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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

#221

Post by AstralStorm »

HWR_14 wrote: post #196
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…

But mating is always the optimal engine move. So I'm not sure a huge material advantage is the advantage you think it is.

You will need to find a mate where there are two possibilities to win. Unplayable for humans, funny for engines.

In fact, the opponent cannot play the best move to escape a mate, so a bunch of the games would become forced surrenders.

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

#222

Post by AstralStorm »

Khoth wrote: post #92
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.

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).

You can force the opponent into a position where the only move that saves them is a top engine move. Since they cannot play that move, the other option is to surrender.

So essentially this converts most mates in two into mates in one, but some become ties by repetition.

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

#223

Post by HWR_14 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #221
HWR_14 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But mating is always the optimal engine move. So I'm not sure a huge material advantage is the advantage you think it is.

You will need to find a mate where there are two possibilities to win. Unplayable for humans, funny for engines. In fact, the opponent cannot play the best move to escape a mate, so a bunch of the games would become forced surrenders.

If there are two moves that mate, they are both considered optimal engine moves.

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

#224

Post by BurningFrog »

rtkwe wrote: post #69
BurningFrog wrote: post #68

I've been thinking about a possible chess variant to eliminate opening preparation drudgery. The Fisher 960 variant tries to do this, but it can be very different from regular chess, and some of the positions are unbalanced. I think we can use the fact that engines know when a position is even. There must be millions of even positions in the first 10 or so moves. Pick one of those randomly, and start the game.

I would wonder if you need to add an 'ease of play' consideration to how even the positions are. Positions may be technically even but the play for one side could be more complicated to see your way through.

Yeah, that would be a real problem. It's even if you see some amazing combination.

One way to adjust would be to have everyone in a round play the same position, and calibrate. As in if black wins 90% of the games, a white win counts for more.

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

#225

Post by vxNsr »

paulsutter wrote: post #186

Machines would have an even greater advantage here. They know exactly the second best move, and would easily calculate it based on any set of constraints. Humans are worse at the increased complexity

That’s the point. That’s why it’s called HUMAN chess, it’s a game that doesn’t make sense for a computer to play.

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

#226

Post by janalsncm »

a1369209993 wrote: post #210
MichaelDickens wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't human^2 chess be similar to regular chess? The human-chess AI is guaranteed never to play the regular-chess optimal move, so you can get a checkmate by always playing the optimal move (according to the engine). And unlike human chess, there's nothing preventing you from checkmating your opponent. (I believe a chess engine could play human^2 chess exactly like it plays regular chess. A human couldn't because…

Presumably human^2 chess would prohibit both the top engine move from human^1 chess and the top engine move from human^0 chess. That is, it's human^1 chess with the added restriction of not playing top engine moves.

The problem is that there may not always be 3 possible moves in a given position.

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

#227

Post by whimsicalism »

chronial wrote: post #179
lesiki wrote: post #15

Now: Human Chess: a variant where you can't play what AI would play. Next: AI that can play Human Chess. After: Human^2 Chess: you can't play what the AI above would play. etc I wonder if this creates distinctly new games at each level, or if it's just nonsense one level down.

Wouldn't the perfect AI for Human^2 Chess be just the original AI you started with?

The meta is different because they know their opponent also can't play the best move which impacts what move you play (ie. intentionally hanging queen for advantage)

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

#228

Post by a1369209993 »

janalsncm wrote: post #226
a1369209993 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably human^2 chess would prohibit both the top engine move from human^1 chess and the top engine move from human^0 chess. That is, it's human^1 chess with the added restriction of not playing top engine moves.

The problem is that there may not always be 3 possible moves in a given position.

There may not always be 1 possible move in a given position either; how does regular chess handle that? (Presumably you'd use the same rule by default for human^n chess.)

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

#229

Post by jnhnum1 »

yosefk wrote: post #218
EricMausler wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trai…

The answer is no: every time you apply Human(), you reduce by one the number of legal moves at every given game state. After some finite number of iterations, there are no longer any legal opening moves.

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

#230

Post by zmgsabst »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #212
bee_rider wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think some of the moves the engine suggests in human games look whacky to human grandmasters.

Hikaru Nakamura is a top GM that does commentary streams — and frequently comments things like “but what do I know about chess?” when responding to AI suggestions. It’ll suggest a weird move that seems to leave a mess on the board while insisting that everything is great. And obviously if you actually tried to play against Stockfish from that position, it would crush you.

Looks like 400 ELO, but hey — what do we know about chess?

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