Chess is imposing to the uninitiated. Most casual fans could spend their entire lives studying a library’s worth of chess theory, only to still be routinely humiliated by competitive players. Simply getting started is difficult, too. The basic rules require a decent amount of time to memorize before anyone can make their first moves, a hurdle that has stopped plenty of people from ever trying the game.
But what if there was a way to quickly improve your abilities without spending hours hunched over the board? If the mental strain that comes with learning chess isn’t enough, will some actual, physical pain do the trick? That’s what YouTuber Fletcher Heisler, aka Everything Is Hacked, wondered before embarking on the monthsong, tortuous journey of designing, building, and playing a custom chess set capable of delivering a Taser-like shock whenever it detects an error. As recently highlighted by Hackaday, the results are as fascinating as they are sometimes difficult to watch.
Heisler’s Skinner box-esque chess set was inspired by similarly masochistic DIY projects like an electrified keyboard, and gets its voltage from a reconfigured TENS unit. Short for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation, a TENS machine typically relies on adhesive skin pads that channel low-voltage current to zap muscles and deep tissue. Treatment is intended to change or even block pain perception in patients, and is often employed to alleviate conditions associated with osteoarthritis, tendinitis and fibromyalgia.
At most, a TENS unit is somewhat uncomfortable or annoying. Ramp up the voltage, and encounters become much more memorable. Which is exactly what Heisler did.
Building a functional, reliable, and less-than-lethal electrified chessboard proved surprisingly more complex than its creator anticipated. Configuring the underlying chess brain was probably the easiest part. That was simply a matter of getting the open-source Stockfish chess engine to run on a Raspberry Pi minicomputer. Unfortunately, things quickly nosedived from there.
It ended up taking months of trial-and-error to create a functional prototype. Literal and figurative pain points included ensuring each piece properly conducting electricity, rigging every square with mechanical keyboard switches to facilitate the connections, and countless unintentional jolts. Math also didn’t work in Heisler’s favor. Since each chess square required wiring, every step needed repeating at least 64 times—or 128 times for two-part steps, 256 times for three-part stages, and so on.
The chessboard ultimately offers four different modes. Illegal Mode shocks a player if they make a move that violates the game’s movement rules. Playing against the onboard Stockfish engine offers a zap for any move it deems a blunder—the standard chess parlance for a particularly terrible decision. Timed Mode sends the volts if you take too long, and there is even a Puzzle Mode with over 1 million preloaded problems to solve. As one might expect at this point, failed puzzles have predictively painful consequences. But since the board can’t move the opponent’s side pieces, users will only receive a shock if they don’t align those moves to match a side display.
However, the hardest injuries to bear weren’t Heisler’s fault. While transporting the invention to its public debut at an annual all-things-STEM convention, he opened his suitcase to a shattered chessboard not once, but twice. Thankfully, he was able to rebuild the machine and finally show off his remorseless contraption. But while the “Taser Chess” project is zany and fascinating, it sadly didn’t help turn its creator into the next Bobby Fischer.
“I had already been building for months, and if anything, my chess game was getting worse because I spent all my time messing with wires,” Heisler says at one point.
He even lost every game against the chess hustlers playing at the park near his home. That said, he did seem to make progress on at least one major component to an electrified chessboard.
“I shocked myself so much building the board that I hardly noticed anymore,” Heisler admitted.
The post Man builds electrified chessboard that shocks players for bad moves appeared first on Popular Science.
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