Live data from Hacker News

Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

wired.com

31–40 of 139 posts

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#31

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 tha…

I actually expect computers to do much better on a game with a lot of randomness, since it then becomes statistics.

Genres that would be difficult: - any game based on recognizing images (the first example that pops in my mind is codenames)

- social deduction like werewolf

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#32
post #18

Kramnik is the one to talk about computer chess alright... I remember when I was still in school the huge scandal with him going multiple times to the bathroom in his match against then world champion Veselin Topalov (should be around 2005-2006). It caused huge outrage and upset in my native Bulgaria. On a different note I learned Xiangqi (Chinese chess) this past February and I found it quite interesting and excitin…

Analysis of the 2006 match by a CS professor:

https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/Elista2006.htm...

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#33
post #15

People have been wailing about chess being dry and full of draws and memorized openings for a century now. Capablanca wanted to swap bisbops and knights to reset opening theory, and Fischer wanted to just randomize the starting positions. I'm probably missing some other people. All of these attempts failed, because of several reasons: 1) The aforementioned problem of memorizing openings and accumulating draws only oc…

I really doubt (3) and (4). I think most chess players would agree that the draw-ish nature of high level play is boring and uninspiring, and that careful preparation of openings dozens of moves deep isn't the interesting part of the game.

I assure you that drawish games are only boring on the part of the spectators, not on the part of the players. People often struggle epically to catch that half-point, it doesn't feel boring at all when playing from the inside. There are many records of epic draws between titans where both sides played incredibly accurately - see Alekhine - Reti or Korchnoi - Topalov off the top of my mind.

And as I said, people rarely if ever prepare openings 'dozens of moves' deep at all but the absolute top level play.

At this point you have to choose if you want chess to cater to competitive chess players (who are mostly content with the rules as they are) or amateur spectators and organizes (who want to see blood).

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#34

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…

No advanced chess engine is using a hard-coded value for pieces. It's not like all Stockfish does is tally up the pieces and summing their value.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#35

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 tha…

There's Arimaa [0], designed by an AI researcher with the goal of favoring humans over AI. However on 2015 AI has overtaken humans in Arimaa.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#36

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 tha…

Randomness is not an issue. AI can already play poker at superhuman levels.

At this point, I'd say that AI can't really play collaborative games well, like Diplomacy. They also struggle in continuous games.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#37

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 tha…

Only social games that require you to amuse your fellow participants, like Apples to Apples and the like. Even then, they'll beat people with poor social skills.

Role playing games.

Random dice games, like Yahtzee, are trivial to write programs to play "prefectly" ... it's just stats and your program will avoid both wishful thinking and pattern matching traps humans fall into.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#38

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 tha…

Agglutinative grammar seems to be a difficult nut to crack, and I think Malayalam (my native tongue) is likely the most complex language in that sense. I happened to read "A quantitative analysis of the morphological complexity of Malayalam" (https://kavyamanohar.com/post/malayalam-morphological-comple...) which was published just a few days ago which describes some of the challenges, and has an interesting comparative study of various languages including Finnish and other Indian languages that are known for agglutination, inflection, and derivation from a common root.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#39

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 tha…

Any game built around word play or humour.

E.g. "I'm sorry I haven't a Clue"[1] or something like Cards Against Humanity.

Though I imagine someone is trying to apply GPT-3 to these sorts of games already.

Beyond that, any sort of narrative based RPG or exploration game (e.g. legend of Zelda) would be hard to do 'properly', i.e. without scripting a bot.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Sorry_I_Haven%27t_a_Cl...

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#40
A summary to undo the clickbait: AI is making chess beautiful by making it easy to check how new rules affect playability. Rule changes suggested in the article are:

- No castling

- Allowing self capture

- Pawns can move sideways

- Pawns can move 2 squares at a time

Post reply on HN