241–250 of 269 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#/media/File:KnightsTempl...
(To be clear, its much older than 741 years, but the way the board is crystal clear and instantly recognisable in that illustration is really striking)
It would be interesting to do an experiment on people playing one another (online) with these pieces vs regular pieces (e.g. one player with a regular set and one player with this set). Because I do feel like I can visualize the state of the board more easily with this approach--but would that translate across people into better play, or is there some point where a more expert player (I don't play very often, though…
> has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to movement Magnus Carlson, considered one of - if not the - best chess players of all time has a famous video of him playing three chess matches simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning all three. Once you get to a certain point not only the movements but also entire gameplay strategies become internalized.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.
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Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check. I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.) So to make chess more elegant in how the rule…
This would make the game less elegant, in my view. There are too many endgames that are just trivially winning if you make stalemate a win for the stalemating player. Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
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This would make the game less elegant, in my view. There are too many endgames that are just trivially winning if you make stalemate a win for the stalemating player. Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
That would just result in earlier resignations so that both players could get back to a more interesting game.
If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Which in turn makes only the most boring openings viable.
Now every game is boring.
Also, in tournament play, finishing your game early just means you have to wait longer until the next round, even in a round robin event. Because chess tournaments pretty much never start a round until the previous round is completely over. Not since adjournments stopped being a thing.
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Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check. I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.) So to make chess more elegant in how the rule…
> Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check. There is a Chess game that does this. It's Chinese Chess (which is just as old as Western Chess, and has the same origin in India). In Chinese Chess, the objective is to capture (or as the Chinese say, "eat") the king. There is no prohibition again…
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation.
> Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
I would favour that rule as well, but keep in mind that even in Go that is a very modern formulation / variation of this rule. Past formulations were about as clunky as chess's stalemate rules, and even left some situation (that were extremely rare in practice) without a satisfactory resolution.
Btw, in Go the 'board' isn't the only state the game has: you also count prisoners. After a complicated ko exchange, the board might look the same, but the prisoner count has gone up for both players. I assume the rules probably only care about the difference in prisoner counts (and board state) to determine whether a state has been repeated; not the absolute prisoner count.
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That would just result in earlier resignations so that both players could get back to a more interesting game.
No, you're fundamentally changing the game, not when people resign. If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it. Which in turn makes only the mo…
> Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating).
(I mention the zero sum game, because eg real life war is not a zero sum game. So it's perfectly possible for certain actions, like starting to shoot medics, to be bad for both parties. But in chess, what's bad for one party is automatically good for the other.)
> [..] which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game.
You know that the other guy gets to have a vote on this, too?
You can also have a look at the Eastern chess variations (Shogi etc) that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141452 mentions that don't have check rules, and see whether for them every game is boring?
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation of the impact of no-check-rules on western chess. It doesn't make everything boring.
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> What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves. As said elsewhere, I would suggest removing rules against putting yourself in check. > The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so m…
But who cares if the rules themselves are more elegant if the game they describe is different and worse because of it? It's like you introduced a bug in refactoring and are insisting on the change because the code looks nicer now.
However, I don't actually think that removing check rules make chess worse. But that's subject to experiment.
See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for exactly such experiments.
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No, you're fundamentally changing the game, not when people resign. If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it. Which in turn makes only the mo…
When people complain about chess being uninteresting, they usually complain about too many draws. Adding more opportunities to turn draws into wins/losses might seem like a good thing? > Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it. Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating). (I mention the zero…
> Stalemate=win chess has little effect on the opening and middlegame play, mostly affecting the evaluation of certain endgames. As such, it does not increase decisiveness of the game by much, as it seems to almost always be possible to defend without relying on stalemate as a drawing resource. Therefore, this chess variant is not likely to be useful for sidestepping known theory or for making the game substantially more decisive at the high level. The overall effect of the change seems to be minor.
This does not seem to support your suggestion that eliminating check rules and ending the game with the capture of the king, would make all games boring.
