Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#131

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

klmadfejno wrote: post #120

exDM69 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opponen…

Do you have any particular reason to believe that the "AI" you refer to are sophisticated ML models built over the sim, rather than hand crafted bots. You say "don't cheat" which makes me think you're referring to the bots included in the sim. Because an AI that's not built into the game shouldn't have any way to cheat. Forgive this comparison, but the ai drivers in mario kart games also cheat, but aren't particularl…

[deleted]

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#132

Post by ummonk » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:20 AM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #104

klmadfejno wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opponen…

When you say "don't cheat" do you mean "are subject to the same physics as human drivers" or "don't engage in illegal overtakes / maneuvers"?

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#133

Post by kleiba » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #124

kleiba wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But would you say the net outcome of this process was a loss or a win for you personally? I mean, I for one never played Monopoly with a computer and yet my perception of the game has certainly changed - not because of technology but because I'm an adult now. I think our stance towards everything always evolves. In return, you were able to find a new interest through this irk: programming. And I think being passionat…

> would you say the net outcome of this process was a loss or a win for you personally? Oh, absolutely. It was far beyond my abilities when I started, so I learned how to program with it. It also got me interested in compilers, as the compilers of the day didn't generate good code, Empire was slow, and I naturally assumed I could do much better :-)

As one does :)

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#134

Post by ummonk » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #41

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…

Leetcode style coding competitions. Short story writing competitions featuring specific prompts/themes. SAT test taking. Short story writing might be more subjective, but the other two are much more objective in nature, and can be easily gamified. AFAIK, AI has a long way to go before it can engage in anything that requires thinking critically.

I imagine AI could score very highly on the SAT.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#135

Post by ummonk » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

It's weird that they the start of this article seems to imply that AI has taken the joy out of chess. I guess I was only a kid for the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov days so maybe I don't know any different, but to me fundamentally chess is joyful because it's a sport. It's not about trying to be the best algorithm in the world, it's about trying to put out strong consistent performance on the spot in a game. Sure, your moves won't be as good as a computer's but that doesn't take the joy out of making them try to be as good as possible.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#136

Post by V-2 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 9:24 AM UTC

fwsgonzo wrote: post #10

throwaway4007 wrote: post #5

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…

960 chess is hugely popular now, and is even being used in tournaments - one of them being today. The only thing that is going out of style in chess is classic chess. Stalemates happen less in 960.

"Even being used in tournaments" is not exactly the same as "hugely popular".

There is some interest, and tournaments are played now and again, sure. However, it's nowhere near the popularity of classic chess, which shows no signs of "going out of style".

To provide some perspective - on lichess.org (one of the most popular sites for online chess; the one where the high-profile tournament you mentioned took place) in June there have been 70,374,749 classic games played. Chess960 accounted for 285,788 games. That's ~250 times less popular.

"Stalemates happen less in 960" - seriously? Why? Do you have any source of that claim? I could believe that draws in general are more rare (lack of opening theory makes equalizing in middle game more difficult). But why would it affect the rate of stalemates specifically?

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#137

Post by osyed1 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

I invented a game called Arimaa that could be played with a chess set but the rules were very different to make it harder for computer. I put up a $10k challenge to develop an AI that could defeat the top human players. A challenge match was run every year from 2004 to 2015 when it was finally claimed (one year before AI took over Go). There was a variant of Arimaa that I didn't go with since the games did not seem that interesting. It was the same as current Arimaa, but without any trap squares. So no pieces were captured and the game seem to take longer to finish, but I think it may have been a more strategic version (less tactics). I still wonder sometimes if that would have been helped the humans stay ahead a bit longer. I avoided that version since I was not sure if it could lead to deadlock positions. Play testing to check for flaws especially at high level play would be way to much effort for humans. It would be less effort to have an AI check the game rules. Although there is still a big cost to doing that. The AI researchers in the Arimaa community have recently developed an AI that has learned to play Arimaa through self play. They have also brought down the cost of training from about $1 million to about $1 thousand. If anyone is interested, there is a discord channel where we discuss this kind of stuff https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR

More information about the Arimaa game as well as a gameroom where you can play it available here: http://arimaa.com/

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#138

Post by monsieurbanana » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #67

monsieurbanana wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Codenames is easyfor an all-computer team; it's simply a word vector problem. There are already AIs published. Pictionary might be harder.

Ah yes, I was thinking of codenames the picture version.

Re: Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

#139

Post by fwsgonzo » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #136

fwsgonzo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

960 chess is hugely popular now, and is even being used in tournaments - one of them being today. The only thing that is going out of style in chess is classic chess. Stalemates happen less in 960.

"Even being used in tournaments" is not exactly the same as "hugely popular" . There is some interest, and tournaments are played now and again, sure. However, it's nowhere near the popularity of classic chess, which shows no signs of "going out of style". To provide some perspective - on lichess.org (one of the most popular sites for online chess; the one where the high-profile tournament you mentioned took place) i…

I am watching Hikaru Nakamura on stream every day, and he does say that 960 will grow, and classic will not. I just take his word for it.

I don't have anything against classic, and as you say, I will probably be playing it forever myself, but from a spectators point of view its more fun if there are less stalemates. There's a lot more room for errors in 960, even among GMs.