Zugwise: Domain-Aware Game Reconstruction for Digitizing Handwritten Chess Scoresheets

arXiv:2611.14544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Digitizing handwritten chess scoresheets has been studied as a handwriting-recognition problem: read the move in each box and check that it is legal. This framing misses the errors that matter most. A misread that yields an illegal move is loud. One that yields a legal-but-wrong move is silent, because a legality-only pipeline accepts it and reads every later move against a wrong position. We therefore treat the task as game reconstruction and present Zugwise, which repurposes computer-chess machinery (quiescence search, static exchange evaluation, pin detection) to ask not "what should be played?" but "could a human plausibly have written this?" An absurdity detector makes silent errors loud at or near where they occur, and a backward…