Yoko Ono's miniature battleground
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- Bill Sunderland & Dani Siller ('Escape This Podcast') and Amelie Brodeur (The Flute Channel) face a question about a board game with a twist.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Bill Sunderland: @consumethismedia, / escthispodcast
Dani Siller: @consumethismedia, / escthispodcast
Amelie Brodeur: @flutechannel, / theflutechannel
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: Podcasts NZ Studios.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett at The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023.
Fun seeing Tom describe the "Fog of War" game mechanic without the terminology.
Another Sudoku fan!
There is a version of online chess with this exact mechanic
Scott's idea for Hidden King chess is awesome.
The Rules:
Each player puts a fully hidden sticker on the bottom of one of their pieces. It can be placed on any piece, pawn to king. All pieces move according to standard rules. When taking a piece from your opponent, you check the bottom of the piece for the sticker. If it has the sticker, you have taken their king and won.
A notable down side is that check/checkmate wouldn't be a thing anymore, but the upside of the intrigue of trying to pick out the other players king based on how they are playing seems very fun. Kind of like Stratego, but still veryCchess.
actually you could keep a version of check/mate
essentially if a player thinks they have identified the king and make a move that would attack them...they can declare check... and if they are right - the other player actually has to follow the usual rules about a king in check
would probably limit the ability to call check, so calling it all the time blindly isnt a possible strategy
might add another layer of misdirection in how you respond to a correct call of check, or how you pretend to follow a wrong call^^
I was thinking, maybe just write it down on a piece of paper at the beginning, so it wouldn't be possible to spot it while moving the piece, or whatnot.
Also, maybe you could implement a rule like if you take the usual king you get to know which figure is the actual king in this game.
this sounds cool. but I think the best strategy would be to always choose your queen to be your king. it's perfectly normal for a player to prioritize not losing their queen, and to decline queen trades, even in normal chess. the only reasons to sacrifice your queen, in normal chess, would be to protect your king, or checkmate the opponent's king. but as both those incentives are removed, you'd have almost no reason to ever sacrifice your queen, so you may as well make her your king. just my 2 cents.
@@mellamobob Could either ban the queen from becoming the king, or just embrace the fact that players will be more likely to take riskier moves to take queens knowing that it would be a powerful strategy to make it their king.
I had a game called Stratego or something as a kid, where all your pieces had different values written on the back, but looked the same from the front, so you could see which one was which but your opponent would have to guess. So it kind of was a mix between chess and battleship.
I've played Battleship Chess: my brother and I each had a board and only our own pieces, with a barrier between us. Our sister had a full set to track our moves and let us know if we had captured a piece or couldn't make a particular move. Cumbersome, but fun!
I've heard of that game under the name German Intelligence Chess (in a thriller novel by Geoffrey Household, I think).
You're not the first person to invent this but I'm very glad that it's gotten posted here early so others can read about it.
It's officially known as Kriegspiel (literally German for "War Game") - I've never played it myself, but it does look like good fun, and I've wanted to play it pretty much since I found out about it years ago.
@@Autoskip My uncle used to do a yearly family gathering to play Kriegspiel, and we've still got his 12+ chess sets in the basement. Most of them were dollar-store cheap cardboard, but the ones for the judge were small, magnetic, and mildly ornate. I'm not the sort of person who loves chess, but just watching the adults play, none of them were grandmasters but they got into it and... those were the days.
The "king is not actually the king piece" is a concept that exists in Stratego!
That was my thought as well. Chess with Stratego pieces.
Ah, that was the game I was thinking of
Without knowing the details of the art piece itself, as a chess player this was instantly the thought that came to mind. Including Tom's thought about "hamfisted 60s idea of unity"
The thing is, and I say this as an experienced chess player, having all of the pieces be the same color would not be a hinderence to an expericnced player. Tom briefly mentioned that Grandmasters can play an entire game blindfolded, which is very true, but you don't even have to be that good to do it. I am nowhere near that level of chess skill, but I have played entire games without a board on many occasions. Last year, on a road trip with friends, I played, and won, a game against my friend while I was driving. He had the board on his phone and was playing my moves as I called them out, but I never looked at the board. During the course of the game, I only made one mistake as far as forgetting where a piece was (I tried to jump over one of my own pawns with a bishop because I forgot the pawn was there), and I blundered a knight late in the game when I was already well ahead because I didn't see that it was under attack. My point is that I would have no trouble remembering which pieces were mine and which were my opponent's if they were all the same color, and most chess players would probably say the same thing.
If I had to guess, most people above like 1600 or 1800 ELO can play blindfolded no problem.
That's the level of a strong school club player, probably not the best in the club, though.
I think the point is that war usually doesn't involve skilled players at all. It's just people doing whatever. It's often played up as some mythic strategy game, when most soldiers and commanders don't know what they're doing and come back to tell tall tales about the battlefield.
Oh Yoko...
While Churchill's variant of chess is one of those kinds of travel boards with magnets so you can fight on the beaches.
Thought of that too when she went on about fighting in different environments
Be careful with that. Churchill, of all people, is credited with one of the first viable magnet chess sets. As in designing it (with a friend). The simile breaks down a bit when you find out he did it after the war (1948, if you need to know) so, no, he couldn't have fought them on the beaches....😉
Ps. Hey, Tom, when are you going to get Heline on here? (I'm not shipping, honest!)
@@robertwilloughby8050 Holy shit, I thought he was just kidding. That's good trivia.
With every episode I am more and more convinced it would be very useful to put the picture/video clip of the guessed object/event (if applicable/available) at the end of the episode. I know this is primarily a podcast (so no video intended), but since you are publishing these highlights on RUclips anyway, I think many people would appreciate it.
It could also be posted on the episode page for the podcast version. The problem being that those images would probably be copyrighted.
@@tiadeets They could just link to it and cite the image.
"Let's double the war!" cracked me up
I'm proud to say that, ignoring the ones I already knew, I guessed this one straight away.
You'll just have to trust me :)
Source: Just trust me, bro. :P
Yeah this is the first time I got one immediately that I didn’t actually know the answer to .
I've guessed a couple recently. It's fun. Not this one, though.
Are you, by chance, dressed in all white?
The board isn't standard, there's no checkerboard pattern, all the squares are white, but differentiated by being slightly different heights so "black" tiles are all slightly raised.
It amazes me that Tom Scott has played Command & Conquer.
He played Mario Kart with The Technical Difficulties for a video.
I bet he played games back in the late-90s to early-00s, while he was still in school.
That might have been one of the network classics around the time he studied. One had one copy of the came with two discs, so it was the go-to choice when connecting two computers.
I guessed it right away! I assumed "trust" meant you had to trust the opponent that the piece they want to move is actually their piece and not yours
When they got to “having to remember things” I envisioned a version where you essentially queue up like 5 moves in your head, then you’re both locked into played that sequence (no piece can move more than once). I guess you could write down your moves beforehand, but you could also play where you just have to trust that the other person won’t change their moves mid sequence
This is a key game mechanic in Robo Rally.
I've actually played on that when it was at the Museum of Liverpool.
To use this to show the futility of war is kinda stupid, though, because it's way easier to win this way. "Yes, that was definitely my queen that checkmated your king there..."
So, you cheat and _your opponent's_ queen wins. See?
I think the point is that if all the pieces are the same colour then nobody can win. Nobody wins in war.
Consider that if you did take the "enemy" king with "their" queen then they could just claim you took your own king.
That's the point omfg
@@InShortSight Honestly, people who just don't like her will come up with the dumbest explanations to dismiss her.
All of those game variations sound fun!
It's wild Tom went on such a big tangent that was somehow completely accurate
I was thinking that the chess pieces were like the pieces in the board game "Stratego" where the pieces are all identical in shape, with a sticker on one side (the side facing the player whose pieces they are) so that only you know which pieces of yours are where.
Pick up and move a piece diagonally - opponent "wait, I thought that was a rook…"
Not sure if it changed at all but the ones I had were embossed or screen printed rather than stickers (actually fact checking my next point apparently in the 90s they were sold with stickers rather than gold/silver imprinting on plastic or wood). Also, you couldn't move diagonally only forwards/backwards/left/right.
Glad it was something else, I immediately thought "human lives all count the same, so all pieces are pawns and you have to keep track of how each piece moves and which is the king"
the rules are the same as in regular chess, except for these changes...
I was thinking it might be normal chess, but you can only touch your opponent's pieces and they can only touch yours. You have to trust them to make the moves you ask them to.
I think y'all'd love the game Stratego. You can't see the other player's battle pieces and have to guess what they are based on movements.
There was a board game I played which was a sort of chess/ rock,paper,scissors mashup. It had three different pieces, artillery, cavalry, and foot soldiers. At the start of each round you wrote down your moves for all your pieces and went through the list one by one resolving conflicts with artillery beat cavalry, cavalry beat foot and foot beat artillery.
01:07 The brief pause before making a Yoko Ono pun is called … an Ono second. Wait, I'm mixing that up with another Tom Scott video.
I'm thinking when you get a checkmate, the losing king lets out a Yoko scream.
At 5:07, Dani went full Churchill: "We're gonna fight them on land! We're gonna fitght them on the seas!..."
In Raymond Smullyan's book The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes encounters various games and has to deduce what must have happened for the board to be in that state. One game uses a set of red and green pieces, and the mystery is which side is really white
Acornsoft Chess, as given away with the Acorn Electron, had a strange mode where you could move any piece anywhere.
I guessed this one straight away because Yoko and John are obsessed with white colour
It's easy to know who owns which pieces if you place them on the edge of each square closest to yourself.
Well, that would kind of defeat the whole idea of this game
Well, at least you'd always know which knights and bishops were your own, and probably always be able to keep track of the king and queen just because of their positioning. It's really only the pawns and rooks that would get mixed up since they have no facing.
I thought it was going to be all pawns
ChatGPT potentially does a lot more than just predicting the next word. It is possible that the hidden layers have more complex structures inside of it since afaik they are turing complete
It's more that it's using the previous words to predict the next word.
But I'm very skeptical of calling it Turing Complete.
@ZT1ST TBH the idea of the Turing test as the be-all-end-all for robot consciousness has always been a bit suspect.
The whole premise of "convincing a human being that its human" starts falling apart once you realize that A: Humans beings aren't that hard to fool. And B: Humans beings aren't even that good at recognizing ~others humans~ as humans (see racism, sexism, religious discrimination, etc.)
In short I'd argue the Turing test is more a measure of mimicry than of true independent thought. Even Turing himself hesitated to call the test a true measure of thought, but people latched onto it anyway because we love the idea of a simple solution to a complex question.
I guessed all white chess pieces... because of the 'all white' joke in the Powerpuff Girls episode where they parody the Beatles.
You didn't mention that the board they played on was also comprised of all white squares.
I finally got one of these answers correct right away. Yey
Which White starts first?
And it come with a free CD which includes her greatest hits such as 'Aah', 'Hu hu hu hu', 'Ow ow ow ow' feat. Chris Brown, 'Ughhhh ughhhh' and the classic 'Hingy hingy hingy hingy'. 😐
Back in high school we played anarchist chess. No king or queen, you win by taking out all of the opponents pieces.
Oh, c'mon guys, it's Yoko Ono in the 60s. One could guess it from the get go.
At 0:55, each side was a mix of black and white pieces or they were all the same colour
I don't know why but I got it immediately :)
i guessed that within a few seconds, had no idea i was right
I'm just thinking "oh there's a go variant just like that, it's fun"
The ‘white’ chair has been covered up!
5:04 Chattleship
oh i actually got close but not quite:
I thought that maybe all the pieces were pawns.
They'd still be black and white, but each player would have to remember which piece is which.
It definitely wouldn't be as playable as Yoko One's version though.
I thought they were referring to monocrome chess.
All pieces are the same colour, and your pieces are on your half of the board. If you take a piece, by crossing the board's half way point that piece now belongs to the other player. You have to achieve checkmate via long distance.
absolutely amazing piece of art work! but we will not learn from it!
Ok, but, isn't anybody going to mention that the set has a prominent appearance on John Lennon's Imagine video????? When I heard Yoko Ono and chess I immediately thought of it.
Rather quickly I figured it'd be some artsy nonsense, and assumed that all pieces were replaced with checkers pieces. After hearing the standard pieces bit, I went to colors.
Another one I managed immediately.
Now I want to see a castle sink a battleship.
I guessed þis one right from þe start!
It's funny : it's a thing go players do regularly to practice memorisation of the board !
Time for a lot of people to look up Salpakan
To me it´s better to see everybody at the same time in it´s window.
Now I'm imagining the chess game from the first harry potter movie but when Ron gets beaten its a full scale stone aircraft carrier crashing into him
The opposite of this, would of course be Arnold Schwarzenegger's one-sided chess set
I was expecting her to go one further & make all of the pieces white pawns.
Now I understand that Lennon was attracted to Ono.
"Viz" magazine did a politically correct chess set. 32 grey pawns all on the same side.
Some politician should make a chess set with olive green (military green) pieces on both sides, then send it as a gift to Putin to make a point. Then again, it is unlikely that he would accept the concept and its logical conclusion.
I guessed this almost straight away. Another fairly simple one. Check mate.
Chat GPT also can't play tic tac toe
That might explain Wagner's march on Moscow: they forgot which pieces are the enemy.
Yoko Uno???
The three of them completely missed the past where it's Yoko Ono lol
The chess game was an art piece not an actual board and pieces
It's a board and pieces - you can play it. www.moma.org/audio/playlist/15/385
It took till 04:14 for Tom to guess what I guessed almost immediately.
I'm guessing they were all pawns and you had to trust that your opponent was moving his "knight" or his "bishop", etc.
edit: I might be on to something. The way she paused before saying all the pieces were normal. Oh, that might also mean that all the pieces were the same color....
Yoko OH NOOOOO!!!!
Initial thoughts: all the pieces were the same colour (but then is it really standard?), and there is no apparent difference between one player's or the other's. Then, you must work mutual trust to establish which pieces are whose?
If the pieces are really standard, maybe the board isn't. It could be, once again, a single colour. Yet, legal/valid piece movements would still be clear and easy to determine.
So I'm leaning toward different rules specified for this game (maybe blindfolded so an illegal move could be done surreptitiously). But then, there is no need for a custom chess set, just a different rule set. Using the same piece shape for every pieces goes back to using the same colour pieces proposition.
... Could it be that the set was precariously balancing itself, and both players need to work together, moving pieces in somewhat mirrored harmony, not to unbalance it so much as to ruin the game (pieces falling off, toppling, etc.)?
Or even simpler, the set could be made to be rested on the players' lap, or hands. But that would technically result in voided/null games, and not be really a trust issue anyway. None of those seem to fit adequately.
The YT title of this video mentions "miniature battleground". It's a stretch, but maybe you had to put something of value inside the pieces; perhaps a piece of paper with some risk attached to it (higher value piece, deeper the info). If the opponent captures one of your pieces, they could learn that "secret/privileged" info (or earn a favour/service). There's the trust. It does require a custom set to encapsulate the info within. It doesn't change the base rules (as James May would say: "Standard!"). And you would only play a game between people that could (trust) open up to the other, or deceive/betray them into putting more valuable info than you do. Even if that's not the answer, this one is such a neat idea.
Results: I was right with my first guess, yet my first objection to it still stands. Would a pro-level official game be allowed the same-coloured "standard (usual, rule verified, appropriate, ...) pieces"? No.
And then I went way deep to find some fitting case... A bit of a let down. That's what happens when we don't define exact terms before having a discussion using them. Still possibly the one that got me working my nugget the most.
so she invented stratego but with chess pieces....
Who goes first as white always starts. So you would have to fight over who starts
🎉A
yay
Pieces in disguise, oh God the homestuck flashbacks
Yolk? Oh, oh no.
Put a record on.
I have never tried 1 colour chess ♟️ but 1 colour go is definitely feasible. For me, that’s an interesting variation and the art part of it would be very secondary.
rather than dating badly, the chatGPT chess analogy has gotten even better :p
ChatGPT potentially does a lot more than just predicting the next word. It is possible that the hidden layers have more complex structures inside of it since afaik they are turing complete