Chess Concurrent Compress

Ye Olde 1985 Chess Compress Challenge

In our previous story, Chess Compress, we took up a challenge published by the kijk.nl magazine back in 1985 where we tried to put as many pieces on a chess board as possible, without any threatening any other. More accurately, we are rewarded a score of 1/n for each piece in a solution, where maximally n pieces of that type can be put on a board without any threatening another. So each queen and rook score 1/8 points, each king scores 1/16 and each bishop scores 1/14, each knight scores 1/32. One then has to come up with a bunch of chess pieces on a chess board that maximises this score. If we restrict ourselves to just one type, the optimal solution is just one. So the challenge is to smartly combine different piece types that are in some way complementary.

The New and Enhanced 2020 Challenge

Now that the optimal solution to the 1985 challenge is known, can we make the puzzle harder for humans? Would it then also be harder for the solver?…

What would be harder for humans is to restate the problem so that there are more pieces in the optimal solution. For humans, it is then harder to check the increased interplay between the higher number of pieces.

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Read on on Medium, to discover the optimal solution also to this 2020 challenge and how it has a remarkable structure …