Chess and Twitter – Chess Tweets!

I recently saw a blog post about ChessTweets, a chess community for Twitter. ChessTweets is going beyond making an app for playing chess by Twitter, they’re conducting an experiment in the value of a collective mind.

The ChessTweets Experiment attempts to expand on the collaborative ideas intended by this famous chess game by creating the world’s first automated and objective hive-mind machine. With the advent of Twitter, developing such a machine has become both readily-possible and irresistible. Can such a machine learn to compete with the best of the best? The ChessTweets Experiment intends to find out.

By asking its participants to give their input in community games and without preselecting grandmasters, ChessTweets will examine each participant’s relative skill and apply a formulated weight to each and every suggested move such that every mind plays an important and unique role.

The experiment is just beginning, and the level of play appears to be fairly uneven. But this should improve as more players join the experiment and as the organizers collect more information about the community. This will be a long-term project, but it is interesting and may provide interesting insight into thinking processes.

If you’re interested in playing casual correspondence-type chess (games are played at approximately one move per day), and you love Twitter, I think you’ll love ChessTweets

I have a suggestion for getting the most advantage out of playing chess on Twitter (or any of the online correspondence-type chess communities): practice analyzing each position by first asking yourself what all the checks, captures, and threats are for your opponent, and how you should respond to each of those. Then examine what checks, captures, and threats you have in your position. Only after you have ascertained all these facts should you begin to do further analysis.