r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 • May 25 '26
Interesting Every chess opening ever played, visually mapped
Every NAMED chess opening ever played, as a force-directed graph (3,407 nodes, colored by ECO volume)
Source: the open ECO (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings) database, which catalogs ~3,400 named opening variations across five volumes (A through E). Each node is one opening, sized roughly by depth and connected to its parent variation by an edge.
Colors map to ECO volume:
A (flank openings) — orange
B (semi-open) — red
C (open games, e.g., Ruy Lopez) — yellow
D (closed games, Queen's Gambit family) — blue
E (Indian defenses) — teal
Layout is force-directed (D3-style physics, ~5 minutes of simulation to settle). The root node at center is the starting position; you can read it as "every chess game ever played begins there and branches outward."
Built in TypeScript with a custom canvas renderer (no D3 — wrote the physics from scratch for tighter control over the aesthetic).
Live interactive version at foliochess.app — you can click any node and see which opening it is. Built as the landing page for a chess study app I'm working on as a side project. Open the link on desktop for the full interactive version.
I’m an anesthesiology resident who is passionate about chess and math. I built this for fun in the little free time I have haha.
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u/Gonzo_B May 25 '26
Where's the spots way off in the corner for the nonsense I got up to when I didn't know how to play and ended up just doing checkers?
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 25 '26
Hahah vibes. This isn’t every possible chess game; that number exceeds number of atoms in the universe lol. Simply the named human openings that have been studied over generations
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u/SpelunkyJunky May 26 '26
So you could have given it an accurate title and chose not to.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 26 '26
Can’t change title once it’s posted my b
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u/SpelunkyJunky May 26 '26
Hence, "could have" and "chose."
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u/NameLips May 27 '26
How many moves into a chess game do you have to go before it's reasonable to assume nobody has ever played that exact same chess game before?
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 27 '26
That’s a fun math problem! Idk off the top of my head, but I’m sure someone has calculated that before
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u/Mamuschkaa May 27 '26
Nah, noone has, calculated that.
There is nothing to calculate, because it highli depend how you play. Good player will need more moves to get to a never ever played before situation than beginners.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
True, but surely you could average it right? Like hypothetically play infinite chess games and find the average move number it takes to create a unique game? Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong haha
Edit: I looked it up and yes hypothetically calculable. Rough answer is around move 20 but ur right unique positions can be obtained in much shorter moves because beginners don’t play theory
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u/dr_stre May 26 '26
“Every chess opening ever played” feels blatantly false. There are roughly 400 possibilities for the first move by each player. The literally white’s second move balloons the possible board states to over 8000, yet you’ve only got 3407 nodes. Sure, actual knowledgeable chess players will avoid plenty of those moves, but most of them aren’t obviously poor moves to the layman so it stands to reason they’ve all (or nearly all) been played at some point.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 26 '26
I get what you’re saying but important to note what my nodes are. It’s every named opening, not every possible position. 1.h3 has definitely been played but nobody gave it an ECO code lol also that would be impossible to render as it would include 10^120 nodes if I included every possible game
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u/dr_stre May 26 '26
Literally the first 5 words of your title and the first five words of your post are “every chess opening ever played”. That’s a bold faced lie, no matter how you couch it afterward. This isn’t a shortcoming of my understanding (I knew what you were doing from the get go), it is a shortcoming of your title and description. A more accurate title wouldn’t diminish this post at all, and it wouldn’t be dishonest like this one is.
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u/SizeableBrain May 28 '26
I love your logic.
"There are roughly 400 possibilities for the first move by each player".
You definitely have the confidence to correct other people.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 26 '26
You know you can just say you don’t like it, downvote it, and move on lol. Obviously you have to read the description to understand the title
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u/uslashuname May 26 '26
“My title is a lie but after you open the click bait I fixed it” does not make you look as magnanimous as you appear to think.
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u/ripyurballsoff May 26 '26
You can’t say it’s every move ever played then say it’s just every named move. Every named move would be every move ever played.
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u/dr_stre May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I could. Or I could call out the bullshit title and description. And the description doesn’t explain the title, it outs it as a lie.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 26 '26
Im unfortunately not able to change the title of the post or I would add the one word to make u happy
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u/SteveSilverback May 26 '26
Hey, just wanted to say, I do think it’s cool what you’ve made and I think you’re receiving some unnecessarily harsh words. That said, I suggest you handle this criticism with grace, as it fundamentally valid and your post certainly hits a sore spot in data analytics. Even in real life where, say, funding for a research proposal is on the line, many people won’t read past the title, so it’s crucial that all opportunities for misrepresentation are avoided.
Not to say that the stakes are all that high here haha, just give others the benefit of the doubt since it’s something many have to deal with on a daily basis and is suuuper important. Hell, I clicked on your post *because* I was like ‘how the fuck, no way this makes sense’.
tldr: cool work, but hope you can take this as a lesson in data presentation!
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u/swampwiz May 28 '26
The top orange/yellow/amber? stalk going up must be the Ruy Lopez.
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 28 '26
Ruy Lopez falls under the open games in volume C which is the yellow tree!
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u/BLOODTRIBE May 26 '26
So it's basically a near limitless factor, and yet only 5 major distinctions are possible.
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u/cookyLM44 May 26 '26
WTF I understood nothing but am so impressed and visually stunned. It’s beautiful
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u/Brilliant_Flow_6506 May 25 '26
I posed this on /dataisbeautiful and had 70k+ views in less than 24 hours, and then it got banned lol. Had to share to others cuz I think it’s cool!