Chess in the Future

What will chess be like in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years? One hundred years ago, no one knew about computers, the Internet, world-wide travel, space travel (chess has been there), digital chess clocks, ebooks, databases, YouTube, or iPads. Chess has been influenced by technology.

There will always be chess-playing humans. The notion that chess might be played out by some mechanical or artificial device goes back several hundred years. Chess still has 25 x 10^115 possible chess positions. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of possibilities in chess.

In a few years, there will be very little printed chess books and magazines. Everything will be digitized and found online or in a 15 terabyte removable hard drive. In 100 years or less, every chess book and magazine that has ever been published will have been scanned and available to anyone on a device or through the wireless Cloud (everything will be wireless). You will have the equivalent of a million chess books and magazines at your disposal running on your 4 THz microprocessor that operates on voice/brain commands.

There will be translators that will translate any chess book or magazine in numerous languages and any format you wish. Even your online chess friends from around the world will understand you with a universal communicator attached to your chess set.

Chess will be taught in all the schools throughout the world. It is a game whose rules are easy enough to learn, but as a game, it is difficult to master. There will be online help to teach children or anyone else how to play. There will be over a billion chess players on the planet that you will have the potential to interact with.

100 million-game chess databases will be common, searchable in seconds. Every important chess game will have been analyzed by dozens of chess engines rated over 3000. Endgames of 9 pieces or less will be solved.

Chess may still be in its original format, or variants such as random chess or random opening chess will be playable. Chess will be played on digital boards that will record all the moves and give you a print out or sent to your iPlayed Chess Pad, complete with analysis. Chess programs, like other apps, will be embedded in your watch and on your folding smart chesspad that fits in your pocket, but can expand with a monitor that shows a chess board 15” by 15.” You want need a battery or electricity as it gets charged by light like a solar panel on your holographic touch screen computer.

Tournaments will be played online at little or no cost to you. Any winnings will be transferred automatically to your PlayPal account with digital money. You will be matched up with players of your own strength and anti-cheat computer chess engines will make sure someone isn’t using a chess engine if prohibited.

Holographic chess should be available and perhaps moves made through thought rather than physically moving them. Games will still be timed, with perhaps delayed times so as not to lose on time, and all the moves will be time stamped so you can see where the most time was spent in the game.

Chess super grandmasters, rated above 2800, will be the stars of the game. Most will be very young, under 30, with a few under 20. You will be able to follow your favorite grandmaster with live feeds from any tournament.

Chess engines will exist in all kinds of formats. You will have some programmed to play exactly like players in the past, such as Morphy or Capablanca or Tal or Fischer or Kasparov or Carlsen or Anand, or anyone you wish. There will also be chess engines that play the same strength as you do. You will be able to program its strength or other configurable variables such as more tactics or more positional or any opening variation or simulate any player based on their past games.

Chess pads will be found everywhere such as hospitals, dentist offices, barbershops, or anywhere that you go. You will be able to play chess with anyone or any engine rather than be stuck doing nothing in waiting rooms or recuperating from an illness. There will be wireless internet access points embedded in everyday objects, so you will always have access to the chess cloud to play chess online.

Cars may have a head-up display of a chessboard so that you can play chess while driving and the moves are voice activated.

There will be millions of chess players hooked up on the Internet. You will be able to have a chance to play a grandmaster online or a famous person or movie celebrity if they wish to have a game. Grandmasters will play 50 or 100 people at once online, and you may be one of his opponents. A celebrity may get online and play only one game, but you added your name to the queue, and when he or she is available, you will be notified online or by cell phone or iPlayed chess pad for a game.

For chess historians, everything will be online and referenced. Every newspaper chess column or article will be scanned and available. Artificial intelligence programs will sort the facts and give a probability of how likely something occurred in the past. Did Alekhine really throw his king in a tournament? Did Hitler ever play chess or show up at a tournament? Could Karpov have beaten Fischer in the 1970s?

Historical ratings will be available for any chess player or from any tournament or match. Every known crosstable will be available. Programs will be able to show the ups and downs of any chess player throughout his career. Every known photo, video, and score sheet will be available for every chess player.

You will be able to create your own strong engine and have it compete if you wish. There will be thousands of chess engines, and you will be able to custom make your own chess engine. You can have it play your favorite openings, or play like Tal and look for combinations and sacrifices, or enter your own games and it will play your own style. You can use your own creation in freestyle chess tournaments, where computers, or any other form of assistance, are allowed and even encouraged.

You will have chess apps on your cellphone or chess pad that will let you know who plays chess in your area, or where the closest chess tournament is, or what tournament is available online, etc.

Chess will be played in space or deep under water as you cruise into space or take a deep dive in the ocean. And if you don’t want to make the trip yourself, you can play chess with an astronaut or aquanaut whenever they are interested in a game.

Chess will get faster and faster. There will be bullet chess tournaments, where a game is played in one minute. The game will be recorded for anyone to see as players move their pieces online or against each other on a digital board at very fast speeds. There will be no mouse. You will just point from one square to another or activate the moves by voice, or maybe, thought. The pieces will move and can be controlled by your eyes.

Opening theory will be pretty deep, but if you come up with a theoretical novelty that has never been played before in the 100-million game database, you will be given credit for inventing it, if the new move is sound enough. It will then be analyzed by strong chess engines to see if it is playable.

Chess will also be added to your contact lens, so that you can get a chess display anytime you wish.