Hello Community,

some of you may have seen "Twitch plays Pokemon".

On the site there is a stream of an emulator that runs an old pokemon game. With the chat, you can press the keys of the virtual gameboy which leads to pure chaos, with sometimes 100,000 players.

This gave me the idea for an experiment: what would happen if two large groups would play chess against each other? Just one board and one game. Every team member can vote for the next turn. When a timer reaches zero, the turn with most of the votes is executed. When both teams are large, they would be exactly equally strong (in theory).

What do you think about it?

Phil

Well it would depend on where you put this and who plays. If it is the general public it will end up like elections with compulsory voting, no one will have any idea what is actually happening and more or less just pushing random buttons until something does happen.

If you got a control group that included chess players only then this would certainly lead to an interesting experiment. But like any group voting system the lowest common denominator always wins, so if you had 1 grand master and 99 high school student chess players you could guarantee that after the 3rd or 4th turns the votes of the 99 will not match that of the grand master.

This sort of experiment was done last year in regards with world champion chess player Magnus Carlsen.

http://www.aftenposten.no/spesial/chess/Chess-game-Norway-vs-the-world-7373788.html#.Uw98m_xdV7I

It is now closed:

http://www.aftenposten.no/henvisninger/henvisninger_skjult/Norway-vs-the-World---closed-7376401.html#.Uw982fxdV7I

And the reason given was:

"Hei, Vi stenger nå spillet. For de som lurer, så skyldes ikke dette at nordmenn bruker proxier for å ødelegge for verdenslaget. Det skyldes misbruk av annet slag.

Hi, We are stopping the game due to abuse."

Translated:

"Hi, we are now closing the game. For those that wonder why, it is not because of norwegians using proxies to destroy for the world team. It is abuse of a different kind."

http://www.aftenposten.no/henvisninger/henvisninger_skjult/Delta-i-Norge-vs-verden---stengt-7369941.html#.Uw987_xdV7I

I am not sure exactly what kind of abuse it might have been, but I am sure there are challenges regarding doing something like this - including the thing they said was not the reason.

Hmm, i once played a 2v2 chess game, was kinda funny.

Off course we didn't vote, but we also agreed not to talk about our moves, and take took turns taking the team's turn, so chaos ruled.

Voting with ~100 other players souds boring, there s basically no control, most people don't even vote on their own governments(which actually influence them).

There is also a chess-card-package, that "changes" the game a bit, for example one card says pawns now attack streightforward instead of left/right forward,

such thing added could spice up the game.

I'm not sure whether players would realy be interested in something like this, but since everyone knows how to play chess it's easy to get them to play a few games,

do make sure the flow of the game is high though.

I believe the concept would work quite well, but I would remove voting as much as possible. Instead of voting, allow each player on each team to 'make' their proposed move, and when either the timer runs out, or all players have proposed their move, pick the most popular one. In the case of a tie, force players to reassign their votes between the tied options.

It's not quite democracy, because there's no discussion involved, but it will probably move much more quickly and removes a lot of the player administrative overhead.

Multiplayer chess boards like you describe have existed for centuries - there's an Indian variant for four players dating back to around 1500, but I've also seen eight player boards.

My personal favourite variant is Diplomat Chess, notably because the bishops move in such a way that they can change colour.

...but that's getting off topic.

Thanks for your feedback! Unfortunately, I know too little about networking and browser-programming to do this (and I have no large group I could test the idea with), so it will remain a thought experiment.