Editing 3020: Infinite Armada Chess

{{comic
| number    = 3020
| date      = December 4, 2024
| title     = Infinite Armada Chess
| image     = infinite_armada_chess_2x.png
| imagesize = 282x497px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = Stockfish 16 suggests the unconventional opening 1. RuntimeError: Out of bounds memory access
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by an infinite armada of stockfish BOTS - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

{{w|Chess}} is a board game played between two players on an 8x8 chessboard. In standard chess, each player has 8 pawns and 8 other pieces: 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, a queen, and a king. {{w|Chess variants}} are chess games in which the rules, board sizes, and/or piece behaviors are altered. In the chess game presented here, a non-standard chessboard is used, which extends vertically past the original 1st and 8th ranks off the page to infinity in both directions. Each square beyond the 8 standard ranks is filled by an additional queen. The {{w|Queen (chess)|queen}} is the most powerful piece on the chessboard, having the powers of a {{w|Bishop (chess)|bishop}} and a {{w|Rook (chess)|rook}} combined. With an infinite armada of queens, each player will have more resources to call on. Sometimes having a bunch of queens [https://x.com/chesscom/status/1841540380363211164 doesn't go very well], however.

[https://www.roblox.com/games/11339102114/Infinite-Armada Infinite Armada] is a "tactical spaceship combat game with fully customizable ships across a massive map" that runs on the {{w|Roblox}} game platform. It's unclear whether its map and number of spaceships are actually infinite, or merely very large.

In the title text, {{w|Stockfish (Chess)|Stockfish}} is a {{w|chess engine}} designed to evaluate a chessboard and find the best move.  However, it is designed to handle finite boards, so it's likely that some problem will occur as it runs on an infinite one. Here that problem shows up as the game's move #1, "RuntimeError: Out of bounds memory access". This error message is unique to the cross-browser {{w|WebAssembly}} implementations of {{w|WebGL}}, so there was probably not enough memory to {{w|Rendering (computer graphics)|render}} an infinite board in a {{w|web browser}} window.

While Stockfish is limited by the processing power of the computer on which it runs, it might not really need to consider the infinitely many pieces to suggest a move. Indeed, all but a finite number of pieces are stuck at every step, so there is always a finite number of possible moves, and so in theory it would be possible for suggestions to be made using a finite amount of {{w|RAM|memory}}. At the start of this game, the number of moves available for the first move are exactly the same as they would be in a normal game of chess, since all the additional queens are prevented from moving by surrounding pieces.

However, without specifically coding Stockfish to be aware of the logical certainty of the infinite number of queens being blocked, it is likely to still be checking ''every'' piece in turn, long after it has successfully prepared to establish (or perhaps [[2407: Depth and Breadth|actually explored]]) the relative strategical advantages of undertaking the twenty initial moves that White could make. (Or, in the algorithm's worst case scenario, it has tried to start its movement-checking process at the 'rearmost rank', and has encountered the error before managing to establish ''any'' valid opening moves.)

==Transcript==
:[A chess board in the starting position, except it extends further at the top and bottom, going beyond the panel. The extra squares are filled with queens of the sides' respective colors.]

:[Caption below the panel:]
:Infinite armada chess

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Chess]]