Not everyone - I've never even heard of 4d chess.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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It's because 3d chess is a sci-fi trope. There are a few versions, but it probably became most famous from the Star Trek version. 3d chess is ostensibly more complex, although the precise rules are usually not described in fiction, and the people who are very good at 3d chess are demonstrated to be extremely smart and tactical. Having a sci-fi character win at 3d chess is itself a trope to demonstrate that the character is a genius. In those examples, often the opponent will be overconfident and derisive of the character's strategy, only to be humbled by the loss moments later. It's a way to showing the character is cool headed, gracious in victory, and leagues ahead of his opponents.
The 4d chess meme was an escalation of a sarcastic exaggerations of the trope, like a way of saying a moron is just doing something obviously stupid is really enacting a super-strategy that you just don't understand.
3d chess is a thing. It's annoying to play.
If you think this is annoying to play, try simulating 4D chess by lining up four of these 3D chess sets
But 5D chess is really fun
That does not look fun to play.
it seems like they usually use it as a farcical example of “someone who thinks they’re smart”.
Isn't one of those dimensions time? There do be time in chess
In normal chess, time doesn't really exist in the normal way that a dimension works. Using one or more time dimensions in a game means you need to be able to control some movement along that axis. In normal chess, every piece moves one "space" (for lack of a better word) forward in time with each move.
If you want to actually see time dimensions being used in a game, try playing 5d chess with multiverse time travel
The same can be said for real life. Time is a temporal dimension, not a spatial one, so everything must only move through it in one direction, and usually does so at a constant rate. (Taking relativity into account things move more slowly through time at high velocities but that's not applicable to most of our world).
I don't know about that. In speed chess, you can lose a game just buy running out of time. Outside of speed chess the state of the board is largely dependent on a sequence of events made over time; even if movement in the 2 directions is always instantaneous, each move is a tick of the clock. Like the 2D board space, most (unique) pieces can move in multiple directions, but like time, games only move forward. Take your hand off the piece, and its irreversible: games move only one direction in time.
I'd say time is definitely a component of the game.
Time is the fourth dimension, humans do not have the ability to perceive time, we only experience the passage of time
Humans perceive time...
No we don't, we perceive the present. We perceive length width and height, and have the ability to traverse that space. We don't have currently have the ability to experience anything other than the current moment. Have you seen the movie Arrival? That's an attempt to show what truly perceiving time would be like.
We can traverse space because it's space. Everything in the universe can traverse space. Similarly, the entire universe experiences time in only one direction. Time and space are the same thing. The movie Arrival is fiction and has nothing to do with the physics here
Space and time are not the same thing, they are facets of spacetime. We are only able to traverse space because we can properly perceive it, we do not have the ability to traverse time. I obviously understand the movie is fiction, it's still a decent attempt at showing what it might be like to be able to truly perceive and traverse time. Our way to understand it (as depicted in Arrival) is the ability to actually see and experience the past and the future. You and I and no being we know about has the ability to see anything except the present.
As an example, the screen you are reading this on presents a 2d image. It does not have the ability to produce a 3d image (though we can make illusions that seem like it sometimes). That screen is constantly moving through 3d space (on spaceship Earth), but you still wouldn't say that it's presenting a 3d image because it doesn't have the ability to directly interact with that space. Just like how we are moving through time but don't have the ability to directly interact with that spacetime.
I’m over here doing 5d chess like Trump with the economy, immigration and water pressure. Basically playing myself because no one wants to follow along.
Playing with myself counts?
Sure, that’s how 5d(igits) chess is played.
3D Chess is easy, first player always wins just move your white bishop across the 3D board until the king is mated, 4D Chess is probably the same way, who can say but it is at least harder to conceptualize.
Is chess not 3D?
Edit: Still playing 1D chess 😭
A game of chess, even in the 3d world, takes part on a 2d plane
Pieces only move 2 directions 😭
You have unlocked the stylistic tool of the hyperbole.
Yeah, but this one goes to 11.
people can imagine 3d chess, whereas 4d scenarios are much harder to imagine