The idea of doing something without a defined "productive" goal might help to do things differently, discover new ways, and in the end stumble on an innovation?

Tried it, 2 comments:

1) Engine gives a piece early with: 1. b3 b6 2. Bb2 Bb7 3. e4 ??Bxg2

2) when you enter an uppercase letter it says illegal move

Edit: and here I am trying to "stumble" on an innovation and be productive again. Erh... Humans

Well, winning with checkmate in just a few moves is also possible (d4 d5 - c4 dxc4 - e4 d8xd4 and after d1xd4, d4c4, c4xc7 and c7xc8 won by checkmate).

I guess playing 'good' chess is not the point, the point is that you can play at all using regexp. (The 'move a2a3 and lose as not considered legal' is more serious then it not actually playing well).

One good way some people learned programming is by building replacements for Python builtin/standard modules functions in Python

I am in a train and I stopped reading because I was crying too much. The fact that the reminder of this story hides in plain sight, in the form of a named CSS color, makes it even more touching for some reason.