Chess via Up-Goer Five

[Matt Fletcher]

The online comic XKCD recently posted a cartoon entitled "Up-Goer Five" which explained the Saturn Five rocket using only the thousand most common words in the English language.

http://xkcd.com/1133/

Even more recently, someone has put up a text editor where anyone can write on any topic using the same vocabulary set.

http://splasho.com/upgoer5/latest.php

I found it quite addictive! Here's my attempt at chess - can you do better?

It is a beautiful game for the brain, played by two people at a time. It was first played about ten hundred years ago in a large land. It is now played by many people all over the world.

You can learn to play the game in a day but you can't learn to be really good at it in less than ten years.

The game is played on a table with many spaces to put pieces on. When you start the game you have ten and six pieces which are either black or white (the other player takes the other color) and when you move you usually try to take the best pieces of the other player.

The game ends when you take (or kill) the very best piece of the other player, or if she kills your best piece. It is possible to make a draw if no-one is ahead in the game.

Children sometimes learn to play the game at school and some say it helps them to think better. Older people usually play it for fun although for a few people it is their job. The best player in the world is paid a lot of money to play.

Computers can play the game much better than humans now because they can think much faster than us.

[Tristan Clayton]

This is addictive - I liked your description a lot, Matt.

As someone prone to waffle and verbosity I found it really hard!

Here's my effort:

A meeting of minds, a fight to the death.
It makes me smile, it makes me cry.
In the moment it means so much,
But still it is just a game.

I care about it, probably too much.
Move, move, take, take, check, check, and it's over.
There is nothing hard about it, really.
And yet most of us will die without ever getting close to its truth.

I have learned to love and hate it over many years.
Most of the time, however, it remains a game about which I feel I know nothing.

[Matt Fletcher]

Tristan - poetry, love it! Must try writing something more poetical!

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Tristan - poetry, love it! Must try writing something more poetical!

What Tristan wrote was very nice. And convenient that the word 'check' is allowed. It is there in the lexicon under a different meaning of course. It is interesting to see what the most commonly used words are.

[Alex Holowczak]

Speaking of chess and xkcd, here's a recent one that may be of interest too: http://xkcd.com/1112/