Aatur Mehta & Bhavya Gohil's Chess Automated has pieces moving on their own!

MUMBAI: Watching the pieces on the chess board in Harry Potter move across the board on verbal commands, one wouldn't have thought it could be a reality any time soon; but two 22-year-old engineering students based in Mumbai have just created something similar. The duo, Aatur Mehta and Bhavya Gohil, has created a 3D-printed, Internet of Things-based chess set called Chess Automated, which can be connected to the internet through Wi-Fi and accessed through a dedicated app.
“If one of the players has the board, the other can be connected through the app,“ said Mehta. Mehta and Gohil, who have created four different prototypes of the IoTbased chess set in the last two years, are currently working on the final product that they plan to launch by end of March. Chess masters, enthusiasts, students and gaming professionals across the globe are expected to lap up the product.

Kumar Saurav, a kernel engineer working at tech giant Apple's head quarters in the United States, has specially flown down to Mumbai to see how the final product is coming out. “I've been meeting them purely out of interest in what they are creating, they have the potential for international gaming companies to sit up and take notice,“ said Saurav. “The automated chess board is a first and as of now is definitely usable for the preliminary levels of world chess tournaments,“ he said.Mehta and Gohil are already working with a closed group of 500 software developers to whom they will provide software development kits, enabling them to cre ate old school board games like Ludo and checkers to mobile based games like Clash of Clans, using the same board.

“The idea first arose when Bhavya and I were thinking of creating a chess board for the visually impaired, a lot of research and discussion still going on in that department,“ said Mehta. “Our initial prototypes were there which had braille and included 3D printed coins, this generated public interest and we went on to create four prototypes for the general public.“

Chess Automated has three different modes. One of them allows users to invite a friend for a game either by entering the op ponent's user name in the app or inviting a Facebook friend to get connected to the game through the chess app.

In another called training mode, one can play against the machine, where the opponent's pieces move on their own, with 10 levels of difficulty and online coaching features. The third mode enables the user to install a chess engine software that mimics the moves of world champion chess masters such as Vishwanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen. According to Mehta and Gohil who met at K J Somaiya College of Engineering in Mumbai, it took them 5,21,579 lines of codes and about 1,482 cups of coffee to create the initial four prototypes The duo has registered the chess start up under Infivention Technologies Private Ltd and are associated with the technology business incubator at RiiDL (Research Innovation Incubation Design Lab).

They have showcased their creation to dignitaries such as RBI governor Raghuram Rajan who apparently said, “This is the smartest chess board one can play against.“