Steve on Image Processing

September 5th, 2008

Escher, images, and chess

My blog has a rule, which I just now made up, that my second post during the month of September has to be totally off topic.

So you've been warned!

OK, you're still reading, so I want to ask you: Do you like to play chess?

A few years ago I was sitting in another developer's office here, staring idly at the Escher print on her wall. This print was a long, thin strip that went almost all the way around the top of the office walls. It showed many different geometric motifs merging from one form to another, in typical Escher fashion. It suddenly dawned on me that the chess pieces in one section of the print were arranged in a real chess position.

Here it is:

Escher chess board

So how about it, image processing / chess fans? What's going on in this position? Who is winning, and what are the next moves going to be?

Next time I'll return to discussing image processing, I promise.

By Steve Eddins

07:00 UTC | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink |

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4 Responses to “Escher, images, and chess”

  1. Viton replied on September 5th, 2008 at 11:50 UTC :

    Let’s give it a try:
    - RxQ : White Rook takes black Queen (White King was checked, can’t take Queen, due to Bishop)
    - Nf2 checkmate : Black Knight at f2

  2. Doug replied on September 5th, 2008 at 12:29 UTC :

    Forced ’smothermate’ is about to happen, with the added insult of threatening the queen on the final move too.

  3. Navan replied on September 5th, 2008 at 12:54 UTC :

    While black is going to win with a smothered mate, it is hard to see what moves would have led to this position. For black, the queen must have started from one of the squares in the diagonal c5-f2. White must have made a blunder to allow this to happen. If it is an artificially set up position why is there a rook at a3. Probably just to connect with the castle on the left.

  4. ismail replied on September 5th, 2008 at 20:59 UTC :

    i love chess keep posting :)
    can we make a web cam identify a chess set ? so we have a roboarm plays for real with us ? it will look fun .. it’s like the computer having grew arm and playing with you ..

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Steve Eddins manages the Image & Geospatial development team at The MathWorks and coauthored Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB. He writes here about image processing concepts, algorithm implementations, and MATLAB.

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