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Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

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Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#101

Post by wrsh07 »

chillee wrote: post #36
keiferski wrote: post #27

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.

I don't think the collaboration is the issue, as Facebook has a paper about playing hanabi: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/building-ai-that-can-master-com...

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#102

Post by floe »

> In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces. Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more natural, than prior chess engines.

'doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces' - really? How would the world be different if it did 'know'?

I know this is kind of a nitpick, but I'm tired of all the metaphors in tech journalism that hold no informational value. I think giving a sense of false understanding is worse than just saying nothing at all.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#103

Post by ohyes »

jayparth wrote: post #79
misja111 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chess beauty now is less about flashy combinations and more about qualities of a position No it's the opposite. Since the advent of strong computer programs it has become clear that there are tactical intricacies in lots of positions that have long been overlooked by everyone, including top players. Gambits that everyone thought should not be accepted because it would give away a too strong positional advantage tur…

Well I agree with your first example. But would you call someone who wins a supposedly drawn endgame after 100 moves a tactical player or positional player? No one I know would claim that what happened on the 100th move was a tactic. It was 90+ moves of jockeying for position.

I'd call them a stubborn player.

A human can't normally predict out 100 moves of optimal play, so that's why it is jockeying instead of being part of an intricate plan.

I mean, it does bring the question, do you play a game for the experience or solely to win?

I play games for the experience, the world's best chess player probably gets a thrill from being the best and winning. Obviously both experiences are legitimate and in competitive chess, studying historical games to learn patterns has always been a thing, so who's to say that studying scenarios 'solved' by a computer is really any different? Possibly there's a little less romance because a human didn't do it on their own? It doesn't appeal to me personally, but neither did studying chess moves. It really looks like a question of scale of preparation to me.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#104

Post by exDM69 »

klmadfejno wrote: post #77
exDM69 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the answer you're looking for, but motor racing and simulations of it. Sounds counter intuitive, but despite doing fast laps when on the circuit alone, even the best AI racers have difficulty surviving a race distance in close pack racing without crashing. Roborace, the autonomous racing league in development has barely managed to put two cars on track and doing an overtake safely. A lot of money and state of the…

I get that this is true of real cars, but is it really true of simulated cars? Can you share an example?

There are no racing simulators or even games that have reasonable AI opponents that don't cheat.

I, mid-tier sim racer, have no chance against good AI in hotlapping on track in some popular sims, but all of them either yield or cause a crash that would take them to the stewards (or grave) when racing for position on the same piece of track.

Pro racing team have excellent sims these days but they don't have AI opponents.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#105

Post by 3PS »

keiferski wrote: post #27

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…

Recently there has been a growing interest in developing AI for cooperative games, like Hanabi. I believe the challenge originated from a paper by Google Brain/DeepMind [1], but several other groups have tackled it, including Facebook AI Research [2].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437021...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02318v1.pdf

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#106

Post by [deleted] »

floe wrote: post #102

> In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces. Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more natural, than prior chess engines. 'doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces' - really? How would the world be different if it did 'know'? I know this is kind of a nitpick, but I'm tired of all the me…

[deleted]

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#107

Post by awal2 »

keiferski wrote: post #27

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…

Calvinball?

https://xkcd.com/1002/

That comic is from 2012, and since then Arimaa, Go and Poker have moved solidly into the "Computers Can Beat Top Humans" category. Jeopardy would probably be there too if there was a consistent effort behind it. I think the Starcraft AI is pretty good these days, but people argue over things like APM restrictions.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#108

Post by kadoban »

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?

I think it's obvious. For capture, the definition doesn't change (it's based on no liberties). Depending on the ruleset you don't need more than capture, territory/score/winner can be defined from that.

Conceptually it's fine anyway though, territory is spaces reachable over cardinal directions via empty spaces or dead stones from only one person's living stones.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#109

Post by dhairya »

cybwraith wrote: post #100
dhairya wrote: post #86

Lichess has great variants to play. If you haven't tried crazyhorse or multi-player version bughouse, highly recommend it. In crazyhorse you can put captured enemy anywhere on the board as your own piece. Likewise in bughouse, you play with a partner (where you are opposite colors) against another team. You each play your own game against the opponent but each opponent piece you capture you can give to your partner t…

Also, if you really want to dive into the crazyhouse idea you can try learning Shogi which is effectively the Japanese version of western chess and has the drop rule and interesting promotion mechanics.

thanks for sharing!

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#110

Post by QuesnayJr »

keiferski wrote: post #27

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 think it would be interesting to look for games that are the same kind of game as chess or Go (zero-sum games without randomness), but are harder for Alpha Zero than people. Something where it's hard to learn through self-play alone.
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