A Group of Students from Technical University of Berlin(TU) have built a chess game as a part of their project on Ethereum using blockchain.

According to a post by a student from the University of Berlin, the main aim of the project is to develop a real-time application using the available tools and evaluate challenges and advantages of this newly developed platform.

“The idea of the decentralized web, and in particular platforms like Ethereum, is to eliminate trust, the need for continuously running servers and maintaining the service, and a central single point of failure,” Paul Grau, CS Master student from Berlin, wrote in the blog post.

All transactions take place in blockchain and the operations are referred to as on-chain. Messages are sent through a peer-to-peer network. Ethereum works with Smart Contracts that are executed on the global blockchain, where the code is public and the messages and data are reliable. The team wrote the contracts in Solidity that supports inheritance and libraries to improve the design.

“We abstracted all code that applies to turn-based games in general, into an abstract base class. Chess is the main contract the clients interact with. Game rules (state and move validation) are in a sub-library ChessLogic. Some helper functions like signature validation (Auth) and Elo score calculation are also outsourced into libraries,” Paul stated in the post.

The team also addressed problems like the cost associated with verifying a game’s end, challenge-response procedure, lack of real-time in making completely on-chain games, among others.

The project was evaluated and overseen by the TU department of Information Systems Engineering and Dr. Christian Reitwiessner from the Ethereum foundation.

“We think that it is definitely feasible to implement decentralized games using Ethereum, but one needs a smart model to make them efficient and usable,” he concluded.