Shortest chess game

I need this game for testing... 1. g4 e5 2. f4 Qh4#

Chess Playing Delta Robot

OK, this robot wins for best use of low-torque servos, and it looks like some kind of laser-guidance for the gripper!


Construction info here.

Chess Playing Robots

Chess playing robot 1 (Lynxmotion AL5A):


Chess Playing robot 2 (Lynxmotion AL5D + linear bearing):

Laser-cut servo-driven robot arm

Here is a cool robot arm made from S3003 servos and laser-cut plywood from "Sawtooth Design Lab":

  

Update: Here is a laser-cut robot arm design on Thingverse:

AWS Turk in Java on Pi and ChessBoard.py

Forget everything I wrote about getting AWS Mechanical Turk on Raspberry Pi.

The solution is to load up Soft-float Debian “wheezy” from here, then Java SE "ARMv6/7 Linux - Headless EABI, VFP, SoftFP ABI, Little Endian" from here.

Also you may want to use raspi-config to extend your root partition to use the SD entire card. 

I loaded up the AWS MTurk Command Line tools on to my Pi, and it appears to work (so far!)

GnuChess, while a great chess engine, is too much of a memory hog to run on Raspberry Pi, even with the command line controls to reduce the memory usage. There are some simpler chess program (such as Micro-Max which is ~2000 lines of C), however since I really only need to validate chess moves and update a chess board for my Chess Playing AWS Mechanical Turk, I decided to use ChessBoard which is a Python-based chess board and move validator. The public methods of ChessBoard.py are described here.

For example, below we create a new board, enter a valid move "e4", and an invalid move "a1":

>>> from ChessBoard import *
>>> chessboard=ChessBoard()
>>> chessboard.getBoard()
[['r', 'n', 'b', 'q', 'k', 'b', 'n', 'r'], ['p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['P', 'P', 'P', 'P', 'P', 'P', 'P', 'P'], ['R', 'N', 'B', 'Q', 'K', 'B', 'N', 'R']]
>>> chessboard.addTextMove("e4")
True
>>> chessboard.getBoard()
[['r', 'n', 'b', 'q', 'k', 'b', 'n', 'r'], ['p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p', 'p'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', 'P', '.', '.', '.'], ['.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.', '.'], ['P', 'P', 'P', 'P', '.', 'P', 'P', 'P'], ['R', 'N', 'B', 'Q', 'K', 'B', 'N', 'R']]
>>> chessboard.addTextMove("a1")
False

Robotic Xylophones

RoboXyLo by Build Brighton:


MIDI Glockenspiel:

Dorkbot SoCal 50

Dorkbot SoCal 50

***** Sunday, December 16, 2012
***** 1:00pm-3:00pm
***** Machine Project
***** 1200 D North Alvarado Street
***** Los Angeles, CA 90026
***** Google map of Machine Project

http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsocal

Speakers will include...

Michael Kontopoulos

Michael Kontopoulos is an artist-inventor interested in constructing mechanical systems and tools for exploring the poetics of everyday, eccentric human behaviors.His work draws from strategies in speculative fiction in order to investigate the circumstances und er which people might build custom devices to suite their nuanced needs or respond to various socie tal failings. Buy constructing electromechanical artifacts and exploring them through video, he tel ls the story of those people, and the world they inhabit.
Born in Philadelphia, Michael has lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and has exhibited his work at various galleries, festivals and conferences in the US, Asia and Europe. 



Joy Padiyar

An overview of Holography is given with reference to its origins, techniques and methods. The various technical applications of holography and its usage are covered in widely differing areas such as security, the internet, industrial optics and imaging systems. The use of holography as an artists' medium is shown, along with specific examples of holographic artwork.
Joy has previously worked for American Bank Note Holographics in the laser lab, where she produced several well-known images such as the MasterCard hologram, and security holograms for Intel and USPS. After meeting Dinesh Padiyar - a fellow holographer and scientist, they both moved to San Diego and established their own company, Triple Take Holographics, featuring both high-tech applications and commercial uses of holograms. 

 


Aaron Rasmussen

Aarom was visited in his dorm by the military after building his first robot in college. Since then, he has launched the Kickstarted projects BlindSide, an audio-only survival/horror adventure game, and Mr. Ghost an iPhone electromagnetic field (EMF) detector.

---

Next Chess Move

More people responded to the chess move AWS Mechanical Turk HIT at $0.25 per move rather than $0.05 per move and making it available to non-Masters.  5 workers responded (out of 5 requested).  Only 3 provided valid moves for white using the FIDE chess algrebra.  2 workers responded with non-valid algebra, and one of those appeared to be trying to indicate a move for black rather than white.

The average time from HIT creation to HIT submission was 58 minutes, 49 seconds.  The last HIT submission came in 1 hour, 38 minutes after the HIT creation.  The time period between submissions averaged 19 minutes, 32 seconds.  The average time between a worker accepting the HIT and submitting the move was 1 minute, 46 seconds.

The accepted moves were:


pe5
c4
Nf3

So I'm going with Nf3, leading to:


r . b q k b n r 
p p p p p p p p 
. . n . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . P . . . 
. . . . . N . . 
P P P P . P P P 
R N B Q K B . R 

Gnuchess comes back with Nf6:

r . b q k b . r 

p p p p p p p p 

. . n . . n . . 

. . . . . . . . 

. . . . P . . . 

. . . . . N . . 

P P P P . P P P 

R N B Q K B . R 

 

How to not only submit to AWS MTurk Masters

If you want the great unwashed to work your AWS Mechanical Turk HITs, you need to figure out how to submit the HIT to non-"Masters".  This article explains how to do it - it was not obvious to me at all!

Playing Chess on Amazon Mechanical Turk

So I have this idea - a chess playing "Mechanical Turk" powered by Amazon Mechanical Turk (aka "MTurk")...

 Powered by: 

To try to understand the market for chess moves, I manually submitted a HIT to get an initial move from AWS MTurk from the starting chess position.  Reward price was $0.05, and I set a maximum of 10 workers for a period of 24 hours.  Moves were required to be in FIDE chess algebraic notation.  I figured that around the world, hundreds of millions of people know how to play chess, so this was going to attract plenty of workers.

And just 13 seconds after I submitted the HIT, I got my first move back: "e4".  But then a funny thing happened - no one else worked on the HIT.  I guess $0.05 per move might be too low to get much participation.

So here is the board after the White "e4" move by the anonymous worker on MTurk:


r n b q k b n r 
p p p p p p p p 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . P . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
P P P P . P P P 
R N B Q K B N R 

I fired up gnuchess as the opponent to the MTurk, and it moved Black "Nc6", so here is where the game is at now:


r . b q k b n r 
p p p p p p p p 
. . n . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . P . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
P P P P . P P P 
R N B Q K B N R