for pieces whose positions would be defined as coordinates on a grid aligned with the posts, the coordinates taking on continuous instead of discrete values. One piece of dust is as valid a center for a square as any other, so no need to mark out squares and no colored moop in the dust to deal with after BM2006.

Guessing that somebody probably would have played around with this idea, I did a search under the words "continuous chess" and came across this page on the chessvariants dot com site, which you can find archived in the Internet Archive should the original copy go down.

The rules are set up for an 8" by 8" board, but scaling them up to a larger playing field should be easy. Maybe the biggest change in the rules is that these is no en passant capture. The rule limiting the nearness with which one pieces may approach another without stopping could be enforced by placing circular bumpers around the motorized pieces, with appropriate radii and trip switches temporarily cutting power to a piece on impact.

[Curmudgeon]

The lone ePlayan surveys the desolate virtual wasteland that is a once active thread. Is there no life left, he wonders. He calls out, only to hear his echo quickly muffled by a duststorm blowing past. Somewhere to his left, he can barely make out the form of a rook, half-eroded away by time. He sees that he has come too late.





He folds up his tent, his chessboard, and his tools, and sets out for a dark blue oasis, not so far off, where the subject will be fresh and new, and who knows, might even be read by somebody.

[Bob]

Here's the concept:

Electric motor scooters, (the kind you ride standing up), turned into chess pieces, with the playa as our board.

Aren't we energetic? Just mount big styrofoam pieces on the backs of Roombas set for low-pile carpet, and relax with a Martini.

[ThePikey]

Are you nuts? A Roomba on the playa would probably overload and crash and die in 5 minutes, or scour the entire playa surface all the way down to bedrock by the end of the week and I don't want to try explaining THAT to the BLM.


Besides, they're motorized. You'd probably need to get 32 DMV permits for those things.

[Curmudgeon]

Here's the concept:

Electric motor scooters, (the kind you ride standing up), turned into chess pieces, with the playa as our board.

Aren't we energetic? Just mount big styrofoam pieces on the backs of Roombas set for low-pile carpet, and relax with a Martini.

Do I feel a tugging sensation? Could it be ... yes, I do believe that Bob is yanking my chain.

This much is for the benefit of third parties lurking, because I'm sure that a civil engineer would already know this. The large styrofoam pieces would represent very little mass, but a large cross sectional area with respect to the wind, which would therefore induce quite a respectable torque on our assemblage, much of the wind landing well away from what will serve as a fulcrum and perpendicular to this lever we've just made of our hapless chess piece, if Heaven smiles on us, and our roomba somehow manages to stay on the ground. Which I doubt. At the very least, the pieces would tip over, if not go sailing across the Playa outright.

If one absolutely MUST use some of those little guys as the basis for mechanizing the pieces, obviously greatly rewired to allow for remote control, what would work better would be mounting lightweight wire cages on top - which wouldn't catch the wind very effectively, the cages being crafted in the shape of pieces and lit up with El wire, to be used at night, when they would be more obstrusively visible and striking to look at.

If somebody wants to mechanize the pieces at all, that is. Why not just make them big, say lawn jockey sized, bring out the surveying equipment to line up the directions of movement, and have the players lug the pieces across the dust?

[spectabillis]

i am not meaning to crap all over the idea, but realistically you need someone with time or experience to step foreward and rc roboticize 32 units.

if each unit has two movement channels (left/right - forward/reverse) thats 64 channels but most rc transmitters use 4 channels per crystal. once you solve that electronics problem, then for each unit you need a reciever, two modified continuous drive servos (if the units are lightwieght), a battery, and supporting cabling to hook it to a compatible recharger that either has to support multiple connections or you are going to have to manually swap each and every unit every night, all night.

since its likely that anything lighter than styrofoam will blow over and away anything heavier and you cant use rc based motors. so now you need a specialized motor driver board that goes between the reciever's pwm signal and the motor and those cost around $100 each. then you need to bulk purchase 32 compatible 12V motors but now you also need 32 new batteries and 32 limiting circuts to still supply 9V to the reciever. then go and buy 64 wheels and 64 swivel wheels.

maybe if you just have one, or two 'master units' that people can control that in turn move the other pieces? something that looks scary and knocks the piece clear off the board area? that would be a much easier thing to do.

[ThePikey]

For that matter, most folks don't have the patience for chess in BRC. Even the most stable individual gets a case of ADD on the playa. "Ooh look, shiny!"

Trying to get a crew of 32 people to each represent one piece at a time is a recipe for chaos. Especially if your pawn doesn't get used until the endgame, most folks would get bored and take off...

(Not that something like this couldn't be done, but you'd need to make the whole thing *vastly* more interactive to keep their interest.)

[falk]

OK, RC-controlled robots then. With computers controlling the board for times when you can't find someone who wants to sit down and play.

The real artistry will be in making the pieces. Certainly a Hope vs Fear theme to the pieces would be in order.

[Curmudgeon]

For that matter, most folks don't have the patience for chess in BRC. Even the most stable individual gets a case of ADD on the playa. "Ooh look, shiny!"

Simple solution - tag team chess. One person plays for ten turns, and then gets tagged and replaced by the next member of his team. While one plays, the rest do something else.

Trying to get a crew of 32 people to each represent one piece at a time is a recipe for chaos. Especially if your pawn doesn't get used until the endgame, most folks would get bored and take off...

(Not that something like this couldn't be done, but you'd need to make the whole thing *vastly* more interactive to keep their interest.)

Human chess? I don't know if I'd want to try to go hunt down that many volunteers and then count on all of them showing up, but if you want to make the board a lot bigger, you could give have each piece get its own performance space, so while they waited to be moved, they could put on their own show for their own small audience. Maybe tell a story. (The Queen Bishop's Tale?) Each piece has a beeper, and when the time comes to move, the audience gets up and moves along with the performer.

[ThePikey]

Well, I'm just basing this off personal experience with a chess set somebody had out there last year. (3-4 ft tall metal pieces, funky blacklights at night, looked cool as all hell) I'd start playing against one person, who'd wander off after ten or so moves. Never did play a full game against anyone, which kinda took away from the enjoyment.

[spectabillis]

i would do the human chess thing if i was a knight.



i just think others would complain after i club them with a mace.

ed: and i think it requires a kidsville NAMBLA bishop.

[Bob]

i am not meaning to crap all over the idea.....

How much money or trouble were the R/C tumbleweeds from a couple years ago?

[spectabillis]

wha?

[Curmudgeon]

i just think others would complain after i club them with a mace.

Inventory ... one nerf mace for Spectabillis, ...

[Curmudgeon]

Well, I'm just basing this off personal experience with a chess set somebody had out there last year. (3-4 ft tall metal pieces, funky blacklights at night, looked cool as all hell) I'd start playing against one person, who'd wander off after ten or so moves. Never did play a full game against anyone, which kinda took away from the enjoyment.

Yes, except if each player in the team is only playing for ten moves, how does that become a problem?

[mdmf007]

christ you have all week there to look around - is there a reason people cant finsh a damn game of chess? - only a sissy or a loser would walk from a game of chess.

later

[Bob]

Radio controlled tumbleweeds. You missed that?

[ThePikey]

Yes, except if each player in the team is only playing for ten moves, how does that become a problem?

You're assuming a degree of consistancy not really found among playa denizens as a whole if you think there will be a constant influx/outflux of players. People will play for a full ten moves, then stop all at once to rotate in a fresh crew? And there will be a group of 32 people eagerly waiting to be a chesspiece?

And do you think you can get 32 people all interested in playing the same game of chess? It's a two person game - two people will be engaged, while thirty people will be standing around waiting for someone to decide what to do. Even if the sixteen people all on one side come to a collective decision, somebody's idea will be neglected more than once, they won't feel like they're interacting, get bored, and piss off for something more exciting/sexy/fun.

Just so you don't get the idea that I'm just trying to piss in your cheerios here...

If you're dead set on getting 32 people out there, you might have to do something along the lines of setting up times to play (at 12, 2, 4, and 6 pm for instance) getting a crew of pieces out on the board, playing for a set number of moves, recording those moves, and setting the next time slots' pieces in those same positions - that way if people know they'll just be there for 20 minutes or so they'll be more likely to stick it out and not scarper off. Get those people involved and interested in something else while the actual players are trying to decide on their moves (Simon Says? Air guitar competition? Pass out drinks? Get people to act out their pieces' death scenes in as dramatic a fashion as possible?* Make people sing a song if they take another piece? Damifino. This is your baby, not mine.)


*which brings us back to the nerf weapons from earlier in the thread...

[Curmudgeon]

Yes, except if each player in the team is only playing for ten moves, how does that become a problem?

You're assuming a degree of consistancy not really found among playa denizens as a whole if you think there will be a constant influx/outflux of players. People will play for a full ten moves, then stop all at once to rotate in a fresh crew?

You know what? This is the third version of my reply to you that I've written, because the first two times I so thoroughly lost my cool that I wrote things that I'd rather not say. But you do seem to not qute be all there, mentally speaking and there's no gentle way of saying that.

I talk about having a team of players on each side, each member of the team controlling the pieces belonging to his side for ten turns before he gets replaced by another member of his team ("tag team") and going back to the party that all of the rest of the team is at. It's a simple concept. Everybody at the team is at an event - whatever kind of event the organizer chooses - and every once in a while somebody at the event gets tapped on the shoulder, told "your turn", and makes the moves for his side for ten moves. There's no way to explain this more simply, and no way to get from that explanation or anything I had already said to a statement that one would replace the teams every ten turns. If you are genuinely too slow to understand what I am saying to you, then there really is nothing that I can do to fix that problem for you.

Judging from what I've heard about ePlaya, I now expect some serious ranting about my elitism or negativity, but what am I supposed to do when somebody shows up and he's just a moron, and he just won't go away? Do I go back and forth forever with somebody who will just never get it, no matter how much I try to spoonfeed a simple idea to him? Do I ask people to wade through that? Or do I do what I'm going to do now?

If anybody is interested, this discussion will be moved over to this thread on the Travel to Burning Man board, where there is a little more moderation and a lot less head butting. If people want to come, that's cool and if they don't want to come, that's cool too. Either way, I'm bowing to the inevitable and accepting that on ePlaya, this thread now belongs to the trolls and the headcases. It's dead, at least as far as I'm concerned. Rusted Iron is obviously free to feel differently.

[spectabillis]

Radio controlled tumbleweeds. You missed that?

ja, i thought you were joking.