Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 139 posts

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#21

Post by luhem7 »

neolog wrote: post #19
loxias wrote: post #16

I would love to see AlphaZero play go on other manifolds than the plane. I and some friends attempted to play 3-space go, toroidal go, and go with other mathematical roadblocks a long time ago. It was fun for a few weeks, and we even discovered some interesting properties about where life can exist on a torus, but a computer could do much better. And I'd love to just see the answers.

How do you define "surrounded" on a torus?

A toroidal plane wraps around left to right and also top to bottom. The left and right edges are connected and the top and bottom edges are connected.

I would imagine the definition of surround would have to be modified accordingly.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#22

Post by joelthelion »

neolog wrote: post #19
loxias wrote: post #16

I would love to see AlphaZero play go on other manifolds than the plane. I and some friends attempted to play 3-space go, toroidal go, and go with other mathematical roadblocks a long time ago. It was fun for a few weeks, and we even discovered some interesting properties about where life can exist on a torus, but a computer could do much better. And I'd love to just see the answers.

How do you define "surrounded" on a torus?

The actual Go concept is 'no liberties'. That works on any topology.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#23

Post by me_me_me »

in3d wrote: post #17

There are promising chess variants where all draws are eliminated: no black castling or no black short-castling Armageddon (draws are counted as wins for black). I wish they would test them instead of their picks - they are still chess unlike some variants they tested, which are probably too radical if you want to attract current chess players.

I got back to chess few years back, and following scene a bit.

The classical long for chess is basically dead. Its boring, with majority draws (close to solved game - de0incentivizing aggressive play). I am glad there is shift towards shorter time formats.

Shorter time control creates more urgency and allows to play subpar moves to throw off your opponent. Its much more interesting to observe.

Armagedon rules are being used now as tie breakers and there is a lot more discussion about changes/rules tweaks.

So who knows what next year will bring.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#24

Post by hartator »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #20

I believe its very much the arbitrary numbers we gave to pieces that we coded into our brute forced chess AIs that has allowed new chess AIs to be better. As this article hinted, its understanding of piece value fluctuates based on the rules of the game but also as the game changes. Alpha Zero makes sacrifices human players wouldn't because they're too wedded to the idea that a queen is 9, a rook is 5 and a knight/bi…

I thought queen was 8, rook 5, and bishop/knights 3?

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#26

Post by FeepingCreature »

WalterBright wrote: post #11

When I was in college, a Monopoly game appeared on the DEC-10. Playing that for a while completely ruined the game for me. Then someone wrote a bot to play ADVENT, which ruined that, too. My ability to play chess declined precipitously after I learned how to program, because while thinking of my next move I'd always digress into how to design a program to do the work for me. I originally wrote the Empire game because…

> I originally wrote the Empire game because it was unbearably tedious to play manually, but the computer took care of the tedium and what was left was the fun.

This is also the premise behind Factorio.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#27

Post by keiferski »

Question for those knowledgeable on AI: what sort of game would be easy for a human to understand, but difficult or impossible for a computer to play or easily defeat humans? I imagine one based purely on randomness, like dice, would be one.

I remember reading somewhere that languages like Finnish and Hungarian are difficult for computers to parse, [1] due to their agglutinative grammatical structure. Not sure if that is actually true, but it seems an interesting starting point.

[1] Discussion sort of about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572261

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#28

Post by ndand »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #20

I believe its very much the arbitrary numbers we gave to pieces that we coded into our brute forced chess AIs that has allowed new chess AIs to be better. As this article hinted, its understanding of piece value fluctuates based on the rules of the game but also as the game changes. Alpha Zero makes sacrifices human players wouldn't because they're too wedded to the idea that a queen is 9, a rook is 5 and a knight/bi…

Stockfish evaluates the position of the entire board, e.g. mobility of pieces, how much opposing space they control, etc. But still, the evaluation function is hardcoded and weaker than AlphaZero.

Recently Stockfish introduced neural network evaluation.

https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/625828091343896577/intr...

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#29

Post by PavleMiha »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #20

I believe its very much the arbitrary numbers we gave to pieces that we coded into our brute forced chess AIs that has allowed new chess AIs to be better. As this article hinted, its understanding of piece value fluctuates based on the rules of the game but also as the game changes. Alpha Zero makes sacrifices human players wouldn't because they're too wedded to the idea that a queen is 9, a rook is 5 and a knight/bi…

I think that stockfish does more than calculate piece values, it evaluates the strength of positions as a whole and is capable of performing some insane sacrifices itself.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#30

Post by jka »

This is a slight tangent to the article, but in the hope HN readers will find this as fascinating as I have recently...

There's a three-way battle developing between AlphaZero (as described in the article, courtesy of DeepMind), LCZero[5] (derived from LeelaZero[1] -- an open source interpretation of the same principles as AZ), and Stockfish[2] (a long-standing open source chess engine that has recently begun including neural network support).

The 'Top Chess Engine Championship'[3] seems to be a good way to follow the latest news; they also stream matches live on their website[4] (it is quite an information-dense site).

You can play against an up-to-date implementation of Stockfish in your browser -- no registration or signup required -- at https://lichess.org

[1] - https://zero.sjeng.org/

[2] - https://stockfishchess.org/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship

[4] - https://tcec-chess.com/

[5] - https://www.lczero.org/

Edit: correct LeelaZero -> LCZero

Post reply on HN