I remember playing "Suicide Chess" where the aim was to get all your pieces taken as fast as possible (King included). If an opponent's piece could be taken you had to do it, although there were often choices as to which one so there was a certain strategy. Trouble was, play that for a while and when you go back to regular chess you find yourself deliberately trying to give your pieces away...
Antichess is pretty hard. Normally all the rules regarding check and checkmate are discarded, and the king is just a normal (minor) piece. You win by running out of legal moves (which could be because you ran out of pieces and pawns or because all your remaining pieces and pawns are blocked). The queen appears to be a massive liability at first, but it actually turns out to be a critically valuable piece. You don't want to lose the queen early for nothing, because later on, you can use it to initiate a forced series of captures. Typically you try to hang on to a decent amount of material early on so that you can win by a lengthy combination later. It might be as difficult as regular chess in practice (though it is much easier computationally), since humans are not great at calculating very long sequences of moves.
He's right though in an actual game, given nobody captures, you can only get 20 knights max. This questions basically like saying the best hand you can get in Texas hold'em isn't a royal flush but instead you just pick up 8 aces and win🤷
@@1988ryan1That would be a good chess problem...How many knights can you get from just a king, 2 knights, and a row? Just knights, not queens when they reach 8th rank. Hmmm
@@jingo500 When i said 20 that was based on pawn takes piece to give a past pawn and enable all 16 pawn promotions + 4 original knights. With only knights and king you can only trade pawn for pawn, which would free 3 pawns for every 1 captured, so 16 knights max.
@@okkimakki They played a poker game with Ricky Gervais when he wasn't well-known. "Ricky Gervais, who was knocked out (of the game), got up, said 'what am I supposed to do now?', and you (Stephen) said 'There's a shotgun in the drawer' (implying he should kill himself with it)
It sounds like someone's dream dinner party that they'd have in heaven: 'yes if I could pick any four people to play a gam of poker with I'd go for... Stephen Fry, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, Martin Amis and Ricky Gervais'!
@@owencrawford5984 probably not every time, but yes - unless one player racks up a big lead in pieces once the board starts to empty out it'd be incredibly hard to pin down the last piece or two if they're something like a rook or bishop. I guess the game would be mostly about protecting the pawns (contrary to normal) because the only way I can see to win reliably is to break them through and end the game with a slack handful of queens...
No matter how many times I watch this Richard's "Isn't that rather more knights than we're used to?" makes me hoot with laughter. And I've no idea why.
@@highpath4776 I could be wrong, but I believe it is fewer than that. To turn all the pawns into knights, the pawns can't take each other so must instead move around each other by taking other pieces, and I'm not sure there are enough other pieces to do this.
puirYorick He’s got an autobiographical volume out called More Fool Me. He also did a press tour about the book, which you can watch on Netflix under the same title.
@@joebykaeby Thank you for including the name of the video on Netflix! I'm going to watch it now, and it will be so very easy to find -- thanks to you! :-)
@@joebykaeby - Thanks for the update. I got distracted by _Stephen Fry's America_ and did not see it was not there, but I just found it on RUclips. He's reading his book, almost 10 hours of his words in his own voice! Sigh!
He was referring to the color of the squares the knights lie on. If a knight is on a dark square, it can only take a piece on a white square, and you get to the answer of 32.
It wasn't that hard, after Steven dropped the big hint, was it? This clip just proved I'm not as stupid as I sometimes think. If the rev. Cole says he doesn't get it then he really doesn't, and he's pretty smart. As Sue was dropping the pieces, Steven said "What do all the pieces you're putting down have in common?". That's the kicker. A knight must move to an opposite colour, so as long as they're all on the same colour none can take another with the next move. Once all the squares of one colour are taken you can't possibly add any more because every square of one colour is within reach of a single knight's move from at least two squares of the opposite colour. You know this because the board has diagonal mirror symmetry and there are no squares a knight can be placed on from which it cannot move, so if it can move to one square, it must be able to move to the diagonal mirror image square too. This tells you once all the squares of one colour are occupied they must cover all the knight's moves you can make from any square of the opposite colour and because any knight's move is reversible if you are on a square where you can take a knight then it is a square on which that knight can also take you. It's all pretty obvious from the realisation knights must change colour with each move and because there are two colours for the squares the most amount of squares of one colour you can put knights on and be safe is half the squares on the board, which is 32.
Some of the variants we'd occasionally play at chess club were laser chess and kamikaze chess. Laser chess: no checks or checkmates. You lose by having all your pieces taken. If a piece is being threatened, it's automatically taken (with priority going to the piece that's just moved or the player whose turn it is if pieces are threatening each other). The idea is each piece holds a laser gun that it can shoot at the places it would move too; so if you move your queen to the opponent's back row it will wipe out the whole row in one go. Kamikaze chess: no checks or checkmates. You win by being the first to have all your own pieces taken. If it is possible to take a piece, you must take a piece (like in draughts). A good strategy is to try and lure the opposing queen into your back row to play havoc!
I guess that poker memory came from the filming of Late Night Poker (UKs Channel 4) - the first TV series to have the "hole cam" to allow the viewers to see the cards, that then revolutionised televised poker and caused the Poker boom.....and introduced the UK watching public to Devilfish, the Hendon Mob and a certain Phil Hellmuth among others....
A little ditty.....The first 'date' with my wife was when she was 13. We were at the same school but I was 15. We went to Chess Club! We been married since she was 18. I'm now 67. Checkmate for life :-) Don't you just love Chess!
I've tried Mirror Chess, where diagonal movement can reflect off the sides, and Jungle Chess where knights can bounce off friendly pawns to get another move.
Or quantum chess in which there can be 2 pieces on the same square or where a piece may or may not be standing a square e.t.c It is a bit silly but good fun.
Technically the answer is 64 if all the Knights are the same color, because by the rules of chess, you can't take your own pieces (and so none of them could capture another).
@@BooshyBrows You can have ten; the two you start with and one for every pawn you get to the other side of the board. I've never heard of a rule that limits you to 4.
@@FleshNFaith It really is; I particularly love the scene, that the original comment alluded to, with Peter Cook as “The Impressive Clergyman”- which is what the character is apparently known as, with the speech impediment haha. The whole scene only lasts about a minute and a half, and he may only have a few lines; but Peter Cook really made them memorable...he “twuwly” was a “tweasure” haha. But the whole film is just incredibly quotable; it’s up there with the likes of ‘This is Spinal Tap’ for quotability, and both were directed by the same person, Rob Reiner. And like ‘Spinal Tap’, ‘The Princess Bride is one of those films, that you can just watch again, and again, and the jokes never get old; I still laugh at all the same places, and even though I’ve seen the film dozens, and dozens of times, I never get tired of it. Just talking about it, makes me want to watch it again; I might have to look up some of my favourite scenes on the old RUclips. 😀 All the best. 😀👍
Victoria's right about how the fun of chess is the specific limitations of the pieces, and what's more, the game is remarkably balanced so there is no single "best" way to play. Like, there is no consensus that the way to win is to base your strategy on the queen, or on the knights, or anything else.
There is lots of consensus, but no full truth. The consensus is based on current theory and knowledge, which shifts. And in recent years, it shifts more than ever due to the arrival of stronger engines, using machine learning and neural networks. For an example of how consensus exists for decades but then turns, it was long said and taught that in the endgame it is always preferable to have a bishop pair instead of a bishop and a knight. This was taught to beginners, and also believed by the best players. However, in recent years, the consensus amongst many top players has shifted to believing that it can be slightly better to have bishop and knight, but only if the queens are still on the board. This might seem minor, but this means that the strategy completely changes in many games, with players choosing to still play for a win, even if they don't have the bishop pair. Many of the established truths have been challenged in the past five years, and there are fewer people these days that believe that rules need to be changed in order to avoid "draw death", where top players draw almost all of their games because no one can get an advantage any more.
@@ragerancher It's really not though. "what's the maximum number of knights you can have on a chessboard, so that none of them can take another" IF they must be in "legal" positions there's a hard cap of 32. IF they need not be in a "legal" position the answer can be infinitely large depending on the size of the board and pieces. Therefore IF we want the question to have an answer, the legal position stipulation MUST exist.
There's one way I like to annoy people... How many queens can you put on the board so none of them could take another? 8. Well, no. It's 16. You can fill every other row and every other file with pawns or other pieces (so b, d, f and 2, 4, 6) and fill the remainders up with queens (A1, A3, A5, A7, C1, C3,...). They get blocked, so they can't take each other. Well, no. It's 64. If all have the same colour, they can't take each other either.
Chess can be deeply psychological. Some players will slam an awkward move you won't have expected and then lean forward and glower at you with such intensity aiming to throw you off your game.
So I knew the answer to this question already, there was a chess learning game I played as a child and that was one of the puzzles, put as many knights on the board as possible in a way that none threaten each other. So already knowing the answer was 32, I said it to myself, but then when Stephen said “it has something to do with being the same color” I was now worried that 32 was going to be a klaxon and that it’s “technically” 64 as long as they’re all on the same team. But by that logic it could be 64 of anything
Fairy chess is pretty interesting. The idea is that you take a normal chessboard and either replace some standard pieces with fairy pieces or add additional fairy pieces to the board. For instance, a empress can move like a knight or a queen (making it a very powerful piece). The nightrider can make unlimited night moves in a single direction. The grasshopper can hop exactly one square over any piece that is a queen's move away. And so on. Though you can play games with fairy pieces, more often people put them in composed problems.
isnt that kind of wrong? they were put on there in a checker pattern, but you could put them side by side then arrange them so the ones they would capture would be own color (no capture)
Absolutely, so obvious if you pay attention to her body language. She’s intelligent, witty, and successful but I can’t help but find her personality irritating
My first thought about the question was that it was referring to an actual game with pawns being promoted etc. You'd need to supercomputer to workout the answer to that riddle?
Because you can not take one of your own pieces surely if you put one knight on each square so long as they are on the same team they cannot take any other
'Fairy chess' isn't a single game. It just refers to any non-standard piece, particularly in the context of a chess problem (like 'white to play and mate in 2').
Yes, I was thinking more along the lines of 'fairy pieces', such as the rose, maharaja, hippogriff, et cetera, incorporated into chess _variants._ I do think I'll start breaking into Gregorian chants whenever I move a bishop after watching this though.
If all the knights were sitting on black squares, it would take just two moves for any knight to take another knight, because you don't move them all at the same time.
haha, when he said "notice what colour they are" I though he ment the Knights are the same colour, and therefore can't take each other. The answer would then be 64.
Before I watch to the end. The knight always changes color when it moves. Therefore, you can fill up all the light squares (or the dark squares if you prefer) with knights, and none of them can take eachother. So the answer is 32. More is impossible as once you have filled all the light squares with knights all the dark squares are covered. Now I'm not sure how to prove there aren't other ways to fill up 32 or more squares but I'm pretty sure the answer is still 32.
...Ah, when he said that they have to take another color, I thought then 64 should be the answer, but he meant *square* color, not piece color. That would be a nice way to make it a trick question though, as a white knight can't take another white knight, regardless of position. Just on the argument that knights always swap color, I would not be convinced that that is necessarily the most you could have, but I'm inclined to trust them. Seeing that no easy proof comes to mind, my next thought is "How hard is it to brute-force the problem?". There 2^64 = LARGE applicable board states, but you can divide by the 8 symmetries of a square so that in some sense there are "only" 2^61 = STILL REALLY BIG states. To give a sense of how big 2^64 is, I think it's now standard that a Unix timestamp should be a 64 bit (signed) integer, so 2^64 is about the number of seconds between 01-Jan-1970 and It Does Not Matter, Everything You Have Known And Will Know Will Have Long Since Ceased To Exist And Been Forgotten By The Time This Date Comes, if memory serves.
there's a famous chess puzzle that can only be solved by castling vertically. the moment this move was used the rules of chess were changed so that you can only castle with original rooks and no future rooks created from getting a pawn to the other side. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_chess_problem#Offbeat_interpretations_of_the_rules_of_chess
Why stop at 64? You don’t have to have only 1 per square... I’d wager it’d be closer to one hundred and something. At any rate, the most knights any side can have is 10.
I was going to say that as well. Another solution is to fill the board with 30-40 knights and put a king in check. Assuming the checking piece can’t be taken by a knight, none of the knights can take each other. (I haven’t worked out how many that would allow.)
If there are 64 knights, meaning each square is occupied by a knight, wouldn’t the first knight to move need to capture a knight on a different colour?
@@Morgan_Bush but knights placed aren't necessarily be multiples of 8. at least i dont see it (without knowing the answer of course). yet i think she implied that the answer is multiples of 8 but maybe you are right and she was just talking about the chess board.
@@brucedickinson12 Bruce, she's a lovely, ultra-intelligent woman married to a man who truly loves and deserves her. Your comment has no application to reality.
sure it does, its a reaction from a man about a hot woman. Shes a funny cute curvy blonde, especially when she was younger. So his comment is actually the MAIN application to reality, men wanting women.
Ellen Spear Behave. You have no idea what they’re like as real people let who’s worthy of who. Ridiculous bullshit. He most likely isn’t but he could be a paedophile or woman beater for all you know.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
I remember playing "Suicide Chess" where the aim was to get all your pieces taken as fast as possible (King included). If an opponent's piece could be taken you had to do it, although there were often choices as to which one so there was a certain strategy.
Trouble was, play that for a while and when you go back to regular chess you find yourself deliberately trying to give your pieces away...
That's called being sht at chess.
I'm brilliant at Suicide chess.
And here I was thinking Shogi was the Japanese chess.
We used to call this Anti-chess. At first it was fun, and then it got to a point where I was losing at it as much as I was losing at regular chess.
Antichess is pretty hard. Normally all the rules regarding check and checkmate are discarded, and the king is just a normal (minor) piece. You win by running out of legal moves (which could be because you ran out of pieces and pawns or because all your remaining pieces and pawns are blocked).
The queen appears to be a massive liability at first, but it actually turns out to be a critically valuable piece. You don't want to lose the queen early for nothing, because later on, you can use it to initiate a forced series of captures. Typically you try to hang on to a decent amount of material early on so that you can win by a lengthy combination later. It might be as difficult as regular chess in practice (though it is much easier computationally), since humans are not great at calculating very long sequences of moves.
I always play this version but I don't tell my opponent
"There's a shotgun in the drawer" - bloody brutal lol
Look at him now, not much of a choice
🤪😂😅😄😂😅
One of the best titbits ever revealed on QI!
If only he'd taken it seriously. 🤣
I think a shotgun would have been a fine consolation prize.
"Isn't that rather more knights than we're used to?"
_HellooOOoo!_
He's right though in an actual game, given nobody captures, you can only get 20 knights max. This questions basically like saying the best hand you can get in Texas hold'em isn't a royal flush but instead you just pick up 8 aces and win🤷
@@1988ryan1That would be a good chess problem...How many knights can you get from just a king, 2 knights, and a row? Just knights, not queens when they reach 8th rank. Hmmm
@@jingo500 When i said 20 that was based on pawn takes piece to give a past pawn and enable all 16 pawn promotions + 4 original knights. With only knights and king you can only trade pawn for pawn, which would free 3 pawns for every 1 captured, so 16 knights max.
@@1988ryan1 So, your version of chess has the Wizard that teleports pieces now? ;)
David Mitchell really won, Victoria is so cool
That poker game anecdote is incredible
@@okkimakki They played a poker game with Ricky Gervais when he wasn't well-known. "Ricky Gervais, who was knocked out (of the game), got up, said 'what am I supposed to do now?', and you (Stephen) said 'There's a shotgun in the drawer' (implying he should kill himself with it)
You could almost say it was Quite Interesting
It sounds like someone's dream dinner party that they'd have in heaven: 'yes if I could pick any four people to play a gam of poker with I'd go for... Stephen Fry, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, Martin Amis and Ricky Gervais'!
Something tells me Victoria Coren-Mitchell Poker Player...has never lost an argument!
@@guyfromdubai Quintessentially Intelligent. That's Victoria.
In high school, we used to play Anarchist chess, where there is no king or queen, and the goal is to completely eradicate the opponent.
death match
that's stupid and would result in a draw every time
Owen Crawford why?
@@10timesover42 because the pieces can literally just move around and avoid being taken
@@owencrawford5984 probably not every time, but yes - unless one player racks up a big lead in pieces once the board starts to empty out it'd be incredibly hard to pin down the last piece or two if they're something like a rook or bishop. I guess the game would be mostly about protecting the pawns (contrary to normal) because the only way I can see to win reliably is to break them through and end the game with a slack handful of queens...
Stephen Fry is made out of wit, colour and comedic nuggets of gold. What a perfect host!
What?
No Purest Green?
@@hypsyzygy506 Stephen Fry wasn't even in that scene.
No matter how many times I watch this Richard's "Isn't that rather more knights than we're used to?" makes me hoot with laughter. And I've no idea why.
Max number of knights would be 20, though how one can advance all pawns to the 8th rank I dont know
@@highpath4776 I could be wrong, but I believe it is fewer than that. To turn all the pawns into knights, the pawns can't take each other so must instead move around each other by taking other pieces, and I'm not sure there are enough other pieces to do this.
Question: “Can you solve this chess conundrum?”
Answer: “No I cannot Stephen, stop taunting me.”
It's not an incorrect answer to be fair
I bet it would have been a klaxon answer for Alan!
Sounds like Phill Jupitus
I hope Stephen records his memoirs for posterity. He seems to have been around for so many hilarious celebrity anecdotes.
puirYorick He’s got an autobiographical volume out called More Fool Me. He also did a press tour about the book, which you can watch on Netflix under the same title.
@@joebykaeby Thank you for including the name of the video on Netflix! I'm going to watch it now, and it will be so very easy to find -- thanks to you! :-)
@@joebykaeby I had a vague suspicion there was something. Thanks for the tip.
UPDATE: Apparently the stage show isn't on Netflix anymore, sadly. Sorry if I misinformed anyone, not sure when exactly it was taken off.
@@joebykaeby - Thanks for the update. I got distracted by _Stephen Fry's America_ and did not see it was not there, but I just found it on RUclips. He's reading his book, almost 10 hours of his words in his own voice! Sigh!
"When you move your knight, do you make a horsey noise?" My answer: "Nay".
sorry. we were looking for: "Ni"
I thought we were looking for "clop-clop" ;) Just like the rag'n' bone man from the 70's
(yes, I'm that old. Get over it...eventually ;)
@@ifatreefalse you're entitled to be quite pleased with yourself for that, nice work.
Watch me whip. Watch me nae nae.
@@jingo500 Not as old as me, who remembers him from the 60's.
I still find myself coming back here just for "There's a shotgun in the drawer."
Same, it is clear Victoria really enjoyed that quip.
Technically, you can have 64 knights and none can capture the other. If they're all on the same team...
That should’ve been specified
Thats exactly what I though he meant when he said the same colour😂
He was referring to the color of the squares the knights lie on. If a knight is on a dark square, it can only take a piece on a white square, and you get to the answer of 32.
@@Maxence1402a I know what he was referring to. I was providing an humorous alternate answer to the question.
@@Chocomint_Queen Oh, I see.
Don't worry, Rev. Coles, your bishop can't get you if you're on a different color square from his.
No, he can't get you if you are on the *same* colour square.
@@djhallingWrong (please don't make me explain my joke)
@@unfasten Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I made that comment.
@@djhalling You may have been tinking that they cannot take the same colour piece?
'Isn't that rather more knights than we're used to?' is such a lovely turn of phrase.
"There's a shotgun in the drawer" 🤣
I always suspected that Fry could knock out some memorable zingers after he's had a few, lol
Sue Perkins... In seconds she sussed the logic - that was good to watch!
I haven't even understood the question yet...
That was kind of glorious wasn't it. I think she had the answer in seconds bar a few moments of counting. Huge respect.
It wasn't that hard, after Steven dropped the big hint, was it? This clip just proved I'm not as stupid as I sometimes think. If the rev. Cole says he doesn't get it then he really doesn't, and he's pretty smart. As Sue was dropping the pieces, Steven said "What do all the pieces you're putting down have in common?". That's the kicker. A knight must move to an opposite colour, so as long as they're all on the same colour none can take another with the next move. Once all the squares of one colour are taken you can't possibly add any more because every square of one colour is within reach of a single knight's move from at least two squares of the opposite colour. You know this because the board has diagonal mirror symmetry and there are no squares a knight can be placed on from which it cannot move, so if it can move to one square, it must be able to move to the diagonal mirror image square too. This tells you once all the squares of one colour are occupied they must cover all the knight's moves you can make from any square of the opposite colour and because any knight's move is reversible if you are on a square where you can take a knight then it is a square on which that knight can also take you.
It's all pretty obvious from the realisation knights must change colour with each move and because there are two colours for the squares the most amount of squares of one colour you can put knights on and be safe is half the squares on the board, which is 32.
It all just depends on "have you heard of this puzzle b4".
@@vapourmile Knights changing colour? Methinks Stephen is more interested in them changing teams.
More Vicki Coren poker stories please
haha Coles was actually making a queen joke at 1:26 but nobody heard the beginning of it
Except they all laughed at it and there was a round of applause.
@@DerekHartley Only when they said it was a Bishop though.
Some of the variants we'd occasionally play at chess club were laser chess and kamikaze chess.
Laser chess: no checks or checkmates. You lose by having all your pieces taken. If a piece is being threatened, it's automatically taken (with priority going to the piece that's just moved or the player whose turn it is if pieces are threatening each other). The idea is each piece holds a laser gun that it can shoot at the places it would move too; so if you move your queen to the opponent's back row it will wipe out the whole row in one go.
Kamikaze chess: no checks or checkmates. You win by being the first to have all your own pieces taken. If it is possible to take a piece, you must take a piece (like in draughts). A good strategy is to try and lure the opposing queen into your back row to play havoc!
I guess that poker memory came from the filming of Late Night Poker (UKs Channel 4) - the first TV series to have the "hole cam" to allow the viewers to see the cards, that then revolutionised televised poker and caused the Poker boom.....and introduced the UK watching public to Devilfish, the Hendon Mob and a certain Phil Hellmuth among others....
I still prefer playing THUD!
GNU PTerry
What about stealth chess?
Ahh, the turtle moves
And Assassin's Chess?
I so want to see VCM and Fry playing poker
👍
A little ditty.....The first 'date' with my wife was when she was 13. We were at the same school but I was 15. We went to Chess Club! We been married since she was 18. I'm now 67. Checkmate for life :-) Don't you just love Chess!
I hope you guys still play against each other! If you do, does one of you when more than the other or is it about half and half?
Now that's lucky! I wish you both good health for many years.
I've tried Mirror Chess, where diagonal movement can reflect off the sides, and Jungle Chess where knights can bounce off friendly pawns to get another move.
theres a variant where the pices have "guns" basically they still move the same but when they take they don't move.
@@ballpython3310 That sounds neat
Oh my god 1:15 Alan really is like Ben from Outnumbered!
I've always thought that. At one point I thought that Ben was Alan's son. They look similar and behave similarly as well.
Can I just say that the speed with which Sue smashed that conundrum is outstanding.
Clearly, Victoria has never played Nightmare Chess, where you can make the bishop explode.
Is there video of that? Please tell there's exploding bishop footage.
Or atomic chess where every capture explodes both pieces and whatever pieces on the 8 adjencant tiles
@@pistonar its done with cards and normal chess pieces. but thanks for the mental image.
This is a severely underappreciated comment
Or quantum chess in which there can be 2 pieces on the same square or where a piece may or may not be standing a square e.t.c It is a bit silly but good fun.
Nice to see the full clip of this. Victoria's recollection now makes sense!
Technically the answer is 64 if all the Knights are the same color, because by the rules of chess, you can't take your own pieces (and so none of them could capture another).
If you're following the rules of chess then you're only allowed 4.... technically
@@BooshyBrows You can have ten; the two you start with and one for every pawn you get to the other side of the board. I've never heard of a rule that limits you to 4.
Technically, in that logic, 62 as both teams still need their kings (obviously heck mate would end it, but I digress)
@@n1nj4l1nk 2 for each team - I didn't know promotion was a thing! Very interesting 😆
But this is QI, so the answer may be changed in a year or two anyway.
That last quote
“When you move your Bishop ‘Oh Hello’” 😂😂😂
When I move my bishop, I say "Mawwidge, ...". Sometimes my opponant chimes in.
I will maintain forever that Princess Bride is one of the most quotable movies
@@FleshNFaith
It really is; I particularly love the scene, that the original comment alluded to, with Peter Cook as “The Impressive Clergyman”- which is what the character is apparently known as, with the speech impediment haha.
The whole scene only lasts about a minute and a half, and he may only have a few lines; but Peter Cook really made them memorable...he “twuwly” was a “tweasure” haha.
But the whole film is just incredibly quotable; it’s up there with the likes of ‘This is Spinal Tap’ for quotability, and both were directed by the same person, Rob Reiner.
And like ‘Spinal Tap’, ‘The Princess Bride is one of those films, that you can just watch again, and again, and the jokes never get old; I still laugh at all the same places, and even though I’ve seen the film dozens, and dozens of times, I never get tired of it.
Just talking about it, makes me want to watch it again; I might have to look up some of my favourite scenes on the old RUclips. 😀
All the best. 😀👍
_Wuv... twoo wuv..._
I don't remember this episode. I may need to rewatch the K series again.
One of my favorite episodes, between this and the "is it a wine glass or two gussets" part.
I like hearing people tell stories about Stephen Fry
Richard Coles is a gem.
I think his background as pop star and vicar gives him a unique field of experience, different than the ordinary comedian
@@Telstar62a...and different from the ordinary vicar!
I am tearing up laughing at Sue's interpretation of "fairy chess". 2:10
The answer is, of course, a blue whale. Next question.
*klaxon*
BLUE WHALE
BLUE WHALE
BLUE WHALE
@@tvdan1043 remember...it's not a klaxon !!
Reykjavik
Joseph Stevens Eyjafjallajökull
@@exceltraining also no straight lines!
Victoria's right about how the fun of chess is the specific limitations of the pieces, and what's more, the game is remarkably balanced so there is no single "best" way to play. Like, there is no consensus that the way to win is to base your strategy on the queen, or on the knights, or anything else.
There is lots of consensus, but no full truth. The consensus is based on current theory and knowledge, which shifts. And in recent years, it shifts more than ever due to the arrival of stronger engines, using machine learning and neural networks.
For an example of how consensus exists for decades but then turns, it was long said and taught that in the endgame it is always preferable to have a bishop pair instead of a bishop and a knight. This was taught to beginners, and also believed by the best players. However, in recent years, the consensus amongst many top players has shifted to believing that it can be slightly better to have bishop and knight, but only if the queens are still on the board. This might seem minor, but this means that the strategy completely changes in many games, with players choosing to still play for a win, even if they don't have the bishop pair.
Many of the established truths have been challenged in the past five years, and there are fewer people these days that believe that rules need to be changed in order to avoid "draw death", where top players draw almost all of their games because no one can get an advantage any more.
2:39 how long had she been waiting for the perfect opportunity to bring up that anecdote
well, you cant take your own pieces so the answer is actually 64
He was referring to the color of the squares the knights lie on, not the color of the knights themselves.
@@Maxence1402a the original point still remains.
Grade A smartassery there, well done.
@@Maxence1402a Question was insufficiently defined, it's a valid answer.
@@ragerancher It's really not though.
"what's the maximum number of knights you can have on a chessboard, so that none of them can take another"
IF they must be in "legal" positions there's a hard cap of 32.
IF they need not be in a "legal" position the answer can be infinitely large depending on the size of the board and pieces.
Therefore IF we want the question to have an answer, the legal position stipulation MUST exist.
That dry/dark humor is hilarious 🤣🤣
There's one way I like to annoy people...
How many queens can you put on the board so none of them could take another? 8.
Well, no. It's 16. You can fill every other row and every other file with pawns or other pieces (so b, d, f and 2, 4, 6) and fill the remainders up with queens (A1, A3, A5, A7, C1, C3,...). They get blocked, so they can't take each other.
Well, no. It's 64. If all have the same colour, they can't take each other either.
Chess can be deeply psychological. Some players will slam an awkward move you won't have expected and then lean forward and glower at you with such intensity aiming to throw you off your game.
So glad they didn't make pawn noises.
You mean like "AW fuck its monday again?"
"Weeeeeeeeee!"
Pawn noises-
Customer: "How much will you give me on this gold watch?"
Pawnbroker: "12 dollars."
Sign in Shop Window: "Gold watch for sale - $5000"
I laughed for an entirely different reason that probably only makes sense to those of us with British accents 😅
"Look, I can give ya $10 for the watch"
Happy new year!
This is my all time favourite clip.
I would so dearly love to see Sue and Richard on Taskmaster.
When they were making the horse noises I was expecting Stephen to do the Melchett ‘Baaa’
It's so awkward when Rev. Coles bashes his bishop on national television.
"Former rock star bashes bishop on late night television"
Who is he?
orion khan A former musician from The Communards ("Don't Leave Me This Way") who became a priest after his music career.
He is the most unchristian priest since the Pope.
I thought he was trying to make the sound one makes when moving the queen...then the others hijacked the joke and made it about the bishop.
I wanna hear more about that Poker game 🤔
The conundrum does not specify "in one move", because of that the only answer is 1
Yes, I thought the same thing.
So I knew the answer to this question already, there was a chess learning game I played as a child and that was one of the puzzles, put as many knights on the board as possible in a way that none threaten each other. So already knowing the answer was 32, I said it to myself, but then when Stephen said “it has something to do with being the same color” I was now worried that 32 was going to be a klaxon and that it’s “technically” 64 as long as they’re all on the same team. But by that logic it could be 64 of anything
I mean, you're right tbf, in the graphic all the knight are the same colour so none of them can take them anyway
2:57 - "There's a shotgun in the drawer..." - what a great line to deliver to the egotistical R Gervais...!!! :) Thank you Mr Fry!
"There's a shotgun in the drawer"? Problem solved . Take all their money.
He meant shoot himself but I see your logic.
what is this show?
It's actually really interesting to me that she described the knight's movement as "diagonal-and-up-one" rather than simply 2 & 1
That's how everyone describes it right? Are you telling me there are people that would describe it as an L shape?
@@verward is this sarcasm?
@@verward L and J are the most common bud
@@DanKop2 Well, I'm not a native english speaker so maybe its a cultural thing. I think everyone where I live would say diagonal and up/side.
@@verward but you still have L and J no matter where you live. As long as you use normal letters…
Must be almost impossible to keep a straight face when playing poker in the company of Stephen, Ricky and Victoria :O
Fairy chess is pretty interesting. The idea is that you take a normal chessboard and either replace some standard pieces with fairy pieces or add additional fairy pieces to the board. For instance, a empress can move like a knight or a queen (making it a very powerful piece). The nightrider can make unlimited night moves in a single direction. The grasshopper can hop exactly one square over any piece that is a queen's move away. And so on.
Though you can play games with fairy pieces, more often people put them in composed problems.
isnt that kind of wrong? they were put on there in a checker pattern, but you could put them side by side then arrange them so the ones they would capture would be own color (no capture)
It’s colour agnostic.
Coren was exploding inside that she wasn't the one that provided the solution.
Absolutely, so obvious if you pay attention to her body language. She’s intelligent, witty, and successful but I can’t help but find her personality irritating
My first thought about the question was that it was referring to an actual game with pawns being promoted etc. You'd need to supercomputer to workout the answer to that riddle?
Because you can not take one of your own pieces surely if you put one knight on each square so long as they are on the same team they cannot take any other
Good job watching the clip.
'Fairy chess' isn't a single game. It just refers to any non-standard piece, particularly in the context of a chess problem (like 'white to play and mate in 2').
Yes, I was thinking more along the lines of 'fairy pieces', such as the rose, maharaja, hippogriff, et cetera, incorporated into chess _variants._
I do think I'll start breaking into Gregorian chants whenever I move a bishop after watching this though.
Chess problem
"here, you can try it out"
Pulls out draughts pieces.
He might be smart, but he ain't US smart! ;)
Not United States smart. That takes a dumbed down degree;)
Just US, as in the rest of the free-thinking world
@@jingo500 The US isn't smart at all lmfao. I don't think anyone wants to be as 'smart' as the average American.
@@jaystyles7305 I was meaning they ain't as smart as us, Not the US, cos thas just stoopid ;)_s
I really want to watch that poker game now
I remember a blue peter episode taking about knights and the presenter said 'once a king always a king but once a (k)night's enough!!
I remember that, I think it was Simon Groom.
Love Victoria ❤
❤
Why were they playing poker in Wales with Ricky, I wanna know the backstory
Don't you wish you were there, however?
@@shoredude2 They would just clean me out cause I suck at Poker hahah. It would make for a good story though!
It was the third season of Channel 4's legendary Late Night Poker (which was filmed in Wales).
I naturally presumed that when "Fairy Chess" was brought up someone was going to ask if it was played with all bishops, given the prior joke ...
If all the knights were sitting on black squares, it would take just two moves for any knight to take another knight, because you don't move them all at the same time.
Who else was at the poker game, who won and why was it in Wales?
haha, when he said "notice what colour they are" I though he ment the Knights are the same colour, and therefore can't take each other. The answer would then be 64.
The answer is actually 64, as they worded the question.
@ 0:14 My question is, who's David?
Nobody mentioned David.
The only person talking at 0:14 was Alan who said "Stephen, I don't understand the question"
gwishart - the way he says it can sound like David though.
I thought it was a trick question. answer being 1, a knight can eventually reach any point on the board given enough moves.
That's quality, what a way to combine two knight puzzles!
Before I watch to the end. The knight always changes color when it moves. Therefore, you can fill up all the light squares (or the dark squares if you prefer) with knights, and none of them can take eachother. So the answer is 32. More is impossible as once you have filled all the light squares with knights all the dark squares are covered. Now I'm not sure how to prove there aren't other ways to fill up 32 or more squares but I'm pretty sure the answer is still 32.
Wow. THAT'S a clip!
I have no recollection of having seen this clip before.
...Ah, when he said that they have to take another color, I thought then 64 should be the answer, but he meant *square* color, not piece color. That would be a nice way to make it a trick question though, as a white knight can't take another white knight, regardless of position.
Just on the argument that knights always swap color, I would not be convinced that that is necessarily the most you could have, but I'm inclined to trust them.
Seeing that no easy proof comes to mind, my next thought is "How hard is it to brute-force the problem?". There 2^64 = LARGE applicable board states, but you can divide by the 8 symmetries of a square so that in some sense there are "only" 2^61 = STILL REALLY BIG states. To give a sense of how big 2^64 is, I think it's now standard that a Unix timestamp should be a 64 bit (signed) integer, so 2^64 is about the number of seconds between 01-Jan-1970 and It Does Not Matter, Everything You Have Known And Will Know Will Have Long Since Ceased To Exist And Been Forgotten By The Time This Date Comes, if memory serves.
When you place knights of the same color, you can put in 64.
there's a famous chess puzzle that can only be solved by castling vertically. the moment this move was used the rules of chess were changed so that you can only castle with original rooks and no future rooks created from getting a pawn to the other side.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_chess_problem#Offbeat_interpretations_of_the_rules_of_chess
This went from intelligent discussion to farcical animal noises very quickly.
Bobby Fischer invented a thing called random chess. The pieces play the same but start in different positions on the board.
64 squares, just make them all white or all black knights
Works for basically every piece, except arguably pawns.
But then they cannot move.
@@tlf2818 but that wasn't the question. Which moron made this question, it's obviously 64.
I was looking for this. Was so surprised it wasn't brought up.
Why stop at 64? You don’t have to have only 1 per square... I’d wager it’d be closer to one hundred and something.
At any rate, the most knights any side can have is 10.
Now I want to see all those comedians playing poker
You could have 64 if they're all the same colour because you can only take pieces of the opposite colour too.
It's a hypothetical derby free for all.
Winner gets to tax the peasants more
I was going to say that as well. Another solution is to fill the board with 30-40 knights and put a king in check. Assuming the checking piece can’t be taken by a knight, none of the knights can take each other.
(I haven’t worked out how many that would allow.)
Yep. I thought the same thing.
If there are 64 knights, meaning each square is occupied by a knight, wouldn’t the first knight to move need to capture a knight on a different colour?
But if all the opposite colour are on the opposite colour squares then it's not the answer, because they can all take a piece.
Once a king, always a king but once a knight is enough.
If the question is, "Can you solve this chess conundrum?" my answer is no and I am right.
how did sue perkins (black haired chick) know at 0:05 that it was multiples of 8?
64 spaces on a chess board - would be a multiple of 8.
@@Morgan_Bush but knights placed aren't necessarily be multiples of 8. at least i dont see it (without knowing the answer of course). yet i think she implied that the answer is multiples of 8 but maybe you are right and she was just talking about the chess board.
Is that a shotgun in your drawers or are you just pleased to see me?
How does a knight move? To the opposite end of short six squared rectangle.
I keep coming back to this. While I love Ricky Gervais, this may well be my favorite panel show moment.
"When you move your knight, do you make a little horsey noise?" Garry Kasparov
did.
Victoria Coren-Mitchell is LITERALLY the most interesting woman in the world.
David Mitchell is both lucky and, I think, worthy. I often hope for their happiness in their life together.
@@brucedickinson12 Bruce, she's a lovely, ultra-intelligent woman married to a man who truly loves and deserves her. Your comment has no application to reality.
sure it does, its a reaction from a man about a hot woman. Shes a funny cute curvy blonde, especially when she was younger. So his comment is actually the MAIN application to reality, men wanting women.
Ellen Spear Behave. You have no idea what they’re like as real people let who’s worthy of who. Ridiculous bullshit. He most likely isn’t but he could be a paedophile or woman beater for all you know.
joejitsu034 but he isn't though is he?
Stephen tried to spare us Ricky. Bless the man.
Sue Perkins is great in this clip
The British Rachel Maddow.
The first QI question I got right without explanation!
Genuinely thought it said cheese and was a bit disappointed when I realised it said chess 😐
Seen the clip before. Still laughed at the shotgun gag.
Damn it! i was looking for a cheese conundrum
Who isn't?
Fairy chess? Are we talking about the Bishop of Peterborough again?