Random Chess Move Generator

What a random chess move is good for

Not much, if you are trying to win. That is worth saying at the top.

What it is good for is teaching notation to somebody who is learning, generating drills, running a joke game where you must play whatever you are given, or settling an argument about the first move.

A few of the moves in here:

• e4
• Nf3
• d4
• Bb5
• O-O
• Qxd8+
• exd5
• h6

Every one of those is a complete sentence in a written language that is about three hundred years old, understood identically by tens of millions of people who share no spoken tongue. That language nearly did not happen, and it lost badly before it won.

Getting a move

1. Press Generate for one move.
2. Ask for several to build a drill, or a nonsense game.
3. Type into Contains to pull a family: everything with an N in it gives you knight moves, everything with an x gives you captures.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these moves come from

Moves written in standard algebraic notation, gathered and checked by hand across pawn moves, piece moves, captures, checks and castling. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Chess contains no luck at all

Stop and notice how strange a random chess move is.

There is no dice in chess. No shuffle, no hidden hand, no fog. Both players see the entire position, always, and nothing on the board is decided by anything other than a choice. Game theorists call this perfect information with no chance element, and very few games have it. Draughts has it. Go has it. Almost nothing else you play does.

This has a strange consequence. In principle, chess is already decided. From the starting position, with both sides playing perfectly, the game is either a win for White, a win for Black, or a draw. That fact exists now. Nobody knows which one it is, and probably nobody ever will, but the answer is not waiting to be created. It is waiting to be found.

Everything that makes chess feel alive, the tension, the blunders, the sense that anything could happen, comes from the gap between what is true and what we can see. Randomness is not part of the game. It is only ever a description of our ignorance.

Which is why a random move generator is, strictly speaking, a joke played on chess. And also why the moves needed writing down in the first place. In a game with no luck, everything that happens is somebody's fault, and worth recording.

The man from Aleppo who taught chess to write

In 1737 a book of chess problems appeared in Paris. Its author was Philipp Stamma, born in Aleppo, who had come to Europe and would eventually settle in London.

Inside that book was something nobody had quite managed before. Stamma gave every square on the board a permanent name. The files ran a to h across the board, the ranks ran 1 to 8 up it, and a square was its file letter and its rank number, always, from a fixed point of view. He wanted a notation that would work in any language, and he very nearly built the one we use today.

The differences are trivial. He wrote p for a pawn move, and he named a piece by the file it started on rather than by its initial. Beyond that, if you can read a modern chess book you can read Stamma.

What he had actually invented was a coordinate system for a game. Not a description of what happened, but an address for every point on the board, so that a move is nothing more than a name and a destination.

How the worse system won, and held on for two centuries

Twelve years after Stamma's book, a Frenchman named François-André Danican Philidor published his own, and he wrote his moves differently. He described them from the point of view of the player to move. The king's fourth square. The king's bishop's third.

That system has a fatal quality: every square has two names, depending on whose turn it is. The square White calls his king's fourth, Black calls his own king's fifth. It is the same square. You must keep two boards in your head, one for each player, and mentally flip between them.

Then, in 1747, Philidor and Stamma played a match, and Philidor won it comfortably.

Read what follows from that, because it is the point of this whole page. Philidor's victory made Philidor's book famous. His book carried his notation. English chess literature followed the famous man, and so the English speaking world spent the next two hundred and thirty years writing chess in a system where every square had two names, because the man who used it had been the better player.

Meanwhile the Germans and the Russians quietly adopted Stamma's coordinates and got on with it.

The English language holdouts only gave way in the 1970s. In 1981 the international federation stopped recognising the descriptive system altogether, and Stamma finally won an argument he had been losing since he lost a chess match in 1747, twenty six years after his own death.

What happens to a game once you can write it down

Here is what notation actually bought.

A game you can record is a game that accumulates. Every idea anybody has ever had, in a serious game, anywhere, is preserved exactly. Not remembered, not described. Preserved, move for move, and reproducible on any board by anybody.

Nothing else in ordinary human life is like this. We do not have the complete record of every conversation, every negotiation, every argument that great minds have had. We have the complete record of their chess.

That is why a modern club player can casually know things that took the strongest player of the nineteenth century a lifetime to work out. It is not that we are cleverer. It is that we inherited the notebook.

And the notebook is still open. Chess games are now stored in a plain text format that any computer can read, and the same coordinates Stamma chose in 1737 are the ones the engines use. His idea outlived his reputation, his opponent, his language, and the technology of writing itself.

Questions people ask

How do I read algebraic notation?

The letter is the piece, the square is the destination. N is knight, because K is taken by the king. A pawn move has no letter at all, just the square. An x means a capture, a plus means check, and O-O means castling, drawn as the rook and king moving.

Why do old chess books look like gibberish?

Because they are written in the descriptive system. P-K4 means the pawn goes to the king's fourth square, which in modern terms is e4 if White is moving and e5 if Black is. Same words, different squares. It is not that hard, but it is a tax you pay on every single move.

Are random moves ever legal?

A move drawn from a list is only legal in the positions where it is legal, which is the whole difficulty. Playing a truly random legal move requires knowing the position first, and a program that does so plays at roughly the level of a distracted child.

Is chess solved?

No, and it is unlikely to be. Positions with seven or fewer pieces on the board have been solved completely by computers, which now know the perfect result of every one of them. The starting position has thirty two, and the gap between seven and thirty two is not a gap anybody expects to close.

References

1. Algebraic notation, on Stamma's 1737 system and FIDE's 1981 decision to stop recognising descriptive notation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_notation_(chess)
2. McCrary, R. J. The History of Chess Notation, on the Stamma and Philidor rivalry and its effect on English chess literature. https://sites.pitt.edu/~schach/News/PA/Shippensburg_March_2003.pdf
3. Chess notation, on the descriptive system and the twelfth century coordinate manuscript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_notation