Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
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Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
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Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#2Excerpt:
Modern chess is the culmination of centuries of experience, as well as an evolutionary sequence of rule adjustments from its inception in the 6th century to the modern rules we know today.
While classical chess still captivates the minds of millions of players worldwide, the game is anything but static.
Many variants have been proposed and played over the years by enthusiasts and theorists.
They continue the evolutionary cycle by altering the board, piece placement, or the rules—offering players "something subtle, sparkling, or amusing which cannot be done in ordinary chess
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#3Great read.
Interesting variations to the rules. Here's an annotated quote:
"The nine changes considered in this study are listed in Table 1. No-castling and No-castling (10) involve a full and partial [not allowed during first 10 turns / 20 plies] restriction on the castling rule. Pawn-one-square, Semi-torpedo [can move 2 squares on 2ed and 3rd ranks], Torpedo [can move 2 squares], Pawn-back [up to your 2ed rank, don't count against 50 limit], and Pawn-sideways involve changes to pawn mobility. Self-capture chess allows players to also capture their own pieces. Finally, Stalemate=win recasts stalemate as a win for the attacking side, rather than a draw."
Do any chess games support these modes or is these possible to play today?
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#4The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main complaints about chess either, which as far as I can tell are:
1) It’s too drawish
2) It requires too much memorization to learn
Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of people actually love about chess, which is that chess as a body of knowledge is continually growing forever. You can learn something about chess today by reading Morphy’s games from the 19th century, and any time you play or watch a game today you’re most likely going to see a brand new game of chess, that nobody’s ever seen before (and if it’s a top level game it could be a very interesting brand new game of chess).
I personally doubt tinkering with mechanics has any improvements to offer chess, and I don’t think most people actually want the most frequently complained about “problems” with the game to actually be fixed.
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#5Great read. Interesting variations to the rules. Here's an annotated quote: "The nine changes considered in this study are listed in Table 1. No-castling and No-castling (10) involve a full and partial [not allowed during first 10 turns / 20 plies] restriction on the castling rule. Pawn-one-square, Semi-torpedo [can move 2 squares on 2ed and 3rd ranks], Torpedo [can move 2 squares], Pawn-back [up to your 2ed rank, do…
Software rendering of these rules might lag a bit—but if you have dedicated hardware, it should be possible to make this work.
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#6Great read. Interesting variations to the rules. Here's an annotated quote: "The nine changes considered in this study are listed in Table 1. No-castling and No-castling (10) involve a full and partial [not allowed during first 10 turns / 20 plies] restriction on the castling rule. Pawn-one-square, Semi-torpedo [can move 2 squares on 2ed and 3rd ranks], Torpedo [can move 2 squares], Pawn-back [up to your 2ed rank, do…
“Variants such as Torpedo, Pawn-sideways, No-Castling, and Self-capture are now a reality, playable on a major chess portal such as chess.com.5 On the back of the initial evidence, the first No-castling tournament was held in Chennai in January 2020.” - one of the last few paragraphs in the article
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#7Great read. Interesting variations to the rules. Here's an annotated quote: "The nine changes considered in this study are listed in Table 1. No-castling and No-castling (10) involve a full and partial [not allowed during first 10 turns / 20 plies] restriction on the castling rule. Pawn-one-square, Semi-torpedo [can move 2 squares on 2ed and 3rd ranks], Torpedo [can move 2 squares], Pawn-back [up to your 2ed rank, do…
“Variants such as Torpedo, Pawn-sideways, No-Castling, and Self-capture are now a reality, playable on a major chess portal such as chess.com.5 On the back of the initial evidence, the first No-castling tournament was held in Chennai in January 2020.” - one of the last few paragraphs in the article
Oh thanks! I skimmed some paragraphs, must have missed that. Gonna check that out.
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#8A nice companion piece here, showing how AlphaZero learns compared to human Chess history - https://en.chessbase.com/post/acquisition-of-chess-knowledge...
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#9These changes don't change complexity
of the game much, while chess can be altered
to have much higher branching factor
and move complexity. Check:
https://github.com/FrozenVoid/Game-Design-DB/blob/main/Board...
Re: Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
#10The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main complaints about chess either, which as far as I can tell are: 1) It’s too drawish 2) It requires too much memorization to learn Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of peopl…
> The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are,
Classical, white wins 18/1000 and black wins 3/1000 with 1 minute per move. Semi-torpedo, this is 27 & 6/1000, so it's both less imbalanced and less drawish than classical chess with very high level play.
(White's 6x advantage is reduced to 4.5x).
It also has a slightly richer set of interesting moves per position on average.
A bit more imbalance in other variants isn't a catastrophic problem, either, IMO, with tournaments consisting of multiple games and equal numbers of games as white and black.
Your other point-- yes, any benefits of tinkering with the rules needs to be balanced against what it does to the traditions and continuity of the history of the game.