A new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).
I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?
Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?
Erick,
Not sure if you like playing chess. I do. I loved the concept . I guess chess players are going to like this. For serious chess learners this is going to be a paradise to learn and for experienced players a chance to meet other gurus. Now read a social networking over a game
You ask your final rhetorical question as if offering people crowdsourced chess precludes them from playing a simple game over a spot of Earl Gray. Come, now—how brazen to believe that a simple website might otherwise “cheapen” the beauty that is a simple game of chess. To assume that is to assume far too much; that people might *use* the site, that people might stop playing their one-on-one games, instead preferring to play the crowd version and that people won’t use this as something fresh, to remind them why chess is fun and to learn about the game for when they play other people, one on one.
Zefrank had a chess match played against his entire audience that worked through a wiki. It was interesting to watch. I think the concept is neat, but it’s clearly nothing terribly special or groundbreaking. It’s a new take on it and a fun way to learn more about the game and get back into it. It’s not “destroying something beautiful.” Please.
THis is a very old concept. World Chess Network (now part of ICL) had tons of “community challenges” where the audience decided how to play a champion. Often, a 2500 ranked player would fall to the wisdom of the masses.
Pathetic! Pathetic! Pathetic! This site is made for people without a backbone. I hate hanging over other peoples games. Imagine how weird. Yeah I played chess tonigh with 50 other really cool guys and we kicked ass. Yippy. What do you want a medal? Whats next alcohol free beer???
Not so interesting….ppl will loose interest if the player don’t hear them
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
i don’t like it – chess is meant to be an individual sport, one-on-one…one brain against another.
and besides, the 80/20 rule will play into effect – only a few will point out really good tips while the rest play cheerleader
Stan from CrowdChess here:
Erick, thanks for a great write-up. Just wanted to say that in no way, shape or form are we trying to “destroy something beautiful”, in fact I would say we are trying to make something beautiful even more beautiful and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that…
With the power of the internet, one of the greatest games ever invented can finally be social and in the process create the ultimate wisdom of the crowds battlefield that can push the boundaries of human intelligence.
In the future we plan to organize games where countries plays vs. countries for CrowdChess world championship and champions and/or top players play against a super computer, resurrecting the old debate of who is smarter, men or machine.
I think there is a lot of potential in this idea and hopefully you will agree!
If you have any ideas, comments or anything else that you want to share regarding this project, drop me a line at: stan (at) crowdchess.com as I would love to hear from you. Being a young entrepreneur and knowing that there are a lot of very smart people reading this blog, I would love to learn from you and see what I can do to better the CrowdChess concept.
Thanks!!
Stan
Just joking….Not a bad idea at all
Stan I really apreciate you coming on and answeing us personally. I love chess and will try your service. I wish you a lot of luck and many users
Ask Viswanathan Anand. Click on the link to know who he is.
Why does TechCrunch even post crap like this? It seems that it’s becoming the norm. I come to TC to find out about exclusive launches and start-ups… not gimmicky websites. Seriously, I think content needs to remain focused and pertinent. Post less articles if that needs to be the case. I’d rather see two quality TC articles a day then 10 mediocre ones – I’ll take quality over quantity any day.
Or am I the only one who sees it this way…?
-Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
things that should probably not be bulk crowdsourced without some sort of editorial control or limitations:
- rocket science
- brain surgery
- chess
I can’t see things that actually require expertise in a field crowdsourcing this way very well. Wikipedia manages because people who don’t really know about lemurs won’t bother to edit the entry on lemurs (or will have their edits removed) — but in a chess vote, amateurs and experts alike will both vote and will count equally.
Unless the “crowd” in question is made up of, let’s say, 20 grandmasters, or unless you weight “good” players votes more heavily somehow, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get entirely average and predictable moves in every situation involving more than 4 or 5 players on a team (assuming the team is randomly assembled). Plus, who wants to play chess when you don’t have any real control over your own moves? It seems like it’d be a lot less fun to relinquish equal control to a bunch of teammates in chess.
Could be good for learning from good players with team chatting, though.
I prefer to liken CrowdChess to a(n) Ouija board. Rather than a single party making an intelligent, reasoned move, all players are spirits haunting the game. Though they move pieces about in an order that no single individual suggests, all must suffer the consequences.
That said, absolutely everything must be crowdsourced. The most productive meetings are, of course, the ones with at least sixty people shouting to have their say in a matter that (intuition would tell us) “doesn’t concern them.”
The beauty of crowdsourcing something like chess is that it amplifies the cognitive dissonance and indecision that arises in one’s mind while playing to hundreds. What’s more – you get to experience the agony of “standing in a room full of idiots” should your move not be chosen.
Next up: “WikiWatch – what time is it? Let’s decide together!”
How is this stopping people from playing chess alone?
Yes Mr. Henry @ 11 you are the only …. … Have you ever seen a chess board?
Chess is not just a game but super computers are made better keeping chess (# of moves) as the benchmark. I think this post is perfect (for those who love the game) and for hard working people who have created the site.
In 1999 Gary Kasparov played the world in a one-move-per-day match over the internet. It was an astounding game. Read more here:
http://en.wikip...ersus_The_World
this is web 2.0 of course it needs to be crowd sourced. I would imagine after this post, we’ll soon see a Checkers variant
Re the “can the crowd beat the grandmaster” question; Microsoft Gaming Zone hosted a “Kasparov vs The World” match back in 1999.
The crowd team voted on suggestions that came from four strong players rather than being completely crowd-sourced, although the best of those suggestions were those based on analysis parts of the crowd was doing. The crowd tended not to choose the very strongest moves; since anyone in The World could vote, with no reputation information involved, and sinced the majority tended to be convinceable by unsophisticated arguments, there wasn’t much correlation between the best analysis and the best move.
This isn’t a surprise; at the first level of sophistication, crowd sourcing only works if the average member of the crowd has a respectable level of ability or at judgement compared to the best in the world, and access to different information than other members in the crowd. Not the case in chess, so I hope CrowdChess has or will evolve something more sophisticated than “everybody vote”.
The World team nonetheless did very respectably and had the world champion worried before blowing it during the transition from a frightenly complicated middlegame to the endgame. The best analysis being done actually resulted in improving the state of the art in endgame tablebases. There was some bad feeling near the end when the keenest in The World team tried and failed to effectively resign the definitely lost game by voting for a move that threw away the team’s queen. Votes were both spammed and arbitrarily ignored. It’s been a long time, but I still seem to be a little emotionally involved in it.
The Kasparov team were very honorable and didn’t read the necessarily public analysis being done by The World team. I do not know how CrowdChess hopes to avoid espionage problems if it ever gets to the point where the play is strong and involving.
Growing up I played tons of chess. It’s been probably 5 years now since my last serious game and I’m very excited to try this site out. I haven’t explored the site yet but I’m wonder if it give you the option as an individual to play a large group. I hope. I’ll be putting my own review of the site on http://actionstalk.com
Great post Erick.
Stan,
how are you planning to make $ from your site?
by showing ads between moves??
can you include monopoly in your site? or some other board games? say poker.
I hadn’t seen the Wikipedia entry that Rock Howard references above (http://en.wikip...ersus_The_World) before. It’s a great account, I highly recommend that over my quick summary above.
@ Anthony Bailey
Great point. We have taken a lot of steps to prevent gaming and espionage, but at the same time we are going to continue improving this part of the game to make it as “bullet proof” as possible.
hm, Oleynick… all your previous projects had been (failed) make-money-quick schemes, I don’t quite see how this will work
I would be interested to know whether a crowd is really able to think ahead several moves in advance, or whether it can only do that because the moves it play are really always those of the best player in the crowd (but then, how can the crowd understand his/her strategy and vote for these moves unless maybe it is itself composed essentially of advanced players?). Often, a visionary strategy has to be the work of only one person (informed by experience gained from many persons).
I love chess and this is a cute idea. Either I missed the joke or the programmers don’t play the game – the board is actually set up wrong. The king and queen are reversed and the coordinates are reversed (A1 should be white’s queenside rook). These details aside, I don’t think the game quality will be as high as something like “Kasparov vs the World” unless many people of master level play get involved. The fact that 1) f3 received 12% of the vote is pretty telling.
@ Mark (#23)
I think you read too much ValleyWag… I did 3 internet projects in my lifetime prior to launching CrowdChess and lost money on one of them. If you’ve never failed, tell me your secret.
As for make money quick line, why make money slow?
@ Dave (#25)
Our bad. Will fix this now!! This is the result of not sleeping for a few nights straight…
I must agree with Dave #25. There really can’t be high hopes for the quality of the games.
I wonder how many of the participants actually know how to play chess.
The misplaced coordinates are permissible (this does not directly affect the game). However the swapped King and Queen makes this no longer regular chess but a variant like Fischer Random. It dramatically changes the game.
Just one person on staff who actually knows how to play won’t hurt.
Wow…this should have been something launched as a facebook app…ONLY!
From a gameplay aspect, the reward seems to be lost if your move isn’t chosen. In chess you get a feeling of acheivement knowing that your move can either make you lose or win. If you don’t have direct control you lose that risk which makes the game lose it’s fun factor.
King and Queen are now in their right positions… sorry for the confusion.
Its an okay idea conceptually. The question is whether individuals who aren’t skilled (such as myself) can recognize the wisdom of the moves suggested by the more skilled, or whether they will write them off as foolishness.
are the moves regulated?
what if 51% of people think I can take the queen with my pawn for the first move, is it game over automatically?
why dun we try that? I guess it is not regulated. such as the misplace
if it is, it won’t let you start in the beginning.
Being an avid chess player myself I think this is a great idea as it opens up a lot of new possibilities. This certainly makes the game a lot fun to play and I have to disagree with the fact that the reward seems to be lost if your move isn’t chosen because you will have another chance fairly soon (I believe each team is given 1 hour to make a move) and it’s not the end of the world.
It’s the same with Digg, people are still digging stories even though most of their submissions never make the front page…
One thing I didn’t like though is the fact that you can’t play with your friends on the same team since the team selection process is random but I do agree with their reasoning (FAQ # 4).
Stan, thank you. My only regret is that my dad isn’t here to see this. He was a chess maniac and would have LOVED it. He liked chess any way he could play it: one on one in a quiet room, his friend Sammy Reshevsky playing dozens of people at once, postcard chess, blindfold chess, you name it. It was all chess, and it was all good.
The concept isn’t new at all. ‘Team chess’ is one of the alternative chess games available on specialized chess servers and it has been around for ages. I can imagine you, people are assessing this more from the business perspective, but believe me, active (although amateur chess players) are familiar with the concept from chess servers like ICC (The internet chess club) or FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) – http://www.freechess.org.
@Jean (#24): Typical team players are not grand masters at all, so the crowd doesn’t ‘think’ several moves ahead. Neither are best moves suggested by the team strongest player. What usually happens is someone suggests a line, but not being a GM they’d probably miss a move and then someone else from the team would point that out, so another line would be suggested.
I’ve taken part in lots of team games (on FICS) and it is fun – really! As part of the team I’ve played stronger chess as compared to my individual accomplishments. Plus, I get to actually see the reasoning behind one line or another. This is not the case when you get beaten by a stronger player on the regular basis, so it’s usually easier to improve your play in team games.
I still have to admit that not much of the players are interested in these kind of games though – out of between 600 and 3000 players at any given moment (speaking of FICS) there are no more than 10-30 players interested in team chess. You can tell that because these games are organized in special channels and you could see the number of people in those channels.
@ David (#34)
Of course they can. When you propose a move in the play room one of the things you are required to do is to write the explanation for your reasoning and why you think your move is the best, once you do, others can comment on your move and have a great discussion with you about your move via comments or chat, if they like it they can then vote for it, if not, they can either vote for another move or propose one themselves, but it’s up to you to explain your move in detail so that others will see the logic behind it.
@ MarcT (# 32)
The game is run on a sophisticated chess engine so yes, the moves are regulated and you cannot just make any move you want. It has to be a legal chess move and if somebody tries to make an illegal move, the system will tell you that you are proposing an illegal move and will not let you make it.
Hope that answers your questions!
Stan
@ Nasko (#35)
Team Chess is entirely different from what CrowdChess is, see for yourself: http://mywebpag.../Team_Chess.htm
@Stan (#37):
The term ‘Team chess’ as used on the Free Internet Chess Server that I was referring to has nothing to do with what is described in the article linked to by you. On FICS there are two channels (for white and black) and everyone interested in a team game can join either one. When there are sufficient players (per judgment by the majority of the players) the game starts. Note that each team may consist by any number of players – I’ve taken part in a team game where each team had more that 50 players. Each team’s discussion goes in a dedicated channel and although technically any user could be in both channels (e.g. for the observers’ convenience) moderators are watching out for people taking part of discussions and still being in both channels thus abusing the system.
You’d agree that this functionality would be similar to CrowdChess even though the term ‘Team chess’ may not have been used properly for that context.
Been done so many times before. Crowdsourcing chess makes NO sense.
Site is terribly designed.
Chessboard is incorrectly done.
Verdict = LAME
show it on http://www.dotthelife.com
this is a cool concept. lighten up, people.
Team chess is boring, but it would have been cool if the concept was built like the NYC Central Park scene in some way. People could socialize around the game, but the two players would be left alone.
cool idea
Funny, we’ve absolutely considered playing Cellufun chess that way, where each person votes on their phone
Hello guys , its a great idea to sustain the best moves
good luck;)
As a cognitive psychologist, I think this could be a great source of info for research on crowdsourcing. I´ve published papers on the journals “Minds and Machines” and “Cognitive Science” concerning chess skill, and I really hope this things gets traffic so that the quality of play can be analyzed. While random people will never immediately see the best lines, like advanced players do, they would, be able to quickly discard bad options (because it only takes ONE person with a cogent reason to show it´s bad).
And I think this should be FUN! Imagine games between xxx@Mit.edu versus xxx@Harvard.edu, or between minor, local schools. If I were running this site, that´s who I´d be promoting it to, universities and highs schools competing in the same region. They should get engaged–if only for the fun of competing.
This is not at all a bad post. Some people seem to be thinking that if you´re not talking about the next google or giving them billion dollar advice, then it´s useless. I hope techcrunch never succumbs to such superficial thinking.
Hey thanks for sharing that chess site. I think that it looks like to many online chess plattforms, but the difference is the suggested moves given by the spectators, which make that you can learn very much gaming.
Thank you
Gold concept. It’d be funny to play your friends online, then crowdsource your moves without your buddy knowing, haha. And of course, I would love to see the crowd vs. the grandmaster vs. deep blue. But I think the *general* crowd would lose because it’s an aggregate of average players with average moves.
Hey,
I dont like this concept of group chess. Im an ardent lover of chess and love to play with a single. Thanks to Yahoo Chess for letting me to play with people around the world
Anyhow CrowdChess/TeamChess may have its own likers.
Naveen.
No one ever built a statue to a committee.