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One Million Chessboards

by chunkles on 4/28/25, 7:52 PM with 76 comments

https://eieio.games/blog/one-million-chessboards/

  • by eieio on 4/28/25, 10:30 PM

    Ah hello! I made this :)

    My blog describing it is pretty sparse, sorry about that. Happy to answer any questions that folks have about the architecture.

    Not that it was necessary, but I got really into building this out as a single process that could handle many (10k+/sec) moves for thousands of concurrent clients. I learned a whole lot! And I found golang to be a really good fit for this, since you mostly want to give tons and tons of threads concurrent access to a little bit of shared memory.

  • by nomilk on 4/28/25, 11:49 PM

    Someone barricaded their king with about 40 rooks, I hopped in with a knight, and they immediately captured me (with their king), then plugged the gap with another rook so I couldn't do it again. That was amusing lol.

  • by mdaniel on 4/29/25, 1:25 AM

    > You can move between boards.

    Evidently move between boards but not capture between boards :-( It's extra weird because it's not that the movement isn't projected (e.g. queen blue lines all point correctly across board boundaries just the lines always stop at every piece on the other board, regardless of color)

    So, I guess as an exercise in scale, well done! As one million chess boards, caveat gamator

  • by pavel_lishin on 4/28/25, 8:17 PM

    (Also submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822992)

    Neat, though I expected every individual board to have "turns" - I didn't expect that I could just pick a random board, liberate the black queen, and have her clean up every single white piece on the board without my "opponent" getting to do anything in return.

  • by NelsonMinar on 4/29/25, 6:06 PM

    This game has gotten interesting, for instance people have figured out a single board with pieces filling the outside edges two squares deep is impervious.

    I love how we're seeing emergent gameplay. That's the genius in eieio's projects. He's inventing game systems that on the surface seem simple, but at this mass scale they have interesting possibilities that people discover. And they're entirely new and invented, so we have no idea what to expect until the community figures it out.

  • by ryukoposting on 4/29/25, 3:41 AM

    Chasing people around is a lot of fun. Very enjoyable, if not for chess reasons.

  • by pmontra on 4/28/25, 11:33 PM

    It works well on my Android phone with Firefox. Well done.

  • by sltkr on 4/29/25, 5:49 PM

    It crashed for me:

        Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'type')
        at $80b91fc9d2f468ec$export$4abc8fab4139dfcd (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:406898)
        at $c692b767326c99ec$var$PieceHandler.getMoveableSquares (index.e2b13a6c.js:4:4373)
        at index.e2b13a6c.js:4:13557
        at oQ (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:60912)
        at o0 (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:61761)
        at oZ (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:60941)
        at Object.useState (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:72377)
        at Object.q (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:10352)
        at $a2d3bef833187ce9$export$474cd6ee072cf5a4 (index.e2b13a6c.js:4:12305)
        at oF (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:58673)

  • by darepublic on 4/29/25, 1:06 AM

    I was only able to move the black pieces. And I was able to move black consecutively on the same board. So I didn't fully understand. Are the rules being enforced or is it just updates.

    I enjoyed the sc2 UI when selecting pieces

  • by cheekyfleek on 4/29/25, 7:37 PM

    We definitely have some cheaters, playing as the other color. Thought I saw it last night but I know I saw it today. I think I saw vindictive use of it too, both times. One black fortress was destroyed and next thing you know the nearest white fortress found its pieces moving into the worst possible positions, often next to a waiting black bishop or rook. I'm not sure how exactly you handle the colors, but in a world where I can RDC onto a dozen computers on a half dozen continents in seconds I suppose this was inevitable.

  • by maxmcd on 4/28/25, 10:08 PM

    If you missed it, there was a nice story around One Million Checkboxes: https://eieio.games/blog/the-secret-inside-one-million-check...

    I wonder if something similar will happen here.

    @eieio please open source the Go code, would be fun to poke at.

  • by sashank_1509 on 4/29/25, 7:44 AM

    I spent a good half an hour making an impenetrable fortress for black, hopefully it lasts till the end (it will unless someone in black breaks it)

  • by felipemesquita on 5/2/25, 4:57 AM

    I've achieved what seems to be a stable structure outside the edges, https://onemillionchessboards.com/#1347,3624

  • by yayitswei on 4/29/25, 5:21 PM

    I predict this will evolve into bot warfare! For example, here's a snippet to advance pawns: https://gist.github.com/yayitswei/442cd5128b2dbfbd95a101b70f...

  • by ChessviaAI on 4/29/25, 2:01 AM

    Really impressive engineering work her, especially running it all on a single server with in-memory board state and optimistic rollback.

    I work in chess tech, but in a very different direction (structured games, coaching, serious play). It's inspiring to see chess reimagined like this!

  • by tantalor on 4/29/25, 1:09 AM

    I saw a black piece moving around very quickly. Is there a secret way to move without clicking twice?

  • by NooneAtAll3 on 4/28/25, 10:58 PM

    I made a Promoted-32 queen

    I won

  • by GenshoTikamura on 4/29/25, 12:23 PM

    It's interesting how the game will end. Will it end up in a deadlock, or in a fierce duel of two power pieces with hundreds of players behind each struggling to gain control concurrently?

  • by Mr_Modulo on 4/29/25, 1:44 AM

    Do the boards regenerate at some point? If not, it seems like most of the pieces will be depleted after a while.

  • by amelius on 4/29/25, 9:06 AM

    These days I keep wondering what a 4d or 3d chess board looks like.

  • by fredo2025 on 4/29/25, 1:12 AM

    This was a strange game. I could only move the black pieces, and I could take the opponent’s king. What next?

    Also, the skull button seemed to do a lot of damage and shake things up.

  • by cheekyfleek on 5/8/25, 6:12 AM

    The bots are alive!

  • by gitroom on 4/29/25, 2:07 AM

    insane seeing so many wild ideas happen at once - i keep wondering, stuff like this, what keeps people coming back and building even weirder moves over time you think