i’ve always been attracted to the force of thousands of anonymous users shaping the outcome of something online. chessvote.com was my attempt at bringing this force to the chess world.

chessvote.com kept track of several simultaneous chess matches. move timers were generally a few hours long. during that time, anyone could vote for the move they thought should be made. once the timer was up, the move with the most votes was performed.

it was new at the time, and traffic never really took off. if it had, i think it would have been really interesting to see the kind of matches that evolve when the internet plays against itself.

like most of my other web stuff, it was written in php. it took about 20 hours (non continuous) to get to a functioning state. writing a chess engine is a little more involved than i had originally thought.

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