
Ask HN: Can chess be used for crypto communication? - capex
Hi folks, I am writing a short fiction, and I came upon the idea to use chess as a medium of communication. Is it possible? I mean, if a person uses an entire chess game to represent a paragraph? I imagine one side of the game is not enough to express the english language as there aren&#x27;t enough  initial moves in the game. But both sides together could do the job?
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theWold
Using normal chess pieces? ....

1)

umm I mean you do have an 8x8 grid (8 bits each row) and you could have pieces
make up bits being on or off and make a 8 letter phrase (each row being it's
own letter).

(Ascii Wikipedia for your reference -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_code_cha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_code_chart))

2)

Maybe you could also do something like the Where Am I Game?

example:

I stay one night in Denver; four nights in San Francisco; And one night in
Washington DC;

Where am I?

1 Denver = D 4 SanFrancisco = F 1 WashingtonDC = W

(DFW) -> Dallas

So you could do something like playing a chess game and for every attempted
move (like player 1 moves a Rook but keeps his hand on it and taps the board
thinking about the move and then places it down means the letter 'o').

3)

There was also a movie with Bruce Willis (or The Rock Johnson. I always get
them confused). Where the main guy tries to escape from a space prison. There
was one scene where they communicated over a chess game by only talking when
there hand was on the queen. Any word spoken while on the queen was then
concatenated to a sentance to convey what they were really talking about.

~~~
capex
Thanks, but what I had in mind was a chess game played on the internet, using
for example, [http://chessboardjs.com/](http://chessboardjs.com/). Can a
recorded game communicate a message?

~~~
nekopa
How about this: you use an AI to play your side, speed chess, 30 second time
limit length of time for your move is a letter- 1-26, anything over 26 seconds
is punctuation.

Then arrange an instant messenger software to interface with the chess playing
AI so you type up the message and it plays the move using the right length of
time for each letter

Then you can translate in real time, or save the moves with times and convert
the whole message at once.

Play multiple games to send longer messages...

Then you could use a different shifting cypher for each colour to fool
breaking the code, or even implement some kind of one time pad.

Example
here:[http://www.chessbymail.com/score.htm](http://www.chessbymail.com/score.htm)

~~~
capex
Using time as the differentiator is a brilliant insight. Thank you.

