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

humanchess.abcd.party

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

#211

Post by yamtaddle »

bee_rider wrote: post #209
yamtaddle wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm approaching 40 years old, have played chess off and on since I was a kid, and I'm not sure I've ever played a match that didn't include several blunders. Like, on the off chance I'm playing someone who doesn't blunder often, I'll certainly pick up their slack. My game quality is measured in how many times I say "fuck!" right after moving a piece. A very good game for me is about a two-fuck game.

The fun thing about chess, you don’t seem to think you are good, but I can’t imagine only making two obvious mistakes in a game! It grows with you, haha.

No no, that's a very good game for me :-)

Most of them it's more like four or five "oh my god I hope they don't see that thing I spotted the second I took my hand off" moments—and that's just the ones I notice before they're exploited. I'm sure I make tons of moves that anyone half-decent would call blunders but that simply go unnoticed by both players at the board.

I'm so very bad at spotting diagonal attacks, especially. Anyone who can open up their bishops then play for time will eventually see me put my queen in some dumbshit situation that lets them take it free or cheap in a single move, for instance, not even any multi-move planning required.

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

#212

Post by squeaky-clean »

bee_rider wrote: post #208
okamiueru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title "Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden" kinda suggests that the top move just isn't available to the player. However, the thought you had, and similar ones, are very much the intentional side-effect of the rules. The only way to win the game, as stated, is forcing your opponent to make the top engine move. Or, of course, correctly claim that your opponent made such a…

I wonder — at the top end the chess engines clearly compete with each other and produce different results, that’s how one can be said to be better than the other, right? But against us puny humans, especially novices, do they produce very different outputs? Or is it just like, the moves to crush a silly meat-brain are just super obvious, no need for creativity. Especially in this game, the humans will be trying to pl…

Some games from the most recent chess engine tournament look whacky as hell. Like if you showed the games to a grandmaster they would probably estimate it was 2 completely new 400 elo players.

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

#213

Post by squeaky-clean »

aqme28 wrote: post #81
meandthewallaby wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states that if there are multiple moves the engine recommends, that they all count as the "optimal" move, even if there's an indication of preference by the engine.

I like the idea of not being allowed to use any move the engine would recommend. Blunders only.

Lichess has a variant called "Antichess". If you can take a piece, you have to. No checks/checkmate rules. First person to have zero remaining pieces wins.

You basically want to "blunder" into giving your opponent long chains of captures while avoiding any positions that allow your opponent to hang a piece.

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

#214

Post by Dr_Birdbrain »

CarVac wrote: post #139
misja111 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this variant you can win without checkmating: just checking with leaving only 1 forced move is enough to win the game.

As long as putting the king in check isn't optimal…

Right, so your check should be in a context where another move was mate in 1

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

#215

Post by ouid »

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…

giving checkmate is a loss, the win condition for human chess is giving check in such a way that there is only one legal move. So hanging your queen might be good offensively, but its not good defense.

Moreover if you hang your queen in more than one way, your opponent can still take it in whichever way the computer evaluates as worse. Which is often easy to guess. The weird part of this will come from the fact that accuracy of engines diverges very rapidly off of the critical path. Once you're down a queen, you're basically free to play however you like.

There are a lot of dynamics here.

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

#216

Post by layman51 »

It seems like it would be fun to watch people play this. What would happen if one player cheated by using the same engine that was selected at the start and consistently picked the second, third, fourth, or fifth engine move? I don’t think that would work out for them because the game incentivizes you to win by forcing your opponent to take a high-level piece like your queen to win and then calling them out for being forced to have used the top engine move, right?

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

#217

Post by ht85 »

10xDev wrote: post #138
ht85 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> you win by forcing your opposition to mess up You just described all of chess.

You mean all of humanity

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

#218

Post by yosefk »

EricMausler wrote: post #181
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…

I had a similar naive thought, but it doesnt resolve easily. For starters, Black can do the same thing just a move behind. Second, if you ever hang your queen two ways at once - one of them could be a less optimal take (-5 is not as good as -8) Third, whoever is a move ahead in a race of taking pieces will be the first to run out of weak pieces to take. Their available move pool is shrinking faster. Not sure how it w…

The best way to find out the best strategy for Human Chess is to train AlphaZero to play it, and learn from its example. Then we can make a Human Human Chess variant where you lose the game by playing the top move suggested by this newly trained engine.

It is an interesting theoretical question whether we can have Aleph Zero Human Chess where Human(Human(...(Chess))) is applied infinitely, approaching Aleph Zero trainings of AlphaZero, or we get a redundant variant after some application where further application of Human() no longer produces a new variant.

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

#219

Post by AstralStorm »

okamiueru wrote: post #65
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…

The title "Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden" kinda suggests that the top move just isn't available to the player. However, the thought you had, and similar ones, are very much the intentional side-effect of the rules. The only way to win the game, as stated, is forcing your opponent to make the top engine move. Or, of course, correctly claim that your opponent made such a…

Actually no, the top choice would be to force your opponent into a position where the series of second best moves literally destroys them. You're looking for traps where only a particular move can save you.

A minimally modified engine lookup wins here.

There's a whole bunch of openings that ensure it for white, this game is rigged even more than playing the best move, even if you do enforce a random opening.

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

#220

Post by AstralStorm »

EricMausler wrote: post #182
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my thought too. Does the engine know that the other player is forbidden to play the top engine move on the next turn? Then you can't just do something like c3 Nf6 Qa4 e5 Qe4!? to hang the queen in the center, knowing that Nxe4 is prohibited, because the strongest move for white if Nxe4 is prohibited would have been Qe4!

Any move the human chess engine makes would be losing by definition if it is also used as the bench mark. Therefor, such an engine can only hang in computation - being unable to produce a top move because if it were to make a suggestion then the actual best move changes to avoid it. Since the engine is unable to produce a move - there is no top engine move which makes every move legal. A normal game of chess is playe…

You forgot that the engine user may cheat and even if they declare the engine there's no real way to detect if they're truthful and not using a certain of the engine tuned for Human Chess specifically.
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