Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grandmaster-level chess without search

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 171 posts

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#121

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dullcrisp wrote: post #25
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem that difficult to pull off - take one of the existing engines, get the top y moves, choose randomly. For each level down increase y by 1.

Seems this might still have the problem of moves being either extremely good or extremely bad depending on how many good moves are found, rather than playing at a consistent level. Or for example in a degenerate case where there are only two moves and one leads to mate, the computer will be picking randomly.

I don't know enough about chess but surely amateurs don't play at a consistent level. Like, I play a little and I'm quite certain some of my moves are awful (20%?) and some are the same move magnus makes (10%?) and most are on a spectrum between (70%?).

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#122

Post by tzs »

gcr wrote: post #114
tzs wrote: post #20

OT: what's the state of the art in non-GM level computer chess? Say I want to play chess with an opponent that is at about the same skill level as me, or perhaps I want to play with an opponent about 100 rating points above me for training. Most engines let you dumb them down by cutting search depth, but that usually doesn't work well. Sure, you end up beating them about half the time if you cut the search down enoug…

Stockfish is the classic answer, though I’m not sure how well it’s graded. Someone must have a “Stockfish strength”-to-ELO mapping.

It's not getting an engine to play in the right rating range that is the problem. It's getting it to play like a human would play in that rating range.

The average rating of tournament chess players in the US is around USCF 1550. I'm not sure what their FIDE rating would be. FIDE ratings are usually 50-100 points lower than USCF ratings but that's based on comparing people that have both ratings which for the most part are strong masters and above.

A human with a USCF 1550 rating will typically be mostly making moves that are suboptimal in a variety of ways: piece coordination, king safety, planning, pawn structure, development, search, and more. Basically they are around 1550 at nearly everything. There will be variations of course. A particular player might be worse at king safety and better at tactics for instance, but it will be something like they handle king safety like a 1400 and tactics like a 1700.

With a GM level engine turned down to 1550 you tend to see aspects of GM level play still in its game. If you are a 1550 playing against it it doesn't feel like you playing the kind of opponent you will play if you enter a local chess tournament and get paired with another 1450-1650 player.

It feels like you are playing someone with a totally different approach to chess than you who just happens to lose or draw to you about the same amount as a 1450-1650 human.

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#123

Post by 7373737373 »

timerol wrote: post #117
amoss wrote: post #113

If you solve chess then you have a tree that is too large for us to currently compute (about 10^80 although my memory may be way off). Annotating that tree with win / loss / draw would allow an optimal player without search. The two obvious approaches to compression / optimization are to approximate the tree, and to approximate the annotations. How well those two approaches would work depends a lot on the structure o…

Note that the exact version of this technique is used in chess for the endgame, referred to as a tablebase. Chess is solved once there are 7 pieces on the board, in an 18.4TB database, described here: https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/7-piece-syzygy-tablebases...

Makes me wonder what % of games end with <=7 pieces

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#124

Post by 7373737373 »

jackmalpo wrote: post #34

what i would love is an engine that thinks more like a human. presumably since this uses stockfish annotated games, it basically ends up thinking like a computer. thinking like a human would be awesome for game reviews to walk through things to note in different positions (tuned to my elo).

Or even the opposite end of the spectrum - with extremely limited resources (memory/program size/computation time): https://rlc-chess.com/ - like demoscene programs. Capable 1kb chess programs exist!

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#126

Post by KolmogorovComp »

KK7NIL wrote: post #6
alfalfasprout wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is classical chess (unlike eg; go) is essentially "solved" when run on computers capable of extreme depth. Modern chess engines play essentially flawlessly.

The developers of stockfish and lc0 (and the many weaker engines around) would disagree, we've seen their strength improve considerably over the last few years. Currently there's a very interesting war between small neural networks on the CPU with high search depth alpha-beta pruning (stockfish NNUE) and big neural networks on a GPU with Monte Carlo search and lower depth (lc0). So, while machines beating humans is "…

> ask the guys who have actually solved chess endgames with 8 or less pieces

Source?

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#127

Post by jeremyjh »

Scarblac wrote: post #111
jeremyjh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say chess positions, I said chess games . That number has a lower-bound of 10^120. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

But that's not the relevant thing if we're talking about storing a best move per possible position.

Unless you’ve calculated every line to a forced win or draw you don’t actually know the objective evaluation of a position and so you can’t determine “best move”. That’s what a tablebase is.

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#129

Post by 6510 »

tzs wrote: post #20

OT: what's the state of the art in non-GM level computer chess? Say I want to play chess with an opponent that is at about the same skill level as me, or perhaps I want to play with an opponent about 100 rating points above me for training. Most engines let you dumb them down by cutting search depth, but that usually doesn't work well. Sure, you end up beating them about half the time if you cut the search down enoug…

It would be hilarious if they downgraded by being more aggressive. For example: It needs to score n points worth of aggressive moves that are not the best moves. After screwing up the position by n they can go back to playing the best moves again.

Otherwise you wouldn't really be learning anything useful. You would end up with an opening vocabulary that good players would easily punish. If you play crappy gambits leading to positions you know well the better players will think highly of you.

Best way to learn is to play the hardest possible engines and just take back moves when it becomes evident you've screwed up.

Re: Grandmaster-level chess without search

#130

Post by wavemode »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #53
tzs wrote: post #20

OT: what's the state of the art in non-GM level computer chess? Say I want to play chess with an opponent that is at about the same skill level as me, or perhaps I want to play with an opponent about 100 rating points above me for training. Most engines let you dumb them down by cutting search depth, but that usually doesn't work well. Sure, you end up beating them about half the time if you cut the search down enoug…

What’s your rating, have you tried gpt4o? It’s supposedly good up to about 1300, but aside from that the ability to prompt can make the style of play somewhat tunable for ex aggressive, defensive, etc.

GPT is incapable of playing a full game of chess without making lots of illegal moves, in my experience.

Even correcting for those, it's still horrendously bad at the game. Where are you getting this 1300 number?

Post reply on HN