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Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

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Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#71

Post by Someone »

lisper wrote: post #55
Someone wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun idea, but what happens when a player submits an illegal move that becomes legal only when taking the opponents move into account or that’s only legal before the opponent’s move? Say a rook moving from a1 to a3 while an opponent’s knight moves from or into a2? Also, if you are going to write down moves, you can allow the players to move all of their pieces, too, like in Diplomacy. A queen could capture a pawn next…

I think I would specify that a move has to be legal when at the start of the move, i.e. while it is being written down.

So, a king could move into a checkmate, even if it wasn’t in check at the start of the turn. Seems fine to me, but I think it would be funnier if a king in check could stay put, with the player in check betting that the opponent’s next move will end the check.

There also is the possibility of simultaneous checkmate.

Another edge case is pawns taking pieces. Could a pawn move diagonally into a square being vacated by the piece standing there? Could two pawns simultaneously not take out each other (say by the simultaneous moves d4×e5 and e5×d4)?

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#72

Post by ggambetta »

lisper wrote: post #54
ggambetta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try Diplomacy :)

That's where the idea came from :-) But I played Diplomacy almost 40 years ago (God help me), I wasn't sure if it was still a thing.

Definitely still a thing! I've picked up recently, there's a couple of websites where you can play for free. I've played in playdiplomacy.com.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#73

Post by lisper »

Someone wrote: post #71
lisper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would specify that a move has to be legal when at the start of the move, i.e. while it is being written down.

So, a king could move into a checkmate, even if it wasn’t in check at the start of the turn. Seems fine to me, but I think it would be funnier if a king in check could stay put, with the player in check betting that the opponent’s next move will end the check. There also is the possibility of simultaneous checkmate. Another edge case is pawns taking pieces. Could a pawn move diagonally into a square being vacated by…

> a king in check could stay put, with the player in check betting that the opponent’s next move will end the check.

Yes, that was part of the intent. There is game theory in play as well as chess strategy.

> There also is the possibility of simultaneous checkmate.

Yes, or even simultaneous king capture without checkmate(s) resulting in a draw.

Or you could adopt a quiddich-like rule and say that if the kings are simultaneously captured then the game is decided by the sum total of the remaining value of the pieces on each side.

> Could a pawn move diagonally into a square being vacated by the piece standing there? Could two pawns simultaneously not take out each other (say by the simultaneous moves d4×e5 and e5×d4)?

I would say yes and yes.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#74

Post by 29athrowaway »

mikk_w wrote: post #65
29athrowaway wrote: post #7

Promotions are a big part of shogi, and part of what makes it fun. You do not start with the most powerful pieces, you have to earn them through promotions. Also, the promotion area (the enemy camp) is larger. This article doesn't capture that aspect of the game... which is necessary if you are looking for an ideal chess variant. You may also want to take a look at some mechanics of Xiangqi, another chess variant.

I agree that promotions are an important part of what makes Shogi work so well. As I mentioned in the article, I see there are two ways to make drop chess work - either build a game around weak pieces, or make the king more nimble. I think Shogi has perfected the first approach. I love Shogi. I don't want to reinvent Shogi. But there's something that I love about Western Chess: I love knights, bishops, rooks, and que…

I do not like that pawns move forward but capture diagonally, or en-passant. I also do not like the teleportation that takes place during castling. I do not like that many pieces can cross the entire board (bishops, rooks, queens), and that they're so many of them.

I think shogi already took care of many of the things I do not like about western chess.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#75

Post by beyondCritics »

kemitchell wrote: post #15
Imnimo wrote: post #2

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.

Interesting paper concept. I'll read it. 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?

Did you read the paper? It is quite long, mainly because of Kramnik's manual analysis of some selected games. It appears his role was to explore game playing factors, which are hard to catch with statistics.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#76

Post by keiferski »

mikk_w wrote: post #68
keiferski wrote: post #49

I’ve been wondering if there is a way to change chess so that AI is no longer the obvious winner. Chess itself went through a variety of rule changes throughout its history, so this wouldn’t be completely novel. Off the top of my head - somehow creating new rules, especially socially-dependent or open-ended ones, on demand might work. I asked a similar question a few months ago and got some interesting answers: https…

Arimaa is a game that was designed to be hard for AI to master. Its rules are quite different from chess, but it has a lot of chess in its DNA. It has since been solved, but it survived 11 years with a $10,000+ prize for the first computer to beat a human champion. Now that we are in the age of AlphaZero, I think we are close to the bottom of the barrel of ways to design games to hinder AI. I would be surprised if I…

This is interesting, thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#77

Post by esrauch »

seabass wrote: post #29
esrauch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a 'fog of war' variant where you can only see the squares that a piece of yours could move to.

--that a piece of yours could attack, I believe, not move to

I just checked and if you want to be technical it's "move to normally, could move to during a capture if a piece was there, or holds a piece you could capture".

Pawns are the only case that where those three are different but they see all three:

- directly in front (move)

- forward-diagonal (normal attack)

- horizonal exactly only in the case of a enemy pawn moved to that square last turn that can be taken en-passant (capture). That square goes dark if you move another piece.

Re: Ideal Chess – drop chess perfected?

#78

Post by xiaodai »

mikk_w wrote: post #42
xiaodai wrote: post #5

Go baduk weiqi is still worth looking into for chess players.

Author of the linked post here. I've actually done more Go than Chess in the past 6 months - I enjoy it a lot. My dream is to find a game that captures what I love about both Go and Chess. I've seen many examples of how not to make that game, but my mind turns back to that question every now and then.

Allow to move a piece in go
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