Chess has never had any appeal to me, but recently my brother bought a chess set, and I realized that the board can be represented as an 8×8 matrix, and each type of of piece as a number from 0 to 6, the 6 pieces, and the empty square. So I've been looking for some info on the internet, but I haven't found too much. Do you know if anybody has made some research on this, or published books, or articles. Matrices have applications on stochastic processes, optimization, best-decision taking, so wouldn't it be possible to create models for best moves according to a situation, and such?
What do you think?
Best Answer
Taking a bit of a stab in the dark... It seems to me unlikely that matrices could be used in the way you describe for chess. The basic operations on matrices are addition, multiplication by numbers and multiplication of matrices. Just to take addition, it would mean something like this: if one position has a king on a1 and another has a queen on a1 then "adding" them gives a position with a bishop on a1 (for example). This doesn't really seem to make any kind of sense in terms of actually playing chess.
On the other hand, linear algebra has huge applications (as you have mentioned) and I wouldn't be surprised if matrices are used in chess programming. But not, I think, in the way you have described.