Chess pieceA chess piece, or chessman, is a game piece that is placed on a chessboard to play the game of chess. It can be either white or black, and it can be one of six types: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn. Chess sets generally come with sixteen pieces of each color. Additional pieces, usually an extra queen per color, may be provided for use in promotion. Each player begins with sixteen pieces (but see the subsection below for other usage of the term piece).
Strategy gameA strategy game or strategic game is a game (e.g. a board game) in which the players' uncoerced, and often autonomous, decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Almost all strategy games require internal decision tree-style thinking, and typically very high situational awareness. Strategy games are also seen as a descendant of war games, and define strategy in terms of the context of war, but this is more partial.
Stockfish (chess)Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It can be used in chess software through the Universal Chess Interface. Stockfish has consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists and, as of April 2023, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world. Its estimated Elo rating is around 3550 (CCRL 40/15). It has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 14 times and the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship 19 times.
Elo rating systemThe Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved chess-rating system over the previously used Harkness system, but is also used as a rating system in association football, American football, baseball, basketball, pool, table tennis, various board games and esports, and more recently large language models.
Candidates TournamentThe Candidates Tournament (or in some periods Candidates Matches) is a chess tournament organized by FIDE, chess's international governing body, since 1950, as the final contest to determine the challenger for the World Chess Championship. The winner of the Candidates earns the right to a match for the World Championship against the incumbent World Champion. Before 1993 it was contested as a triennial tournament; almost always held every third year from 1950 to 1992 inclusive.
Chess problemA chess problem, also called a chess composition, is a puzzle set by the composer using chess pieces on a chess board, which presents the solver with a particular task. For instance, a position may be given with the instruction that White is to move first, and checkmate Black in two moves against any possible defence. A chess problem fundamentally differs from play in that the latter involves a struggle between Black and White, whereas the former involves a competition between the composer and the solver.
Internet chess serverAn Internet chess server (ICS) is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet. The term specifically refers to facilities for connecting players through a variety of graphical chess clients located on each user's computer. In the 1970s, one could play correspondence chess in a PLATO System program called 'chess3'. Several users used chess3 regularly; often a particular user would make several moves per day, sometimes with several games simultaneously in progress.
ChessBaseChessBase is a German company that develops and sells chess software, maintains a chess news site, and operates an internet chess server for online chess. Founded in 1986, it maintains and sells large-scale databases containing the moves of recorded chess games. The databases contain data from prior games and provide engine analyses of games, while endgame tablebases offer optimal play in some endgames. ChessBase's Indian YouTube channel ChessBase India has amassed more than a million YouTube subscribers and more than 671 million total views as of November 2022.
Perfect informationIn economics, perfect information (sometimes referred to as "no hidden information") is a feature of perfect competition. With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have complete and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions. In game theory, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.
Knight's tourA knight's tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square exactly once. If the knight ends on a square that is one knight's move from the beginning square (so that it could tour the board again immediately, following the same path), the tour is closed (or re-entrant); otherwise, it is open. The knight's tour problem is the mathematical problem of finding a knight's tour. Creating a program to find a knight's tour is a common problem given to computer science students.
