Writing Challenge Day 2: Low motivation, high chess accuracy

Writing today is already more challenging than yesterday. I’ve been sitting at my desk facing total brain fog, lacking the motivation to sort my ideas out. Why am I doing this? Where should I start? Hmm... fuck it, let's play chess. But after one win, I didn't enter an addictive rematch loop to escape from my writing duty, as often happens. Instead, I thought - why do I love chess? Why am I playing on lichess? How could crypto improve the platform? How could we bring chess to crypto socials like Farcaster? There are enough interrogations here to get started.

If you've read yesterday's post (Day 1), you should know the context of how I got into chess: a boring class of "entrepreneurial" bullshit somewhere in 2019. I generally think no theoretical business learning can beat hard skills with a building habit. But that's for another story. Chess amazed me in the first place because of its scientific nature: a game with incomplete but perfect information. These terms borrowed from game theory mean that you can't know your opponent's strategy, but both players have access to the same level of information: the state of the board. This type of game is conceptually more difficult to imagine and requires one player to outwit the other by making them misinterpret one's decisions. Chess is a psychological war. Another fascinating aspect of chess is its relation to infinity. Claude Shannon calculated 10^120 chessable (possible) games while trying to brute force a solution. It's more than the number of atoms in the universe after physicists' cosmological estimation (10^80). So, how could computers suggest the best move, like the arrow in the image below, if they have to evaluate an infinite number of situations (i.e., board states)? Well, they have strategies to discard most of them.

The values of free software are closely tied to crypto. I can’t envision a closed-source crypto project succeeding, at least in the B2C industry. Crypto ideology goes a step further than the anti-capitalist views of open source. It is more libertarian-focused: it provides financial and privacy tools for the masses to escape the state's control. Lichess is open-source and founded by Thibault Duplessis (ornicar), describing himself on Git Hub as the "Maker of lichess.org, a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists.". How can we not love this man? Lichess tastes the French Revolution and is an excellent alternative to chess.com, a $500M business with the same features. Respect. The cherry on the cake is the tech behind Lichess: Scala, an elegant and powerful statically typed functional language targeting the JVM. This technology resonates deeply with me, so I might dedicate an entire article to it in the upcoming days.

I think you got it: I love this project, but how could crypto improve it? Great product ideas often come from broken user experiences, and it's easier to have the former when you encounter the latter. Putting aside these typical business school platitudes, I'd love Lichess to go onchain for at least two reasons: (i) username updateability and (ii) collecting iconic games.

• My lichess username comes from the name of my Legendary World of Warcraft Orc from the Lich King era. Definitely not my proudest invention. I remember being 12 and randomly typing on my keyboard to obtain this weird assemblage of letters deprived of any meaning: "Rutiyu". Lichess doesn't allow me to update this username from another age. I'd love to connect with a wallet and claim ownership of an ENS or a Farcaster ID to replace it. Moreover, I bet this onchain integration would be easier than allowing native username mutation. They could add a link in their database, just like an alias, and rely on "Rutiyu" for all the internal actions. But I'm just speculating here.

• Some games are iconic, at least for the ones who played them. I'd love to collect them onchain as NFTs directly from the lichess interface. The thumbnail image could be a beautiful screenshot of the checkmate position stored on IPFS. 

Have you heard about Farcaster, the "sufficiently decentralized social protocol"? I'm sure you have.
It's one of the hottest crypto projects at the moment. The key promise is to decouple the social graph of a Twitter-like social network from its client applications. Users own their data to a certain degree. Censorship happened at the client level, not at the protocol level. Suppose @dwr bans me from Warpcast because I keep posting nudes or scams in other users’ channels. In that case, I can still use a different client like Firefly or Supercast that might have different policies, like being nudes friendly, and interact with my network from there.

The Farcaster team recently shipped frames that let developers turn any cast (post) into an interactive web3 application. It makes signing transactions from the comfort of your social app super straightforward, and from there springs the opportunity of integrating lichess. I'd love to send a challenge to a lichess username from a frame on Warpacst and use the lichess javascript SDK to operate the game. This challenge could handle stakes to spice up the integration, and a smart contract could act as an escrow until the game ends. Irwin - the open-source protector of lichess from all chess players villainous - could detect, slash, and ban cheaters.

Ideally, as stated earlier, the lichess username would resolve to a Farcaster ID. I could forget about it forever and challenge my friends directly from my favorite social network.

I'd love to see someone (me?) work on the above integration. Could we call it Farchess? Probably. It would be worth asking the community's opinion, but let me finish this writing challenge beforehand…