I just did a quick search on my Ipod in the app store and there are several score keeping apps for under $5.00. From the reviews it doesn’t look like any have been scaled up to fit the Ipad yet. And it also sounds like people are using these in tournaments, possibly unrated ones? Years ago I used ChessPad on my Palm Pilot before the Monroi even came into being. I’m not so sure that data entry is really faster. I can write pretty fast. It might be more accurate and legible though.
I’ll mildly object to being told that I have my head in the sand.
If you are saying that an illegal move is an accident that needs to be prevented, that’s fine. I stand by my statement that your first step should be to try to get a rule change that removes the penalty for an illegal move, and that as long as the penalty is in place, then an electronic scoresheet that indicates that an illegal move has occurred is an advantage.
I’m not endorsing electronic scoresheets or opposing them. Just making an observation that if things move in your desired direction that the rules have to be modified ahead of the game.
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Bill, you’re wrong in your saying that electronic scoresheets can be used to prevent illegal moves.
By the rules that stand and should stand, the process entails making the move before recording it. If the electronic scoresheet is set to make note of illegal moves and it is used by the rules, all it will do is let the person using it know that he has made an illegal move after he made it. Understand that he will have released the piece and the move will have been determined and possibly completed if he had already pushed his clock button. Yes, it will also let him know after his opponent has made an illegal move.
Yes, if we require the electronic scoresheets to make note of illegal moves, it will act as a referee in the cases of illegal moves, it certainly won’t prevent them.
An electronic scoresheet by itself may not prevent illegal moves, but it will discover them immediately, and make correction easier.
Once the software evolves to the point where the players are playing on a pair of computer screens, then we will have reached the ideal situation, where illegal moves are physically prevented.
More likely, in practice, it will happen the other way around. With improved technology (beyond just an electronic scoresheet), the need to penalize illegal moves will disappear, because they won’t be allowed to happen in the first place. Eventually, the rule makers will then get around to removing the then-moot rule.
Bill Smythe
When it comes to subtlety and illegal moves, this example is only the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s another example involving castling. Suppose white wants to castle, so he moves his king from e1 to g1. But suppose he would then be castling through check, e.g. black has a rook on the f-file. Should the scorekeeping device, in non-detection mode, play the illegal move Ke1-g1, or the illegal move O-O?
Or, suppose white tries to castle queenside by moving his king from e1 to b1 (instead of to c1). Should the scorekeeping device assume the illegal move Ke1-b1, or should it also play the Ra1 to c1, or to d1? Three choices here.
Here’s one involving en passant. Suppose black has just played f7-f5. White wants to capture en passant, so he tries g5 to f6, putting himself in check.
Should the scorekeeping device assume the illegal move g5xf6 e.p., or the illegal move g5-f6?
Pawn promotion is another can of worms. What if white moves a pawn from a7 to d8? Should that be a simple illegal move, leaving a pawn on the eighth, or should a promotion be demanded? Or, what if white tries to promote to a king, or to a black piece? Or to leave an unpromoted pawn on the eighth? Or to move a pawn from the third rank to the eighth? Or to move a pawn, already on the eighth from an earlier illegal move, to another square on the eighth?
For that matter, castling and promotion aside, what if white tries to move a black piece? Or if he tries to move from a square that has no piece on it? Or if he enters two white moves in a row, with no intervening black move?
For these and many other reasons, the designer of any scorekeeping device that purports to have an “illegal move detection off” mode, had better give these questions a lot of thought.
Bill Smythe
These are interesting questions, though after thinking about them a bit, I still believe illegal moves should be allowed on electronic scoresheets.
I note that the mere presence of a diagram on an electronic scoresheet significantly reduces the possibility of errors such as these happening in real life. If you make an illegal move on the board, you’re likely to notice it when you go to enter it into your scoresheet…and if you make an illegal move on your electronic scoresheet, the position on the board will not match, and you’ll go look for where you went wrong.
I believe the only time I’ve ever made an illegal move in a tournament game was 1992 (a blunder at the IHSA Class AA individual tournament when I absent-mindedly grabbed my queen while I was in check). But I write down illegal moves more often than I care to admit. That just doesn’t happen to me anymore with my eNotate.
For the purposes of this post, allow me to define an “internally legal move” as “a move usually involving interaction between two pieces that is allowed, assuming no external factors such as an attacked square or a discovered check”.
In this first example, Ke1-g1 is an internally legal move, as a king could move two spaces from its home square. So, the device should play O-O. (As an aside to this, if there is no rook available on h1, the device should just let the king stay on g1.)
Ke1-b1 is not an internally legal move, as there is no situation in chess where a king can ever move more than two spaces. So, the device should just leave the king on b1.
g5-f6 is an internally legal move. So, the device should play gxf6.
The device would, in theory, demand a promotion any time a white pawn hits the eighth rank, or a black pawn hits the first rank. The “internally legal” standard doesn’t apply here, as it’s just one piece being moved.
To answer these in order:
If white tries to move a black piece, the scoresheet should record the move.
If white tries to move from a square that has no piece on it, the sheet should do nothing, because it is not being given any data on what to move. (In real life, this would usually be an alert to the player that there was an error in his previous notation.)
If white puts in two white moves in a row, the scoresheet should record the moves in order, the first one for white, the second one for black.
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Actually this past Monday evening, there was an illegal move in a game I played where neither one of us noticed. We were playing 2 games of G/30, d/5 that was dual rated. It was the 2nd game where after winning the 1st, I misplayed the opening and lost a Bishop for a pawn. As the game progressed into the end stages, I checked my opponent with a Knight, forking the King and a Rook. My opponent placed his King on a square that was still in check from my Knight. It was the f4 square and with a few other pieces and pawns on the board, it really was easy to miss.
My eNotate simply let me put his King on f4, as it does with any illegal move. I never noticed it until I attempted to download the game to my laptop and in my Deep Junior database. I use a pgn reader called, Chess Pad to copy the game to the clipboard and I then copy it into the Deep Junior program. Well, every time I tried to open the game with Chess Pad it said there was an error. After a number of attempts at reloading and copying, I saw a button that said I could see the error. Well sure enough, it showed the pgn with the Kf4 as an illegal move, so the program wouldn’t accept it to read.
All I do is notate the move on the device screen. I only check to see if the move made was the move I intended to enter. I really would not or did not see the illegal move on the screen when I missed it on the board.
Per the rules, an illegal move, if not noted after a certain number of moves stays. Well, that move stayed until the end of the game, so it is now a matter of record.
Something that is not generally known by people that don’t have one of these devices is that the eNotate will let you record any move as if you made it on the regular chess board. It doesn’t care if there’s a piece on that square or anything.
The castling is automatic in the moving of the rook though. I wonder how it would handle the illegal 0-0-0 that Bill mentioned.
Another problem that having the program alert and alarm the illegal move will produce is the hassle of when you accidentally tap the wrong thing when entering a move. As it now is, all we need do is back space the move entry and re-enter the correct move. If the alert or alarm go off every time an error in score keeping is made and it is an illegal move that was incorrectly entered, that would be a bit worse than annoying.
Bill - Your clever examples demonstrate that the only appropriate behavior from such a device would be complete passivity; moving the white king from e1 to g1 should do just that, and the device should then accept either of two things next - either a move by the white rook from h1 to f1, or a move by a black piece.
There are two themes intertwined here:
A. The issue of the extra capabilities and possibilities created by the non-passive electronic device (which must be operated by the player, and which could be misused or even contain a mechanism for cheating, which means arbiters have an extra job to do when these are in use).
B. The issue of scorekeeping itself.
As for the march of technology, one day we can expect web cams to be augmented with software that watches a game and parses out the moves, just as the DGT board does via its detection network. Perhaps sooner than that, maybe someone will manufacture a roll-up vinyl board version of the DGT-style smart board containing the same kind of detection network, and also add to it the obvious storage or wireless technology to collect and transmit the positions or moves, so these can proliferate at lower price points, and become common.
(If anyone wished to explore building such a roll-up smartboard, I can help on the engineering side, as my father originally conceived of the detection system now in the DGT smart board when looking at one of own rollup tournament boards and said “you know, that could be wired up to know where all the pieces are”, and subsequently developed and patented the system now in use. The patent is now expired and in the public domain, and the engineering to reduce the detection system to a thin layer is something he has described to me, too.)
We can take this one step further. Even without exposing the king to check, handling an incorrect attempt to capture en passant is problematic. For instance, remove black’s rook from the hypothetical. Suppose that black had just played f6-f5 instead of f7-f5. Or, suppose that black moved the pawn from f7 to f5, but there have been intervening moves. If white moves his pawn from g5 to f6, what should the device do?
Regarding illegal move detection - I think it should definitely be off. Consider the following circumstance.
Two players in mutual time pressure, Player A is still keeping score, we will assume that Player B is not keeping score.
Case A, player A is keeping score with pen and paper, Case B, player A is keeping score with a Monroi with illegal move detection on.
Assume that player B is a piece ahead, but his King is in danger and his pieces are a little loose.
Now in the real game (this is based on a real scenario that I watched one day along with two other masters)…
Player A checked and simultaneously attacked one of B’s pieces. B moved his King out of check and defended the attacked piece, as any other move loses a piece and leaves B in a bad position. However in doing so, B placed his King in a “new check”. (Note, we are not saying that B purposefully made an illegal move - what we are saying is that B saw only one move that held the game and missed that it was illegal.) A missed this. Soon thereafter B’s material advantage became telling and he mates A. A agrees with the loss.
In Case A, the game is between two players, there is no outside assistance, A fails to see the illegal (HIS responsibility) and loses.
In Case B, the Monroi tells player A an illegal move has been made during time pressure, something that not even a TD may do. Therefore, we can only call this outside interference. Consequently, the game is not between two players, and the game result has been impacted.
Given this, I can’t see how this isn’t outside interference in any other time situation since a Monroi is a scoresheet, not a TD.
Therefore, the illegal move detection should be off. The recording device needs to be as “dumb” as a sheet of paper.
A way around some of these problems would be for the device to require the player to take all distinct actions that were involved in making a move. For example, when castling, the player would have to move the king and then, separately, move the rook. When capturing en passant, he would have to move his pawn and then, separately, remove the captured pawn. When advancing a pawn to the far side of the board, he would have to, separately, do the promotion. This would allow him to make the full gamut of possible illegal moves.
The biggest problem with this is how the device would translate such illegal moves into notation. A move like e8 (with no indication of a promotion) would be clear enough. Or if a bishop on g5 were moved to f6 and an opponent’s pawn on f5 were removed, Bxf6 e.p. should do the trick. But how would the device notate a king moved from e1 to b1 followed immediately by a rook moved from a1 to c1? O-O-O would not do it, since this would indicate that the king ended up on c1 and the rook ended up on d1. But if it notated it as two consecutive moves for white, this would in itself be likely to tip off white that he was making an illegal move.
Bob
I wonder whether this is even possible.
Consider the following position:
2R5/5k2/8/8/4b3/8/5K2/1R6 w - - 0 1
White, the owner of the device, selects the rook on b1, then tells the scoresheet to move it to c7.
Somehow the device needs to know not to write this move “Rc7+,” since that would mean moving the rook on c8 to c7. But since the two rooks are neither on the same rank nor on the same file, it would also have to have some other criterion for determining that this is one of those “which rook?” cases. Furthermore, if the rooks were on the same file, the move would be written “R1c7+,” but since they’re not, “Rbc7+” is equally correct (while equally illegal).
Furthermore, what if *Rbc7+ is not an illegal move but an illegal entry, and the player actually played Rb7+ but selected the wrong destination square, and then black plays …Bxb7? In that event, it won’t be possible to record …Bxb7 because of where the device thinks the pieces are, causing a sort of cascade failure. What if, on his next move, white plays the bishop-king fork Rc7+? Then the electronic scoresheet has to allow a piece to be played onto a square occupied by a piece of its own color – and furthermore, if it’s using the same-file criterion to determine how to write the move, might even write it “R8c7+”! Whereas on a paper scoresheet, one wrongly recorded move has no bearing on the correctness of the rest.
A paper scoresheet has no “illegal move detection” because it contains no virtual representation of a board and pieces. They are represented only in the recording player’s brain, and he is the illegal move detection system. But inside a MonRoi or eNotate, if the “pieces” are anything other than icons to be dragged around and the “squares” are anything other than origin and destination coordinates, there has to be illegal move detection, both because of the scenario I describe above and because there has to be legal move detection as well: if a player moves his king from e1 to g1, the device has to know that this means castling and therefore to move the rook from h1 to f1 also. But what if white plays *1.0-0 ? Will the scoresheet allow this, placing the rook on f1 and the king on g1 and blithely obliterating the bishop and knight that occupied these squares? Or what if the players play 1.e4 c5 2.e5 d5 3.exd6 ep ? The scorekeeping device has to recognize this as an en passant capture and remove black’s d5-pawn from the board, and not just allow white to arbitrarily move his pawn from e5 to d6 with no other consequence.
Speaking of which, what if the owner of the device enters the moves 1.e4 c5, then tells it to move the pawn from e4 to g5? How would the device even record that move? “2.eg5”? There have to be at least three levels of illegal move detection: (1) Can this piece move like this? (2) Does this piece have a path to this destination? (3) Is there some reason why an otherwise allowable move is forbidden, such as check? Isn’t it somewhat absurd to have the device verify the first two criteria of legality but not the third?
I think that a device that was truly “as dumb as a sheet of paper” could not include a representation of a board and pieces at all, but would contain only icons for pieces, a blank board with labeled coordinates, some special-case symbols (“x,” “0-0,” “0-0-0,” “+,” “#,” “=” for promotion, “ep”) and an “enter” button. And it would be hard to create one that both was user-friendly and could handle special-case moves like R1c7.
or the device would simply have pictures of the pieces and a b c d e f g h - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and the user would simply tap those and you would see a score sheet like view. B e 4 for example The software would be smart enough to convert to pgn format. Or you could have the extra buttons of x , O-O etc
or the device would allow handwriting and one could write big on it and it would translate (OCR) it to the electronic view scoresheet, filling in the move in appropiate template area. Then you would have the best of both worlds, electronic paper. Do it on a kindle reader type device and batteries would last a really long time.
I hereby nominate Keith Ammann’s post for the award of Best Post of the Year.
Keith takes the point I had made, about the difficulty of determining the meaning of certain illegal moves, and extends it to its logical extreme. It’s called “the devil is in the details”, and is the motto we detail-minded people live by. (Others go by the motto “well, I hadn’t thought of that just yet” or “half-baked is OK”.) Without us detail people, the world would be a much sloppier place.
As for fixing the problems Keith brings up, if one still insists on having some kind of an “illegal move detection off” option, one would have to adopt various conventions, such as:
- All moves would be represented in long notation, e.g. Bf1-b5, explicitly showing the departure piece, departure square, and arrival square. If the departure square is empty or contains an enemy piece, use an uppercase X in place of the departure piece.
- Both captures and non-captures would be represented with a hyphen, not an x.
- The moves Ke1-g1, Ke1-c1, Ke8-g8, Ke8-c8 would always be represented O-O or O-O-O. Any pieces already between the king and rook (including the rook, if any) would be obliterated, and a rook would automatically be placed on the appropriate intervening square.
- If the departure piece is a pawn on the fifth, the arrival square is on the sixth on an adjacent file, and the arrival square is empty, obliterate anything on the fifth on that file. Represent such a move as Pg5-f6 e.p.
- If the departure piece is a pawn, and the arrival square is on the last rank, always demand a promotion to a friendly Q, B, N, R. Represent the move as e7-e8Q.
Now, I suspect that even the above would be unacceptable to some, because the player might still be tipped off to an illegal move. For example, the presence of an X as the departure piece (or the omission of the departure piece) would be a dead giveaway, as would the addition of “e.p.” to a non-capture.
So, to fix these new problems, the above conventions might have to be modified along the following lines:
- Modify (a) by omitting the departure piece. Represent the move as simply f1-b5.
- Keep (b) as is.
- Modify (c) by representing castling as simply e1-g1, e1-c1, e8-g8, or e8-c8. Keep the rest of (c) as is, i.e. still obliterate any intervening pieces and place a rook appropriately.
- Modify (d) by representing any such apparent e.p. move as simply g5-f6. Still obliterate anything on the fifth next to the pawn.
- I’m not sure what to do about (e).
Now, I’m sure some would object to the above, as well. They might not like the omission of the departure piece, the omission of “x” for a capture, or the representation of castling as a simple king move. So what’s next?
(Of course, all representations could be converted to standard form at playback time, when legal move detection would be turned on. There might, however, still be a question as to how certain illegal moves should be represented.)
By the way, I’m sure that any suggestions to turn off the diagram display at move-entry time would be met with howls of protest from almost all users of those devices. The diagram really is the whole point.
As to the suggestion that illegal move detection constitutes outside interference, I’m not really bothered by that. “Outside” interference provided by a device (rather than by a person), which merely enforces the rules, can’t be all that bad. We’re in a transition period, where the equipment is becoming capable of enforcing some of the rules. With sensory boards and/or dual computer screens, we’d be even closer to that goal. Online chess is already that way. We should be looking to shape the future, not enslave ourselves to the past.
Bill Smythe
I seem to remember a product that was an 8 x 8 or something like that sensory board that was fairly reasonably priced but obviously to small to play rated chess with. But what if you merely used it as a score keeping device.
You still have to make your move on the regular board and then you move that piece on your 3D scorekeeping device. The only difference between it and the 2d devices is one of dimensionality. (Well maybe not exactly because you wouldn’t have the ability to switch to show the move mode.)
But it would mimic the DGT board at a lower price point. But don’t the DGT board players still have to keep a paper score to show if needed?
A sensory board, whether DGT or otherwise, is one possible step towards further automation. If truly reliable, it could negate the necessity for the players to keep a paper scoresheet.
But in my opinion, a pair of computer screens would be FAR preferable. The players would still face each other across a table, but each would have a screen (and a mouse) in front of him. There could even be a third screen, oriented horizontally between the players, for the benefit of spectators and TDs. You would move the piece on your screen, then click the Submit button. The computer would reject an illegal move by simply moving the piece back to its departure square as soon as the mouse is released – you wouldn’t get to click the Submit button.
This is the scenario we should be contemplating for the future. Proposed rules about electronic scoresheets should attempt to anticipate this vision.
Bill Smythe
Create a chess server on a local area network and that can be done now.
In fact, as I recall, somebody on these forums did exactly that a few years ago. There was some discussion as to what to do if one of the players insisted on playing on a “regular” board. I don’t know how the event came out, nor do I remember who it was.
Bill Smythe
I simply don’t agree that players should be relieved of the duty of keeping score. I don’t mind making it easier (which is why I own an electronic scoresheet, and why I switched to algebraic notation years ago), but players absolutely should keep track of their own moves.
I also don’t agree that having players keep their own score is looking backwards. There are plenty of games in which players are required to keep their own score, even though electronic devices can certainly do so. Depending on the game, this is considered nothing more than basic player responsibility. Probably the highest-profile example of this is golf - and that’s nothing more than counting strokes and adding numbers. Of course, the number of cameras and independent observers on even Nationwide Tour stops means that players could be relieved of keeping their own score.
I am also not necessarily bound to tradition. For example, I’m open to running/playing tournaments with different pairing methods. And, outside of a DGT board, I own pretty much every example of commercially available advanced chess technology there is. However, I see it as part of the game for players to keep their own record of what happens in the game.
One other thing that perhaps we “sloppy” folks might have considered: a big part of the reason people play OTB is personal interaction. Giving two players an iPad and a custom app to play rated games against each other really robs players of a good bit of that interaction.
A different game (that doesn’t even have a scorekeeping requirement) tried to do this. Casinos tried fully automated poker tables - players get their own hooded screen for their cards and actions, community card screens, and money changing hands electronically, complete with the ability to “cash out” via printed voucher that could be taken to a cage for money.
Sounds cool, right? Surprise: these tables are simply not that popular. Cost isn’t the factor - casinos would save a bundle over time by not having to provide dealers, chips or cards. Poker players, almost universally, rejected the idea of replacing traditional tables with automated tables…in part because human interaction is really the central point of playing poker.
With apologies to Wilhelm Steinitz, my opponent in a OTB event is not an automaton. I enjoy actually moving bits of wood or plastic against a live person, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I enjoy playing online too - but if you take away pieces, a board and a scoresheet, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t play much besides online blitz games, because what’s the point, really?
There’s nothing wrong with looking forward with technology. In the process, though, it is almost always wise to think about what is being lost in the name of progress, lest you be guilty of subtraction by addition.
Personal interaction would be retained, as long as the players face each other across a table. The only difference would be what’s between them, a physical chessboard or a pair of computer screens.
Bill Smythe