ESN - Emanuel's Simple Notation - Represent any chess position in only two words!

[klx]

Abstract
Dear Chess aficionados, I'm proud to present my latest discovery -- Emanuel's Simple Notation -- or ESN for short, a superior notation to represent chess positions in only two English words!

Background
I was reading the thread "Gentelmen, check your engines." when I encountered this string:

3R1R2/K3k3/1p1nPb2/pN2P2N/nP1ppp2/4P3/6P1/4Qq1r w 0 1

Puzzled initially, I soon learned that this represents a chess position in the "Forsyth–Edwards Notation" (FEN).

I then started thinking, that this is not very user friendly at all. It's long, easy to mistype, and difficult to share with others. I thought that surely, this is something that Emanuel can improve. I slept on it, and sure enough, in the middle of the night it came to me -- we can represent chess positions using a combination of plain, English words!

Result
In the middle of the night I rose, and starting designing my system. The impressive conclusion is that any chess position can be represented using only two regular English words.

For example, that position above, could instead become:

"family pottery"

When someone else then enters these two words in a chess engine, it will be uniquely mapped back to the intended position. As you can tell, it is trivial to share this type of position, without having to resort to transcription or copy and paste.

I am happy to go into more technical details how this works, but wanted to first stop and gather some feedback.

[klx]

Apparently there is a similar concept for geographic coordinates called What 3 Words which maps any location to three English words.

This company has 200 employees and a valuation of close to half billion USD! And my mapping is only 2 words!!

This might be the biggest thing to happen to chess in decades!

[smatovic]

Are you undergoing an acute psychotic episode? If so, the mods should take care, and prevent you from burning your name further on this public forum.

--
Srdja

[AndrewGrant]

Old idea. Andrews' Simpler Notation already exists, and uses only one word in piglatin to encode all chess positions losslessly.

[amanjpro]

Can we use Chinese words instead?

[BrokenKeyboard]

Most of the time FENs are used to represent board states for easy sharing. There already exists things like PGN formats which store fens along with comments. And if you want extremely compact representation, then the StockFish community (at least im pretty sure) made the binpack format which allows you to store billions of positions in approximately 50GB. That's mainly used for training. If you could explain how the encoding / decoding works, I would love to learn exactly how your system works!

[Brunetti]

In the middle of the night I rose, and starting designing my system. The impressive conclusion is that any chess position can be represented using only two regular English words.

The impressive conclusion is wrong. Even with a million words dictionary, with two words you can map one trillion (10^12) positions. If chess was limited to one trillion positions, the game would have been solved in the last century.

Despite its apparent simplicity, the FEN notation can represent any possible board position, even if illegal, with many kings, and so on. Anyway, the possible legal chess positions are a much bigger number than 10^12 (check for example http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=77685 this trade). Let's say 10^40, very lower bound. "Regular" English words are less than 200.000. Do the math: you need at least 8 words. And to keep the encoding/decoding algorithm simple enough, you should divide the board into chunks, like FENs, and the number of words would be higher. And you need a fixed standard dictionary shared between all applications using this system.

Last but not least, you lose any readability:"family pottery" (unreal example since you need many more words) doesn't say anything, "3R1R2/K3k3/1p1nPb2/pN2P2N/nP1ppp2/4P3/6P1/4Qq1r w" is by far more clear, at least for an experienced reader. And FENs are usually read by experienced readers.

Alex

[klx]

Those who have seen my previous discoveries know that I can back up my claims. Two words are indeed all that is needed, and I will explain how.

First, how did I make this discovery? Well I thought to myself: how many FEN strings have there ever been created? Surely it's far less than a billion. And so, I thought, why not create these on demand?

This led me to the design: An online service -- Emanuel's Notation Service -- which takes as input a chess position and returns back two, hitherto unused, random words. Internally, it then stores a mapping between the chess position and these words. So when someone later requests a position like "family pottery", the original position is looked up and returned. Similarly, the same chess position will be mapped to the same two words.

The dictionary size is 40,000 words, so with two words there is a total of 1.6 billion positions, which should be more than enough for the unforeseeable future.

Emanuel's Simple Notation is free of charge, and has three additional features.

1. A pure offline mode, where we use enough words to uniquely identify the position without having to store the mapping elsewhere. For example, with 10 words we can encode 10^46 positions.

2. There are 40,000 one-word positions available (not Pig Latin, that's a really stupid idea). I will sell these for $39.95 each. This will bring in $1.6 million which I will use to power Emanuel's Notation Service (it will be run as an AWS Lambda), and buy a Lamborghini.

3. You can subscribe to become an "Emanuel Premium" member. This has the following exclusive set of features:

• You can request two new random words for any position you submit (though you can not select the words yourself, that will be additional charge)
• You can delete mappings that you've created
• You can see access statistics for mappings that you've created

"Emanuel Premium" is only $9.99 / month.

[Sopel]

k boomer

[OfekShochat]

lol