SCP-177: Checkmate

SCP-177: Checkmate SCP-177 is a chessboard that plays back, gets better, and has a serious problem with cheating. You play white. Black moves itself. You can't shove its pieces somewhere else, and it celebrates when it wins. The tests turn into a rivalry between the board and Dr. Calib. Early on, he enjoys their games enough to want a rematch. Later, he accuses it of cheating with en passant. The recording shows the move was perfectly legal. Meanwhile, its play keeps improving. It narrowly loses to Deep Blue, later defeats a world champion, and beats Rybka in twenty-five moves. Then Calib builds a computer specifically to beat it, including the ability to cheat. That goes about as well as you'd expect. The computer moves its queen like a knight, and an unseen force throws the board into the computer, destroying vital circuitry. So now there's an explicit rule against cheating. The funny part is watching this become personal for the researcher. He starts out delighted to have a good opponent and ends up building a machine that can break the rules because winning has become that important. The chessboard, meanwhile, was playing fairly. [Read SCP-177](https://t.co/rVG1Vr58x6)