OK, I want you to start off by thinking of this as a design challenge. Suppose I told you that your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to design a chessboard worthy of 21st Century technology.

We want this chessboard to boast a bodacious bevy of futuristic features. I think it goes without saying that we want to be able to use it to play against either a fellow human opponent or an artificial intelligence (AI) adversary.

We also want the board to be able to teach us how to play better. In this case, it would be nice if the board could detect what piece you’d picked up and then illuminate different squares with different colors to indicate the good/bad values associated with potential moves.

Now, this is the clever part. We don’t just want the AI to be able to indicate where it wants YOU to physically move its pieces for it (lazy AI). Instead, we want the AI to be able to move its pieces on its own. In turn, this opens the door to your being able to play with someone who is remotely located, with them selecting moves and their pieces moving on your board by themselves.

And, just for giggles and grins, let’s say that we want multiple pieces to be able to move at the same time, like when you wish the board to return all the pieces to their home positions at the end of a game.

So, how would you set about doing this? Well, I just saw GoChess on Indiegogo, and it blew me away. Boasting “Self-moving pieces | Real-time coaching | Online play | AI-powered,” this little scamp presses all my hot buttons. Check out their video, and then we’ll reconvene.

The use of sensors to keep track of the locations of the pieces was cool, but the part that really blew me away was the use of little robots mounted under the board to move the pieces. BRILLIANT!

But wait, there’s more. You know what it’s like when you’re on YouTube—you are watching one video when you see another tempting treat, then another, and another…

Thus it was that I ran across a video showing the building of an electronic chessboard that supports fast-and-furious games without the players having to take turns.

Here’s a summary of the rules. As soon as the game starts, both players can move one piece after another as fast as they can. The first clever bit is that, after a player has moved a piece, that piece is locked down by the board—it physically can’t be moved for a “cool down time” of 5 seconds. The second clever bit is that—although players can’t move their own pieces when those pieces are “cooling down,” their opponents can. This means the board must have the ability to detect which player is touching which piece.

Again, think about this as a design problem. How would you implement all of this. When you’re ready, look at this video.

I don’t know any details about the young man who created this project and video, but he’s scary-clever. Goodness only knows what he will end up doing in the future! While we wait to see what he comes up with next, do you have any thoughts you’d care to share about any of this?