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…
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
#102It'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.
My immediate first reaction was also that it would be interesting to have a variant that is the same except you are allowed to checkmate, except then I realized the recursive nature of how board positions are evaluated makes that problematic. For instance, if there's a mate in 2, the first move of the mate in two is now certainly the "best move". Creeping up on a checkmate without ever making the "best move" until the very last one might actually be harder than the win condition based on strangling the opponent described in the current rules.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is a joke on the accusations among professional chess players that some players cheat by using a chess engine to determine their next move. In other words: claiming the move of your opponent is the top engine move is equivalent to accusing them of "cheating".
Yes, but this new rule also adds interesting new mechanisms, like for instance the kamikaze check move with the queen, where the opponent's only move is to take with the king, hence losing the game (as it is also engine top move). Mastering that kind of new threats does not seem easy IMO, and in fact could well be mastered by... computers ;-)
I've heard it said that the best parodies are almost as good as the things they parody (and a sign that the comedians in question both love and understand the thing they are making a parody of). It could be argued that this chess variant is a really good "parody" in that sense, but encoded in the rules of the game itself.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#104Even though you could modify an engine to evaluate each of it's moves against the selected "top engine" move to avoid them, there is no clear route to success since there's going to be a lot of overlap between human and computer for more obvious moves... So you'd need some kind of tunable difficulty threshold above which it avoids the best solution.
Even then, your difficulty setting is a gamble on whether your opponent will call your bluff.
In the opposite case, because of the same overlap, false positives are going to be a combination of frustrating and flattering.
I find this is the case in most of the online FPS I have played, the knowledge that cheating is possible combined with the disbelief of the ceiling on human ability makes a huge number of people think you are cheating even if your ability is merely above average. There are also confusing overlaps between cheating behaviour and pros on FPS when trying to evaluate replays e.g wallhackers (especially pro wallhackers) and pros sometimes look very similar, because the pros are attempting to track through the walls in their mind... if they get lucky, a replay makes them look super suspicious and hard to distinguish in a single case. There are going to be a ton of games like this where the cheating behaviour are close or identical to the top pros.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#105Just make the move disallowed. You'll need the computer to be paying attention at all times, but nonetheless it would be more enjoyable to play.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#106Naive. 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.
I think you overestimate how much you would have to defer to this external engine that would have to say which move is "top".
Every move you advance you chessboard situation by one move only and that move is already part of the tree calculated previously. You don't need to search through massively more new moves because, assuming sane players, the move each player makes is one of the very few top moves previously considered by the engine.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#107Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#108Now: 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.
Re: Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
#109It'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…