Relativistic Chess Dr Cliff Pickover wrote a large number of books. In his book Mazes for the Mind he describes, amongst many other things, a number of chess variants. One of these variants is Relativistic chess, invented by Kevin Whyte of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, together with Lee Corbin.
Examples Consider a rook that attacks a pawn, see below.
Now, the pawn cannot move. All squares to which the pawn could move are considered not to exist, so the pawn cannot move at all in this position. In the next example, the bishop attacks the pawn. However, all squares between the pawn and the bishop are considered not to exist, so the bishop is considered to be one square diagonally from the pawn, and hence the pawn can take the bishop. The rules do not state exactly the way knights move.