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

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

#91

Post by tromp »

tomesco wrote: post #79
sebstefan wrote: post #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…

There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the best engine move and needs to be allowed.

No; checkmates are not needed. You win the game by almost checkmating the opponent: by leaving them only one legal move, which is thus necessarily the top engine move.

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

#92

Post by Khoth »

tomesco wrote: post #79
sebstefan wrote: post #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…

There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the best engine move and needs to be allowed.

If you deliver checkmate, you lose. You have to instead force your opponent into a situation where they only have one legal move (which is trivially the best engine move).

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

#93

Post by II2II »

tomesco wrote: post #79
sebstefan wrote: post #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…

There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the best engine move and needs to be allowed.

The article had an illustration of this: the player put their opponent into check where there was only one move to get out of check. The opponent would have to make that move, whether they were human or machine, so the player who made the original move wins the game.

It is an interesting variation on chess given the current state of tournament play, yet it isn't really a solution to the cheating problem since it is effectively a new game with a new end-state. But you are probably right about there needing to be some sort of threshold. While there the rules of the variation says that any move with equal scores is considered equivalent, I would imagine the players would need a very intimate knowledge of how the engine scores moves in certain scenarios.

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

#94

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

tromp wrote: 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 think if this was played at a GM level, games would be dreadfully boring, for one simple reason: the first player that ever allows a winning threat with only one defence, will lose the game.

This will lead to extremely cagey games where no one ever dares make the game sharp and imbalanced.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

tromp wrote: post #91
tomesco wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the best engine move and needs to be allowed.

No; checkmates are not needed. You win the game by almost checkmating the opponent: by leaving them only one legal move, which is thus necessarily the top engine move.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by RivieraKid »

twawaaay wrote: post #90

Naive. I can create an engine which will plan with this restriction in mind. In other words, whatever the rules, you can have an engine that will try to do the best according to the rules.

How would such engine work? Chess engines work by evaluating a lot of positions. But in order to evaluate a single Human Chess position, you need to run a normal chess engine for a minute to determine the top move.

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

#97

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

kadoban wrote: post #17
curiousssnake wrote: post #11

"" 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.

This is not necessarily true. Sometimes there are emultiple best moves, and in this case the order might be arbitrary depending on all sorts of hard to control things like thread interleavings and caching effects which can be affected even by other processes on the system. You could run it single threaded with no transposition table, but then you have a pretty shitty engine because modern engines are fundamentally designed around having a transposition table. Then you get situations where the top engine move might actually be a bad move.

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

#98

Post by Y_Y »

vanderZwan wrote: post #47
tromp wrote: 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.

Is there a known family of "functors" for games like this, e.g. veto or having one opportunity to swap positions with your opponent etc.? It would be cool to see what you could say about the rule modification in a general sense before applying to a particular game.

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

#99

Post by jll29 »

An interesting variant of chess; Alan Turing is said to have introduced another, outdoors version of chess where you'd move, then run around the house, and if the opponent hasn't moved by the time you're back, you'd get to move a second time. That change of rules ought to push Turing's variant somewhat outside the tree of possibilities of traditional chess.

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

#100

Post by nojs »

Bootvis wrote: post #64
sebstefan wrote: post #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…

e4, Qf3, Qxf7 looks menacing

I guess after 1. e4 e5 2. Qf3 black can safely play Qf6
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