Quantum chess online

[matkovski]

Hi everybody!

I made an implementation of quantum chess, as a free public play zone, it's online already at http://q-chess.com/. You might remember - a chess variant that got some media attention 10 years ago or so, and hasn't been heard of much since. The rules in my implementation are more or less usual for quantum chess (if there's such a thing), all described in detail and with illustrations. Split and merge moves, superposition and observations, I tried to stick to the canon as closely as possible.

There's a computer opponent, you can invite somebody to play against you, and theoretically you can just get paired with somebody, like in normal chess apps.

The engine behind the computer opponent is of course not really an engine - I couldn't make use of any open-source engine because it doesn't work like with quantum chess, also I'd rather see people playing against each other than the computer. So it's just a simple minimax algorithm, with a somewhat random decision making for split and merge moves. The entire implementation is in TypeScript - the main reason for this was to be able to share the entire chess logic code between the frontend and the backend without having to translate, that would make maintenance too painful.

I'd really appreciate some feedback on how playable you find it, and whether the fancy chess variant is of any interest to anybody, or if the website feels encouraging to try it.

Cheers!