HN Reader

Telegraph chess: A 19th century tech marvel

”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 (?)

1 month agoby gorgoiler

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.

1 month agoby kenjackson

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:

https://lichess.org/HzzfuyWv

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

1 month agoby qsort

Microchess for the Kim-Uno: https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html

1 month agoby anthk

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.

1 month agoby b00ty4breakfast

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.

1 month agoby zkmon