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Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

humanchess.abcd.party

41–50 of 243 posts

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#41
post #17

"" If the chess engine suggests the opponent’s move, the claimant wins the game. If not, their opponent wins instead. "" How? Top engine move changes with evaluation time. Longer the wait, better the move.

You can make the engine choice deterministic just by choosing an evaluation time and settings.

That wouldn't work as the speed at which the engine runs is not deterministic.

Engines can be configured to limit search to a certain depth, which will produce a result after every branch has reached the limit or been pruned. That process will vary in time but be deterministic.

Recent neural based engines tend to not be deterministic, especially if ran multi-threaded.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#42
The second move is too early.

I've played and lost enough games against engines that I would say I've learnt some of the "best moves" (as suggested by the engine, when analysing why I lost) in almost every "usual" scenario for my "usual" openings all the way to maybe the fourth move. There are a lot of variations, but even past the fourth move I still remember some engine suggestions based on my own errors.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#43

Is this called "Human" chess because top engine moves would not be humanely possible? I have a low chess rank (900 on chess.com), yet on an okay game 25% of my moves will be "top engine moves": https://i.imgur.com/TGaDtzr.png I could even easily find games where I had 50% of top engine moves. It's really not exceptional. Often the top engine move is the only good move and that only good move is pretty obvious.

It is "Human" chess because you win by forcing your opposition to mess up, instead of pursuing perfection yourself.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#44
post #13

A simpler variation, that needs no computer to settle disputes, is Veto Chess. In Veto Chess you get one chance per game to veto your opponent's last move, and force them to make a different one. This shares with Human Chess the property that you can win by checking the king such that the response is forced. It may also serve as a handicap system in games between players of widely different strength, where only the w…

Ok, I take your protected queen with my queen and veto you taking mine on next move.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#46
So basically chess with landmines. Every move will be contested (because why wouldn't you? there are no downsides and only upsides)

So every move you make (I'll be watching you) could end up being the top move. Even if you run the chess engine yourself to decide what not to play, you're still at risk of bad luck because you happen to run the chess engine on a faster or slower machine than the person checking for the top move, and they diverge.

EDIT: Never mind, contesting and getting it wrong causes you to lose - that's the downside.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#47
post #13

A simpler variation, that needs no computer to settle disputes, is Veto Chess. In Veto Chess you get one chance per game to veto your opponent's last move, and force them to make a different one. This shares with Human Chess the property that you can win by checking the king such that the response is forced. It may also serve as a handicap system in games between players of widely different strength, where only the w…

I wonder how well this generalizes to other abstract strategy games like go or checkers.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#48

So basically chess with landmines. Every move will be contested (because why wouldn't you? there are no downsides and only upsides) So every move you make (I'll be watching you) could end up being the top move. Even if you run the chess engine yourself to decide what not to play, you're still at risk of bad luck because you happen to run the chess engine on a faster or slower machine than the person checking for the…

If you contest a move and you're wrong you lose the game.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#49
It's a cool concept but the first naive thought that comes to mind for me is that white could just easily dominate by taking advantage of the fact that taking a queen is almost always the top engine move. So just by maintaining relative king safety on white's side, you just open your queen early and make sure that every move there onwards hangs your queen in some fashion. It's very easy to hang a queen. You just have an invincible juggernaut for the first half of the game until you've demolished enough pieces to make it hard to find ways to hang your queen, and by that point the material advantage is such that the opponent might just resign.

Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

#50

So basically chess with landmines. Every move will be contested (because why wouldn't you? there are no downsides and only upsides) So every move you make (I'll be watching you) could end up being the top move. Even if you run the chess engine yourself to decide what not to play, you're still at risk of bad luck because you happen to run the chess engine on a faster or slower machine than the person checking for the…

There is a downside - if you contest and you're wrong, you lose.

The page doesn't say, but it's cheating to use an engine yourself to decide what move to make (or to decide whether to contest)

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