
Movies Get Chess Wrong - kodisha
https://medium.com/s/story/why-movies-get-chess-wrong-a1a84750c2d6
======
uberman
Watching chess, like watching "hacking" is kind of boring. The audience
understands the high level concepts but not the details. I feel that the
actual placement and progress of a game of chess on the big screen follows the
same "entertainment logic" that "cracking" passwords one letter at a time
does. That is no logic at all.

Chess is a signifier. The players are smart, sometimes ruthlessly willing to
sacrifice for the greater good. The opponents are doing battle often a mental
proxy that foreshadows a physical battle to come. There is a slow tension to
it. People get the high level concept and symbolism without understanding the
nuances or in fact without understanding what a fork is or being able see it
on the board let alone being able to "see it" coming.

Almost no one in a theater will see HAL's mistake at calling for mate in 2
rather than mate in 4. Sure, people find "easter eggs" and hidden messages
like this after the fact and it is fun to debate but during the film this
simply goes over people's heads.

Finally, this post suggests that the "average" game is about 79 moves.

[https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-
the-a...](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-the-average-
length-of-a-game-of-chess)

Any director will be hard pressed not to take liberties regarding play and
still keep the audience engaged.

~~~
hhjj
The one letter password guessing had some credibility long time ago thanks to
unvalidated password length fields:
[https://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2014/02/hacking-
windows-95-...](https://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2014/02/hacking-
windows-95-part-1.html)

But nowadays i doubt you often encounter that kind of bugs and the speed would
probably be unappealing to audience.

~~~
eridius
The one letter password guessing still has relevance today in systems
vulnerable to a timing attack. If the timing of password validation is
affected by the valid-prefix length (which it would be if the password
validation is a simple strcmp()) then you can use that to brute-force the
password character-by-character.

------
weliketocode
Meh. For reference, I'm an expert level (~2000 ELO) chess player.

I'd say only very casual players or nitpickers watch the movies and say...

> "Ah ha! That is against the rules/wrong/a clear mistake! I'm so smart! Silly
> filmmakers for not knowing such things!".

It's the same as watching a Doctor or Lawyer show. Many of these 'mistakes'
are made for dramatic effect, for better storylines, or to make the situation
in some way or another.

In classical time controls, chess games can easily take upwards of 4 hours,
and periods of 10, 20, or 30+ minutes with NO MOVES are quite common.

It's not a game that fits easily into the mold of other mass spectator sports.

~~~
mikestew
_It 's the same as watching a Doctor or Lawyer show._

Or show involving anything HN readers would be familiar with.

“I wrote a program that reconfigures the warp drive computational algorithms
to give us 50% more power.”

“In an hour? Last I looked, that whole thing was like 50K LoC. How much did
you test this before you deployed it to OUR ONLY PROPULSION OUT OF KLINGON
SPACE?! Someone code reviewed it, I take it?”

<Six weeks later...>

No, no one’s going to watch that (“goddamn it, Bob, quit mixing formatting
commits with functional commits!”) So the director takes a few liberties, we
shut up, eat our popcorn, and pretend it’s perfectly reasonable to knock that
out over lunch.

------
Cpoll
> Filmmakers’ most common blunder may be the sideways board. On a correctly
> placed chessboard, the square in either player’s bottom right corner will be
> light-colored

This is the only one I wouldn't consider a gaffe. Plenty of casual chess
players don't know this either. It flips the board layout (queens on the wrong
side), and would probably feel wrong to a more experienced player, but it
doesn't actually affect the game.

~~~
bscphil
This is most definitely wrong, and I think any but the most beginning player
would notice. It doesn't affect the theory of the game, of course, but there
are good reasons to be consistent about this. It flips the meaning of "light
square bishop", for instance.

~~~
Cpoll
I think it depends on how you learned to play. Personal anecdote: I learned
the game from another casual player, and played a few hundred hours without
learning any openings (but developing my own crude ones) or even knowing 'en
passant.' Only when I actually started studying theory did I learn the
orientation rule and understand why that sort of consistency is important. Now
a flipped board sticks out like a sore thumb.

~~~
ourmandave
Back in junior high I remember watching two kids playing an end game and their
kings were right next to each other.

They'd only heard that "a king can't take a king.", but didn't know why.

------
ourmandave
_Even behemoths like Captain America: Civil War don’t check that their pieces
are in the right place, committing mistakes that any patzer would catch._

A minor prop in the background, where all the pieces are in the right starting
positions, but the board was rotated wrong so the queens aren't on their
colors.

It _totally_ took me out of the comic book movie, man!

~~~
labster
That's how you can tell it's an alternate universe, the kings are on their
colors. That, and the goatees.

------
notacoward
Movies get _everything_ wrong. And that's OK. There's a word for movies that
focus on factual accuracy. They're called documentaries, and most movies are
(for good or ill) not documnentaries. Most movies are trying to _tell a
story_. They need to provide _just enough_ realism and familiarity to engage
the audience's attention, but no more. It's called "suspension of disbelief"
and it's everywhere. Hobbits aren't real. Superpowers aren't real. Incredible
combat or hacking skills as shown in movies aren't real. The movie White House
bears little resemblance to the real version. Romance doesn't work the same
way in real life as it does in movies. And _all of that_ is OK because the
story's the thing.

What an article like this illustrates is not that movie-makers are stupid, but
that some people are _so unbelievably egocentric_ that they believe what
matters to them should matter to everyone else. That what seems obvious to
them should be obvious to everyone, and if it's not then that's sufficient
justification to look down one's nose at them. Never mind that they themselves
are ignorant of many things others might consider important. It's a
narcissistic behavior, not among movie makers but among movie critics.

------
bitxbitxbitcoin
Some of Hollywood, such as Stanley Kubrick, did know how to play chess. It is
a pity that that no longer seems to be the case.

I didn’t ever look at the HAL chess board in depth enough to realize HAL made
a mistake/bluff but in hindsight I feel there is no way that wasn’t
foreshadowing.

~~~
nabla9
Directors and writers don't have to have to know how to do stuff the
characters do or how things work in the world, but they should do research,
study and consult people to find out.

It's just laziness not to do hat. Many films are just collections of outsider
impressions. Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work
ethics.

~~~
krapp
It's not just laziness. These projects have limited time and money, and more
research, study and consultation than necessary is a waste of both.

Unless the actual, correct mechanics of a chess game are important to the
plot, then it doesn't matter and almost no one will notice, much less care.
Better ROI to spend that money on hair dye for Scarlett Johannsson.

>Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work ethics

No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.

~~~
nabla9
> then it doesn't matter and almost no one will notice,

It matters. You don't notice it consciously but all the small details add up
to the movie feeling special.

> No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.

And that's why we end up with action movies with boring action and special
effect blockbusters with mediocre but expensive CGI, and drama without good
characters.

Good movies with good details can be made with little money if the people who
do it have passion to do it.

------
GoldAndAppel
Also, the 1998 movie "Pi", about intelligence, insanity, chaos, and the game
"Go", the game he's having with the head professor guy looks entirely one
sided winning by one of the colors, and has no room for as many missing pieces
to have been captured.

Either the game has an illegal board, or one player really wanted to lose and
passed ~30 times while apparently still being worth discussing between the two
characters.

------
segmondy
Movies get almost everything wrong. It's story telling, if you're pretty well
informed and you focus on the details, you won't enjoy it. chess, computers,
health care, murder, law, driving, explosion, romance, communication, it's
mostly all garbage. If they matched up and looked like the real world, it
would make for a very boring movie

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tedunangst
Not sure how much Hollywood or real football the author has watched. "But the
home team was wearing their away uniforms! How can the director not know which
color goes on which side?"

------
mcguire
Scooby Doo physics: as long as the ending state is valid, the intermediate
states don't really matter.

Or, as long as the plot and characterization are good, the actual details
don't matter.

------
Mountain_Skies
Waiting for chess boxing to make it to the big screen. Combine flawed boxing
with flawed chess, maybe they cancel each other out. (Yes, chess boxing is a
real thing)

~~~
Rebelgecko
_Mystery of Chessboxing_ came out in the 70s, although might not be quite what
you're looking for. It was an inspiration for the Wu Tang Clan, who have done
a lot to promote chess and even chessboxing. I always thought it'd be fun to
give it a shot but I'm bad at chess _and_ boxing

