18 March 2024

Real Chess Villages

This weekly series on comic software started with an imaginary chess village in the Catskill mountains, last seen in Chess Comics - Grids and Panels (February 2024). To explore the grids and panels,

I went back to the first comic page in the series, The Chess Village (January 2024), copied the prompt I used to make the image shown in the post, and re-entered the prompt into the software.

Chess villages are not all imaginary. Not too long ago I mentioned two in the monthly news post, This Month Features a Bottom Yahoo (September 2023).

Here's a story that taught me something I wasn't aware of: 2023-09-03: Here's why this place in Kerala is called the Chess Village of India (indiatimes.com). [...] Remember Schachdorf Strobeck?

First idea to test the comic software: Does it understand German? I entered the prompt 'Schachdorf Strobeck' -- only this and nothing more -- and received a page that had nothing to do with chess. I changed the prompt to 'Chess village Strobeck', looked at a few variations of the results, and decided that the village structures on the page looked typically German and the villagers' clothing was from different periods stretching back a couple of centuries.

Second idea to test the comic software: Does it know what Kerala is? One of the half dozen pages I created is shown below.


'Chess village Kerala'
AI Comic Factory

Although I'm no expert on the country, never having visited, the village structures and the villagers' clothing look to me to be decidedly Indian. The comic software appears to have passed my simple test.

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