Articles
Articles
Longer pieces on how 3Chess works and how it was built. Written to last rather than dated. Three categories: design essays, research, and tech notes — each post is tagged.
Design essays
Research — in progress
Formal write-ups of the axiom system, the rating math, and the kingmaker proof. Each will ship at /articles/<slug> with ScholarlyArticle schema; some will be cross-posted to OSF or arxiv when polished.
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Research · TBD
The axiom system of 3Chess
24 axioms (A1–A24) and 15 theorems (T1–T15) that determine the game. Board, pieces, moves, capture, check, elimination, territory scoring, draw resolution — all proved from the smallest set of rules that makes the game work.
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Research · TBD
PL-Elo Exact for N-player games
A closed-form rating system for 3-player placements: Plackett–Luce expected scores on Elo's scale, with σ tracking and placement-only updates. Why we built it instead of using TrueSkill or Glicko.
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Research · TBD
The 120° symmetry of the 3Chess board
Why a hexagonal board is the only shape that lets three players start on a structurally identical position, and what the rotation rot₁₂₀(q, r) = (r, −q−r) means for piece reachability across the three colour classes.
Tech notes — in progress
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Tech · TBD
The hex chess renderer in Rust + WebGPU
Rendering the 127-cell hex board, 6 piece meshes (Bézier-lathe profiles), and the post-process vignette with wgpu / WGSL. The WASM build that ships the same renderer to the browser.
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Tech · TBD
Three-way AI · paranoid search for a 3-player game
Why paranoid search keeps alpha-beta pruning effective where maxn cannot, what the 3Chess evaluator looks at, and the engineering of running the search in a Web Worker without blocking the main thread.
Items marked TBD are in progress. Follow on itch.io, X or check back.
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