Moving visuals on this page — measured at 0.26% brightness change per frame and zero flashes per second; your reduce motion setting stops them. What moves, and how it was measured

Mathematical plates that draw themselves — prime counts, orbits and lattices rendered live rather than shipped as pictures. It runs continuously while on screen, and it pauses on its own whenever it scrolls out of view.

We measured it rather than guessing: the largest frame-to-frame change in average brightness is 0.26%, and it produces zero flashes per second against the threshold of three set by WCAG 2.3.1. That is well under the limit, and it is not a promise about any individual: if moving images are a problem for you, you should not have to assess ours.

Everything animated on this site honours your system’s reduce motion setting — turn it on in your operating system or browser and these pages stop moving, with nothing else lost. All the mathematics is in the text and the still figures.

Entry 1 of 3 in Curiosities Play with itExhaustive

The same table, as a landscape Curiosities

Every answer at once — the endgame as a surface you can walk around

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Math: fix White’s king and rook and whose move it is, and each of the black king’s 64 squares already has an exact answer in the table — forced mate in this many ply, a draw, or not a legal position at all. Those 64 answers are the bars. Why 3D: the shape of the surface is the technique. The net tightening as the white king walks in, the ridge along the edge files where Black is already lost, the flat plateau of draws around an undefended rook — none of that is legible as a column of numbers, and none of it is a metaphor: every bar is one lookup. Dev: the 3D library and the 524,288-byte table are fetched only when you press the button, never on page load — measured, not cautious: importing Three.js automatically costs ~850ms of Total Blocking Time and drops this site’s Lighthouse performance score from 99 to 66. Placement uses real buttons rather than clicking the canvas, so the whole exhibit works from the keyboard.

This is not new data and nothing here is generated on the fly: it is the same krk-tablebase.bin the chess exhibit serves, the same 524,288 bytes whose SHA-384 digest the paper (doi:10.5281/zenodo.21797908) cites, and this panel verifies that digest before it draws anything. A mismatch disables the exhibit rather than showing you a surface built from bytes it cannot vouch for. Drag to orbit; move a white piece and watch the whole landscape deform, because the answer to “how long does Black survive here” genuinely changed.

The interest behind all of this was sparked by the work of Dr Dan Rust (ORCID), especially “Queen reflections: a modification of Wythoff Nim” — an acknowledgment of inspiration, not a collaboration; the full note is on the chess page.

Nothing is downloaded until you press the button above.