Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Chess invariants

read original get Chess Invariants Book → more articles
Why This Matters

This article highlights the importance of understanding invariants in complex systems like chess, which can inform the development of more reliable and bug-resistant software. By modeling chess as a concurrent system with specific invariants, it demonstrates how formal methods can improve system correctness and safety in the tech industry.

Key Takeaways

Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the deadlock case of stalemate.

It is a concurrent system, but with a very specific kind of concurrency: interleaved execution. More specifically, taking turns: white, then black, then white.

You know what we do with concurrent systems here? Here we model them, and we distill their invariants.

Here is some setup definitions first.

In a CS or math paper, if you write "Section 2: Model and Problem" well enough, the rest of the paper writes itself. With this setup you can sort of see what the actions will be.

In fact, forget about the actions. Let's look at some invariants.

... continue reading