11–20 of 78 posts
In university, friends in the lab came up with, and regularly played, a 4-player version we called "Drop Chess". In this variant, there are two games going on at once asynchronously. Your partner is sitting beside you, but playing the opposite colour. Whatever pieces he captures, you can drop on the board- but not until the next turn after he captured it, and with some extra rules about where it can go. When one game…
DeepMind and Kramnik had an interesting paper a few months back exploring possible chess variants: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374 The basic idea is to train AlphaZero on proposed variants, and look for ones that have fewer draws and a smaller advantage for white.
I also notice Kramnik is the last-listed author in a group of four, the rest of whom work at DeepMind. Is this a new marketing "thing" in published corporate research?
I had an idea for a chess variant recently that I haven't had time to test yet (but maybe it already exists?): it's exactly the same as normal chess, except on your turn you can move any piece, black or white, even your opponent's king (God chess?) You still have to eliminate the other king, and a piece can still only take pieces of the opposed color, obviously. I suppose it very well might turn out to be completely…
A comment in the original article says it best: ... Changing the rules tends to neutralize acquired knowledge ... and beginning players like this because it levels the playing field.
I had an idea for a chess variant recently that I haven't had time to test yet (but maybe it already exists?): it's exactly the same as normal chess, except on your turn you can move any piece, black or white, even your opponent's king (God chess?) You still have to eliminate the other king, and a piece can still only take pieces of the opposed color, obviously. I suppose it very well might turn out to be completely…
My idea for a chess variant was giving every piece a fixed number of moves (with move-count visible at all times). After the quota of moves is finished, the piece becomes immobile except that it can still capture an enemy piece (and thus move to the captured square).
A comment in the original article says it best: ... Changing the rules tends to neutralize acquired knowledge ... and beginning players like this because it levels the playing field.
^This, but its a good thing. Something that irks me about Chess is that at the high level the conventional wisdom is to memorize openings and gambits rather than derive moves from some sort of first principals. IMO this undermines the entire point of a strategy game.