Chess Engines: How to Make Chess Accessible to the General Public / Game of Phones: The Competition over Devices and Children's Social Development

In 2020-21, as the coronavirus pandemic kept people at home, chess surged in popularity. Due to technical or cost constraints, however, many digital tools that chess players may value were inaccessible to them. As an accessible alternative, an application is therefore proposed. It would run in Docker, a chess engine and user interface, and function either locally or deployed to the web. Using a series of algorithms for building efficient tree data structures, the engine can be incrementally improved over time.
To increase advertising revenues, most social media companies seek to maximize user engagement. User engagement techniques can favor harmful content and promote compulsive use, to the detriment of all users. Many parents and psychologists agree that such policies can make social media harmful to children. Children who use social media are vulnerable to social media addiction, body image anxieties, and political extremism. To resist change, social media companies typically do not deny the risks. Instead, they publicize their parental control tools, arguing that because the tools empower parents to protect their children, parents, not companies, are ultimately responsible for their children’s social media use.