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Spawkfish: Neural network chess

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Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#11

Post by spawkfish »

adamt wrote: post #10

That was really impressive. Other than playing very accurately, I felt it played far more human-like than most computer chess engines. I've written several chess engines, and have often wondered for some time whether or not there was a chance for a more AI/pattern-driven approach. Are you using your AI just for evaluation? E.g. do you have a traditional PVS/negascout (or similar) search? Presumably an 'extreme Type C…

Thanks!

Right now I have just about as close to an "extreme type C" engine as possible. There is a neural network that maps from a board position directly to a ranked list of moves it wants to make., and a little bit of logic on top of that to reject illegal moves.

The recognition of wins/draws/losses is actually done in a layer around the engine, which doesn't understand these things yet. One of "tricks" it is vulnerable to right now is being forced into a draw by repetition, because doesn't know that is a thing to avoid.

Adding a more traditional search (augmented by the network, of course) is on my todo list, and I think it will improve the playing strength a lot. I am pleasantly surprised though, at how well it plays without any of that.

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#12

Post by mathattack »

Very nice! The only thing missing is a Back button to allow me to back out of mistakes. :-)

I believe that chess follows the state of the art in AI. The first wave of success was based on brute force of computing better than people. Now it's harnessing insight. Keep up the interesting work!

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#13

Post by agarden »

In my game[0] it played well until it hit a position where it seemed to run out of ideas. At that point, it let me take its queen for a rook. The strange thing was that it felt like playing my five year old, who also plays well until he runs out of ideas and then just sacrifices a piece.

It also missed the kind of tactics that my kid misses and played surprisingly human like mistakes. Note move 35... Rxf2, as if it forgot about the bishop because it had moved to the other end of the board. That's the kind of mistake a human player might make and computers never do.

It strikes me that this would be a great engine for my five year old to practice against. I'd love to see it added to lichess or put into a phone app for that purpose.

0. http://en.lichess.org/beOA0Q2T#68

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#14

Post by anaolykarpov »

I won (hardly, after I had 3 pawns against a knight during mid game) and I don't think I'd reach 1600 elo if I were to play in tournaments. My elo is about 1620 on chesstempo, where I solve tactics quite often (daily, during the last 8 weeks or so)

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#15

Post by dfan »

Very nice! It may be annoying, but I think at some point you really will need to keep track of castling rights and en-passant (position repetition is much harder but I don't think it is so necessary). Some evaluations depend very heavily on them.

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#16

Post by jicks »

spawkfish wrote: post #3

Hello, I'm the creator of spawkfish :) The project is still in pretty early stages, so don't expect it won't take down any strong chess players yet, but I'm hoping that with a bit of effort it will be possible for neural networks to do for chess what they have recently done for Go.

A very interesting project.

One remark: although I'm admittedly a poor chess player, I managed easily to get a draw by threefold repetition even though Spawkfish could have avoided that easily (and still destroy me). Am I correct to assume Spawkfish don't take past moves into accounts?

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#18

Post by spawkfish »

dfan wrote: post #15

Very nice! It may be annoying, but I think at some point you really will need to keep track of castling rights and en-passant (position repetition is much harder but I don't think it is so necessary). Some evaluations depend very heavily on them.

Oh, absolutely. The project is still in very early stages right now, so a lot of important pieces are still missing.

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#19

Post by zardo »

spawkfish wrote: post #11
adamt wrote: post #10

That was really impressive. Other than playing very accurately, I felt it played far more human-like than most computer chess engines. I've written several chess engines, and have often wondered for some time whether or not there was a chance for a more AI/pattern-driven approach. Are you using your AI just for evaluation? E.g. do you have a traditional PVS/negascout (or similar) search? Presumably an 'extreme Type C…

Thanks! Right now I have just about as close to an "extreme type C" engine as possible. There is a neural network that maps from a board position directly to a ranked list of moves it wants to make., and a little bit of logic on top of that to reject illegal moves. The recognition of wins/draws/losses is actually done in a layer around the engine, which doesn't understand these things yet. One of "tricks" it is vulne…

It would be interesting to see how strength and "human like play" scales with the depth of the search.

There's also a really interesting possibility in training policy networks with different attributes by using games from players with certain styles of play.

Re: Spawkfish: Neural network chess

#20

Post by jhartmann »

Seems very interesting, I really think these approaches will work rather well on a variety of games. Very exciting times. Btw, there is another already Open Source Neural Network Chess engine that might be worth exploring for similar ideas. That codebase already has a minmax search based on the network evaluation. Paper is at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.01549 Code is at: https://bitbucket.org/waterreaction/giraffe
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