Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.
Don’t you miss the days when you manually picked a CD or a vinyl album to play, or a mixtape you carefully put together, rather than having The Algorithm play a ‘mood’ for you? The physical act of putting a cartridge into a playback device, it had something magical. The simple push of a button. No fumbling for a password, no interruption from a Windows update, no keyboard, no loading times. But, unfortunately, all your music is in the cloud nowadays. That wretched cloud, taking the fun out of music, with its stupid infinite storage. Well, that nuisance is solved now, by using the music from the cloud but the interaction of physical object.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
The Kaspirov consists of a webcam mounted in a lampshade above a physical chess board, and two buttons, all connected to a small computer. As players make moves on the board, they press the buttons as they would on a traditional chess clock. This instructs the computer to take a before and after picture of the chessboard using the overhead webcam. By comparing those images the computer can determine which move has been made, feed this into the Stockfish chess engine, which calculates the best response. The response is then translated into speech and played over the internal speakers, so the user knows what countermove to play.
[HONDENKOTS]