Joel David Hamkins: evaluation

Transcript context

…By the way, can we describe the rules of infinite chess? Right. So the rules of infinite chess are the… there’s just the ordinary pieces, and they move on this infinite board, which is just a chessboard, but extended in all directions. Infinitely, with no edge. So there’s no boundary. But the pieces move just like you’d expect. So the knights move just the same and the rooks move, you know, on the ranks and files, and the bishops move on the same color diagonals and… just like you would expect, except they can move as far as they want, you know, if there’s no intervening piece in the way. The one thing is that… Okay, so the white pawns always move upwards and the black pawns always move downwards, but when they’re capturing, the pawns, you know, capture on the diagonal. So I think the piece movement is pretty clear. There are a couple of differences that you have to pay attention to from ordinary chess. For example, there’s this threefold repetition rule in ordinary chess, but we just, we just get rid of this for infinite chess because, of course, threefold repetition is just a proxy for infinite play. The real rule is infinite play is a draw, not threefold repetition is a draw. That’s just a kind of convenient approximation to what I view as the actual rule, which is that infinite play is a draw. So the only way to win is to make checkmate on the board at a finite stage of play. And if you play infinitely, you haven’t done that, and so it’s a draw. And the pawns can’t be converted into something else?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.