Tripartite Chess

In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell describes a world divided into Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania. The three superpowers, the only political, geographical and military entities on the planet, are in a state of constant war with each other. Peace is but a brief interlude between two wars. Constant conflicts from the Orwellian dystopia are not only relevant today – they actually shape the geopolitics of power or intimidation. From the bipolar period of the Cold War, we transitioned into a multipolar world, in which power relationships are regulated by completely different rules.

 In 1995, during the rehearsals for Janez Janša's (then Emil Hrvatin) production The Cell at the Mladinsko, Dario Varga was intensely immersed in chess. He suggested to the director that chess for three players be included in the performance and even prepared a suitable chessboard for it. Later, he and his colleagues – programmers from the UL Faculty of Computer and Information Science (FRI) – started working on a digital version of tripartite chess, which comes with a change in the number of possibilities, strategies and so on. The lecture performance will take place, in collaboration with the FRI research team, simultaneously with launching the game online, and will also end a long road and reunite the fellow travellers of the emerging idea. Will tripartite chess, where the relationship is transitional, allow us to change the rules of the game in the world?