My New Chess Project

 

Let's talk about a beautiful game. The legendary game of chess.

I want to share an anecdote and a harsh lesson I learned at an early age. When I was a kid, I was first introduced to the game of chess, and I loved it instantly. I found this game to be fascinating because it required a lot of strategy and logistics. Chess is really a game of position and patience, a subtle fusion of deceit and force. And as an eight-year-old, whenever I played chess, I felt like a Roman Commander, like Julius Caesar reborn, leading my troops on the siege of Alesia. Although sometimes, in reality, my opponents were more like Hannibal, crushing me in the Battle of Cannae. But I think this is what chess is all about, some people believe it's a solved game, and I agree that with modern computers and AI chess is essentially solved, but I still think that there is an element of human creativity and intuition that makes this game interesting.

Well anyway, back to the story I was narrating. As a kid, I began to study chess theory and play my family and friends for fun, and when I was in the fourth grade, my school held a chess tournament for the entire elementary school. Kids from the first grade all the way up to the sixth grade gathered around to compete at this event. This was the first chess tournament that I won. I mean this was not even a rated event, but still, I was very proud. The whole purpose of this competition was to find 2 chess players that the school was going to train for a year and have them compete at a national academic level. Competition is good since it brings out the best of us.

Anyways, I started training in chess after school with the other student and our chess instructor, and after a few weeks, I started to beat all my friends and family. I could definitely see the progress, but what I cared about was winning. This is very dangerous and as one of my fencing coaches always reminds me, we need to be progress-driven, not goal-driven. Well, let's say that this is not a story of triumph, but rather of my chess demise, and how we need to learn to overcome defeat to become stronger competitors. To make this long story a quick narrative, I'll just skip over the dull details and straight to the good parts.

Basically, I trained with an unyielding resolution for an entire year and was getting to the level where I could beat my chess trainer, although I did not win all of the time. Eventually, the time to compete at this tournament arrived. The tournament was organized as a  random single-elimination composition.  Let's say I was not particularly lucky with my draw, I was paired against this 16-year-old girl that had already competed in many national events and had actually defeated my chess instructor several times. I still remember the chess match, she opened up with the Queen's Gambit and after we battled it out back and forth, on around move 35 we were even piece by piece and second by second, but then she moved the rook to attack my king and called the dreaded checkmate. How was this possible? I had played like Bobby Fischer when he beat Boris Spassky during the world championship, but sure enough, I checked all the possibilities and I had been defeated. I was upset because I had lost, I guess as upset as any eight-year-old child would be. But then my chess instructor walked over to the game board and stated that this was in fact, not checkmate. Then she said to me "Your opponent actually blundered", she then said "Andrei you can move your rook here and do this and that " pointing out a few moves in the game and then it turns out that I would come out on top with a rook and a few pawns against my opponent's pawns. And that is a winning position for me.

The referee walked over to the chessboard assessed the situation and then declared her the winner of the match. Because according to the chess rules agreeing to checkmate is equivalent to resigning the game, and therefore I had lost. It was in this very moment that I started crying because I realized that I had been afraid of facing her, and had given up and not bestowed my full effort, and therefore sold my self short and lost a match that I should have won. I remember I did not cry because I lost, I had lost plenty of matches, I cried because of the disappointment of giving up and accepting defeat. I suppose this is the lesson to learn here. To never give up and always try your hardest, it applies to chess, it applies to fence, and it definitely applies to life.

So why am I sharing this story of defeat? Well because during the COVID-2020 quarantine I was confined to the four walls of my room, and started to play chess again for fun. And I have decided to create a fully voice-controlled chessboard set. This will allow for the game of chess to become accessible to people with impairments and to help grow the chess culture. 

I will write about the progress I make and the challenges I have to overcome. Know that I will not give up this time. I'm going to talk with one of my good friends a mechanical engineer in order to ask him for some assistance with the whole engineering planning. Our current idea is to utilize magnets to move the pieces around the board, and to write up a voice recognition library to play the game of chess.

Check out his site, as he has completed tons of cool projects.  Stay tuned for more
https://www.louisbranca.com/