Some of Hollywood, such as Stanley Kubrick, did know how to play chess. It is a pity that that no longer seems to be the case.
I didn’t ever look at the HAL chess board in depth enough to realize HAL made a mistake/bluff but in hindsight I feel there is no way that wasn’t foreshadowing.
Directors and writers don't have to have to know how to do stuff the characters do or how things work in the world, but they should do research, study and consult people to find out.
It's just laziness not to do hat. Many films are just collections of outsider impressions. Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work ethics.
It's not just laziness. These projects have limited time and money, and more research, study and consultation than necessary is a waste of both.
Unless the actual, correct mechanics of a chess game are important to the plot, then it doesn't matter and almost no one will notice, much less care. Better ROI to spend that money on hair dye for Scarlett Johannsson.
>Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work ethics
No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.
> then it doesn't matter and almost no one will notice,
It matters. You don't notice it consciously but all the small details add up to the movie feeling special.
> No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.
And that's why we end up with action movies with boring action and special effect blockbusters with mediocre but expensive CGI, and drama without good characters.
Good movies with good details can be made with little money if the people who do it have passion to do it.
That's not laziness. It's just prioritization. It's how not "just adding this one feature" isn't laziness. It's prioritization.
I want to show my character's intelligence. I show her playing a game of chess, surprising the experienced player. The chessboard isn't important. The pieces aren't important. It is a language I share with my audience. They see "this person's smart". They barely see the chessboard.
It's like computer hacking or bombs. The light turns green from red. Our heroes have downloaded the data. The red light blinks, beeping frighteningly loudly as the timer ticks to explosion while the maintenance man walks obliviously by. The audience does not question this because the beep is not a word, the light and the ticking not a phrase, the entire scene is a concept, an entire page. It describes the fact that an explosion is imminent and it will be a surprise to the victims.
The audience has trained itself to see things like this, think concept to concept, by learning the language of the filmmaker. Some are forced out from that flow for other reasons and some just because they aren't proficient in this language that millions know. But ultimately, the shared language develops and most will learn and understand.
> Filmmakers’ most common blunder may be the sideways board. On a correctly placed chessboard, the square in either player’s bottom right corner will be light-colored
This is the only one I wouldn't consider a gaffe. Plenty of casual chess players don't know this either. It flips the board layout (queens on the wrong side), and would probably feel wrong to a more experienced player, but it doesn't actually affect the game.
This is most definitely wrong, and I think any but the most beginning player would notice. It doesn't affect the theory of the game, of course, but there are good reasons to be consistent about this. It flips the meaning of "light square bishop", for instance.
I think it depends on how you learned to play. Personal anecdote: I learned the game from another casual player, and played a few hundred hours without learning any openings (but developing my own crude ones) or even knowing 'en passant.' Only when I actually started studying theory did I learn the orientation rule and understand why that sort of consistency is important. Now a flipped board sticks out like a sore thumb.
Not chess, but Go has a similar situation. Most boards aren't actually square boards, but slightly rectangular (eg. each cell is a rectangle). Before anyone told me that, I would sometimes sit down at a board and get the sense that something looked wrong; but I could never put my finger on what it was.
I suspect that chess might have a similar situation, where someone who has played enough, even if they were never consiously aware of the convention, would get an off fealing if it were set up wrong. (Although, in the case of chess, it is truly a convention. With Go there is an objective sense in which one orientation is better than the other).
Also, the 1998 movie "Pi", about intelligence, insanity, chaos, and the game "Go", the game he's having with the head professor guy looks entirely one sided winning by one of the colors, and has no room for as many missing pieces to have been captured.
Either the game has an illegal board, or one player really wanted to lose and passed ~30 times while apparently still being worth discussing between the two characters.
Watching chess, like watching "hacking" is kind of boring. The audience understands the high level concepts but not the details. I feel that the actual placement and progress of a game of chess on the big screen follows the same "entertainment logic" that "cracking" passwords one letter at a time does. That is no logic at all.
Chess is a signifier. The players are smart, sometimes ruthlessly willing to sacrifice for the greater good. The opponents are doing battle often a mental proxy that foreshadows a physical battle to come. There is a slow tension to it. People get the high level concept and symbolism without understanding the nuances or in fact without understanding what a fork is or being able see it on the board let alone being able to "see it" coming.
Almost no one in a theater will see HAL's mistake at calling for mate in 2 rather than mate in 4. Sure, people find "easter eggs" and hidden messages like this after the fact and it is fun to debate but during the film this simply goes over people's heads.
Finally, this post suggests that the "average" game is about 79 moves.
I recently chanced upon this chess video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G90SVhxKeig I believe you could spice up the presentation with some cinematography and a clearer narration and it will make for good cinema. Chess has a nice battle rhythm of quick simple moves and long periods of thinking about pivotal moves. It's still not 100% super accessible if you have to speak and explain the meaning behind the moves, but it's probably a good idea in a movie about chess. In another kind of movie, one in which chess is used more as a proxy, you could have the narrator sort of in the midground, focusing on wordless interaction between onlookers, so people who don't care about the commentary aren't forced to think and understand the game and can instead immediately empathise and get the appropriate emotional response.
The one letter password guessing still has relevance today in systems vulnerable to a timing attack. If the timing of password validation is affected by the valid-prefix length (which it would be if the password validation is a simple strcmp()) then you can use that to brute-force the password character-by-character.
Even behemoths like Captain America: Civil War don’t check that their pieces are in the right place, committing mistakes that any patzer would catch.
A minor prop in the background, where all the pieces are in the right starting positions, but the board was rotated wrong so the queens aren't on their colors.
It totally took me out of the comic book movie, man!
Meh. For reference, I'm an expert level (~2000 ELO) chess player.
I'd say only very casual players or nitpickers watch the movies and say...
> "Ah ha! That is against the rules/wrong/a clear mistake! I'm so smart! Silly filmmakers for not knowing such things!".
It's the same as watching a Doctor or Lawyer show. Many of these 'mistakes' are made for dramatic effect, for better storylines, or to make the situation in some way or another.
In classical time controls, chess games can easily take upwards of 4 hours, and periods of 10, 20, or 30+ minutes with NO MOVES are quite common.
It's not a game that fits easily into the mold of other mass spectator sports.
It's the same as watching a Doctor or Lawyer show.
Or show involving anything HN readers would be familiar with.
“I wrote a program that reconfigures the warp drive computational algorithms to give us 50% more power.”
“In an hour? Last I looked, that whole thing was like 50K LoC. How much did you test this before you deployed it to OUR ONLY PROPULSION OUT OF KLINGON SPACE?! Someone code reviewed it, I take it?”
<Six weeks later...>
No, no one’s going to watch that (“goddamn it, Bob, quit mixing formatting commits with functional commits!”) So the director takes a few liberties, we shut up, eat our popcorn, and pretend it’s perfectly reasonable to knock that out over lunch.
Waiting for chess boxing to make it to the big screen. Combine flawed boxing with flawed chess, maybe they cancel each other out.
(Yes, chess boxing is a real thing)
I took my girlfriend, now wife, to a party featuring chess boxing, headgear and all. She still thinks it is the coolest party we have ever been to a decade later.
Highlight, a guy playing his designated driver and getting beat on both side by a guy 50 pounds lighter.
Mystery of Chessboxing came out in the 70s, although might not be quite what you're looking for. It was an inspiration for the Wu Tang Clan, who have done a lot to promote chess and even chessboxing. I always thought it'd be fun to give it a shot but I'm bad at chess and boxing
Not sure how much Hollywood or real football the author has watched. "But the home team was wearing their away uniforms! How can the director not know which color goes on which side?"
Movies get everything wrong. And that's OK. There's a word for movies that focus on factual accuracy. They're called documentaries, and most movies are (for good or ill) not documnentaries. Most movies are trying to tell a story. They need to provide just enough realism and familiarity to engage the audience's attention, but no more. It's called "suspension of disbelief" and it's everywhere. Hobbits aren't real. Superpowers aren't real. Incredible combat or hacking skills as shown in movies aren't real. The movie White House bears little resemblance to the real version. Romance doesn't work the same way in real life as it does in movies. And all of that is OK because the story's the thing.
What an article like this illustrates is not that movie-makers are stupid, but that some people are so unbelievably egocentric that they believe what matters to them should matter to everyone else. That what seems obvious to them should be obvious to everyone, and if it's not then that's sufficient justification to look down one's nose at them. Never mind that they themselves are ignorant of many things others might consider important. It's a narcissistic behavior, not among movie makers but among movie critics.
Movies get almost everything wrong. It's story telling, if you're pretty well informed and you focus on the details, you won't enjoy it. chess, computers, health care, murder, law, driving, explosion, romance, communication, it's mostly all garbage. If they matched up and looked like the real world, it would make for a very boring movie
32 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 73.1 ms ] threadI didn’t ever look at the HAL chess board in depth enough to realize HAL made a mistake/bluff but in hindsight I feel there is no way that wasn’t foreshadowing.
It's just laziness not to do hat. Many films are just collections of outsider impressions. Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work ethics.
Unless the actual, correct mechanics of a chess game are important to the plot, then it doesn't matter and almost no one will notice, much less care. Better ROI to spend that money on hair dye for Scarlett Johannsson.
>Stanley Kubrick didn't know much about space but he had work ethics
No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.
It matters. You don't notice it consciously but all the small details add up to the movie feeling special.
> No one would put up with Stanley Kubrick nowadays.
And that's why we end up with action movies with boring action and special effect blockbusters with mediocre but expensive CGI, and drama without good characters.
Good movies with good details can be made with little money if the people who do it have passion to do it.
I want to show my character's intelligence. I show her playing a game of chess, surprising the experienced player. The chessboard isn't important. The pieces aren't important. It is a language I share with my audience. They see "this person's smart". They barely see the chessboard.
It's like computer hacking or bombs. The light turns green from red. Our heroes have downloaded the data. The red light blinks, beeping frighteningly loudly as the timer ticks to explosion while the maintenance man walks obliviously by. The audience does not question this because the beep is not a word, the light and the ticking not a phrase, the entire scene is a concept, an entire page. It describes the fact that an explosion is imminent and it will be a surprise to the victims.
The audience has trained itself to see things like this, think concept to concept, by learning the language of the filmmaker. Some are forced out from that flow for other reasons and some just because they aren't proficient in this language that millions know. But ultimately, the shared language develops and most will learn and understand.
This is the only one I wouldn't consider a gaffe. Plenty of casual chess players don't know this either. It flips the board layout (queens on the wrong side), and would probably feel wrong to a more experienced player, but it doesn't actually affect the game.
They'd only heard that "a king can't take a king.", but didn't know why.
I suspect that chess might have a similar situation, where someone who has played enough, even if they were never consiously aware of the convention, would get an off fealing if it were set up wrong. (Although, in the case of chess, it is truly a convention. With Go there is an objective sense in which one orientation is better than the other).
Either the game has an illegal board, or one player really wanted to lose and passed ~30 times while apparently still being worth discussing between the two characters.
Chess is a signifier. The players are smart, sometimes ruthlessly willing to sacrifice for the greater good. The opponents are doing battle often a mental proxy that foreshadows a physical battle to come. There is a slow tension to it. People get the high level concept and symbolism without understanding the nuances or in fact without understanding what a fork is or being able see it on the board let alone being able to "see it" coming.
Almost no one in a theater will see HAL's mistake at calling for mate in 2 rather than mate in 4. Sure, people find "easter eggs" and hidden messages like this after the fact and it is fun to debate but during the film this simply goes over people's heads.
Finally, this post suggests that the "average" game is about 79 moves.
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-the-a...
Any director will be hard pressed not to take liberties regarding play and still keep the audience engaged.
But nowadays i doubt you often encounter that kind of bugs and the speed would probably be unappealing to audience.
A minor prop in the background, where all the pieces are in the right starting positions, but the board was rotated wrong so the queens aren't on their colors.
It totally took me out of the comic book movie, man!
I'd say only very casual players or nitpickers watch the movies and say...
> "Ah ha! That is against the rules/wrong/a clear mistake! I'm so smart! Silly filmmakers for not knowing such things!".
It's the same as watching a Doctor or Lawyer show. Many of these 'mistakes' are made for dramatic effect, for better storylines, or to make the situation in some way or another.
In classical time controls, chess games can easily take upwards of 4 hours, and periods of 10, 20, or 30+ minutes with NO MOVES are quite common.
It's not a game that fits easily into the mold of other mass spectator sports.
Or show involving anything HN readers would be familiar with.
“I wrote a program that reconfigures the warp drive computational algorithms to give us 50% more power.”
“In an hour? Last I looked, that whole thing was like 50K LoC. How much did you test this before you deployed it to OUR ONLY PROPULSION OUT OF KLINGON SPACE?! Someone code reviewed it, I take it?”
<Six weeks later...>
No, no one’s going to watch that (“goddamn it, Bob, quit mixing formatting commits with functional commits!”) So the director takes a few liberties, we shut up, eat our popcorn, and pretend it’s perfectly reasonable to knock that out over lunch.
Highlight, a guy playing his designated driver and getting beat on both side by a guy 50 pounds lighter.
Or, as long as the plot and characterization are good, the actual details don't matter.
What an article like this illustrates is not that movie-makers are stupid, but that some people are so unbelievably egocentric that they believe what matters to them should matter to everyone else. That what seems obvious to them should be obvious to everyone, and if it's not then that's sufficient justification to look down one's nose at them. Never mind that they themselves are ignorant of many things others might consider important. It's a narcissistic behavior, not among movie makers but among movie critics.