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Kramnik and AlphaZero: How to Rethink Chess‎

138 points by lawrenceyan 7y ago

panic 7y ago
Game designers usually have to do tons of playtesting to find all the broken strategies in their games. As self-learning AI becomes more accessible, it'll give designers much quicker feedback. I'm curious to see how this will affect the games we play. Maybe someone will discover a new game as deep as Go and Chess!
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  For chess variants, it has been possible to describe the rule in Zillions of Games format and get a serviceable AI for playtesting in return.
- shagie 7y ago
  Consider then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa - playable on a standard chess board, but has a combination all explosion of movers larger than go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity
  - mrob 7y ago
    The huge game tree of Arimaa is somewhat misleading, because a lot of moves are just simple transpositions. It's a fun game but it doesn't feel more complex to play than Go. Note that despite the anti-computer design, classical computer chess techniques (with some clever hand-written heuristics) were enough for computers to exceed humans.
gwd 7y ago
The idea is incredibly simple. Basically: Don't allow castling. And the claim is that if you don't allow castling, it's basically impossible to set up a "drawish" defense. You have to attack or die. In fact, it's so simple that it's sort of hard to believe. They've done tons of analysis with a retrained-from-the-ground-up AlphaZero and are convinced of it, so I definitely think it's worth a try, and look forward to see its effect. If it does turn out to be true, it will be kind of amazing how one simple rule tweak affected the highest level of Chess play.
- Isofarro 7y ago
  The first no-castling match has already taken place earlier this month as part of the London Chess Classic https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm The current castling rule was an innovation of the Italians when the game was brought in from India. It, along with pawns moving two squares on their first move, ushered in the Italian School of Chess, known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression. However, the Indian form of the game did have something like castling, the king could move from its start square to g2, where a fianchetto'ed bishop would normally sit.
  - nwsm 7y ago
    >known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression Interestingly this goes against the entire point of the article, that castling results in defensive play which results in draws.
- igravious 7y ago
  They haven't rethought chess though. They've merely invented a game called chess' and the suggestion that it opens up "new possibilities" is because it's a new game. Of course every micro-variant of chess is going to open up new vistas, the challenge is this, is it better (how do we define better?) than the original chess? I think they're confusing novelty for the qualities their seeking. The better chess has already been invented and it's called go. And the top human player of that has called it a day in the face of machine learning advancements (wrongly I think). Also I think go is a much more obvious and flexible game to tweak, if you so wanted.
  - sanxiyn 7y ago
    How would you tweak Go?
    - roenxi 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Sunjang_Baduk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Sunjang_Baduk Very entertaining variant with a proud history. None of the usual defensive corner forms work.
adiM 7y ago
I grew up in India and learnt chess from my grand father, who taught me two versions of chess: the standard western version and the Indian version. The Indian version differed in two rules: no castling (as Kramnik is proposing) and the pawn cannot move two steps in the first move. Some other differences are mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess It will be interesting to compare how Alpha Zero learns with the Indian chess rules.
- have_faith 7y ago
  > pawn cannot move two steps in the first move Does this add much variation to the game or does it slightly delay getting into the same positions we already know? Not castling is interesting though but would change the game quite dramatically, perhaps even making it slightly more predictable? I'm unsure. Interesting concepts.
  - thanatropism 7y ago
    Pieces are ranked by power because of their reach. Chess is not continuous-time (I have this theory that the tactical essence of football-soccer is continuous-time chess) which makes it very awkward. There's also a lot of literature on chess openings, which means a lot would need to be re-discovered). I find chess very frustrating because I can analyze positions but almost always get thwarted because of misreading tempo. But honestly maybe I don't have a high enough IQ to play chess.
    - glitchc 7y ago
      I highly doubt that your chess acumen is tied to IQ. AlphaZero can probably beat every chess player, past or present, yet you would trounce it in a whole range of intelligence tests. Perhaps just try counting the moves, and look for counters at each step? Most pro chess players think in patterns anyways, subset of moves that obtain a predefined position on the board. Then the game is more about rock, paper, scissors, where you try to guess the opponent’s pattern and employ a counter-pattern.
carokann 7y ago
I wonder about the win rate distribution for colors in Fischer chess vs. No castle chess. Either way, this would have to go through FIDE (to be widely implemented) and they're too corrupt to bring community together and make a significant contribution to the game of chess.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sanxiyn 7y ago
If you want to read about what chess players (some of them, anyway) think of this, you can visit this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_proposes_a_variant_nocastling_chess/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_propo...
tempguy9999 7y ago
There is a variant that allows you to take your own pieces https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.html https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.... This always attracted me as a concept and seems well received, per link above. It should increase the branching factor considerably, and complicate its evaluation - not saying good or bad, just is.
- pingyong 7y ago
  >It should increase the branching factor considerably Is branching factor actually that relevant? Just from writing some naive AIs for fun I got the impression that the only thing that actually mattered is how well you can evaluate a position without branching further. Whether you have 40 or 100 (or 1000) moves available, you usually just want to only look at "the best" 10-15 (ideally even less if you can), and how reliable this determining of "the best" is seems like a way larger factor than just how many branches there are in theory.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    If you've done game AI then you're the expert, not me. I threw it in as it seemed relevant. I dunno. Granted evaluation is key but so is branching, surely, as that is what generates new positions, and their complexity in evaluation as there are more factors to consider. How does one 'look at "the best" 10-15 [positions]' without culling all the others first, however cheaply? I thought evaluation really was just tree searching (hence branching factor is crucial) with various weights (obviously this is traditional chess evaluation, not fancy NN stuff). I honestly am clueless.
    - pingyong 7y ago
      You do have to cull the others, but the culling isn't what is costly. What is costly is the exponential nature of searching the tree, i.e. if you want to evaluate 3 of your moves in advance, with 50 moves being available every time, you have to generate 50^6 moves, which is pretty fast on a modern CPU, but for 4 moves it's 50^8 which is definitely not that fast anymore. So at some point you have to sacrifice breadth for depth drastically, and as soon as you do that pretty much the only thing that matters is how well you can evaluate positions as they are (without searching further down the tree). Even if you didn't cull searches, at some point you have to stop searching and fundamentally decide what the best move is. If this evaluation isn't good, all your searching didn't do anything. This is, from my understanding, also the reason why traditional AI approaches struggled so much with Go. Not because Go has so many possible moves, but because given a certain game state it is so difficult to evaluate which player is ahead.
devit 7y ago
I think no-castling just generates a different opening theory, and Chess960's 960 starting positions are also not enough: it should be possible to memorize at least the best white move for each of the 960 positions, and probably the main variation and even more. The only way to be sure is to have a random chess variant with at least a billion different possible opening starting positions: the conceptually simplest way seems to be to place all pieces completely randomly in the first three ranks (in the same way for each color), while rejecting any position that allows white to make a capture, check or threaten to capture a non-pawn piece on the first move.
- have_faith 7y ago
  > it should be possible to memorize at least the best white move for each of the 960 positions Seeing how there is no consensus on "best opening" for the normal game of chess, introducing 960 more variations is not going to be a simple case of memorising the "best opening". I would go as far to say that simply introducing 10 new standard opening positions would introduce more than enough complexity to shake up high level play. There's only so much a human can remember once the computer is turned off and you are over the board.
  - devit 7y ago
    Just run the most sophisticated chess engines available 960 times and publish the results. Even if not the "best" in an absolute sense, the moves those engines find are going to better than the move that an human comes up on the spot. This means that memorization will still be necessary in Chess960 to be competitive at the highest levels and in fact it's probably going to be worse because memorizing those 960 starting moves sounds far more tedious than memorizing classic opening theory. Scrabble players can memorize 10K+ word dictionaries in languages they don't know, and since (starting position, move number, chess move) triples can be encoded as words, it should be possible to memorize the main variation found by chess engines for each Chess960 position.
    - have_faith 7y ago
      But this hinges on there being a computable best opening, which there isn't for standard chess and there won't be for most(all?) starting positions in 960 (chess isn't a solved game). It's also not just an enum of [starting position, move number, chess move], there's also "why is this move strong in this position" which isn't something scrabble players have an equivalent of with just memorising lists of words. I personally can't imagine any of the current top chess players memorising hundreds of opening lines for all 960 starting positions and then being able to remember them over the board. Only a few players have a mastery of current known chess theory that's just one starting position. I am happy to be proven wrong though when some new chess savant presents themselves.
EduardLev 7y ago
I find it interesting that both games of this variant between Kramnik and AlphaZero ended in a draw. That suggests to me that we would quickly see the same problem in the variant as we do now. The question would be, how long would it take for humans to catch up? My guess is a couple of years, until the variant has to be changed again (That is, mostly draws in high level competitions). What are other similar games that have a higher level of variation? Go comes to mind. How about we increase the size of the chess board to 9x9, while keeping the same 8x8 setup? That sounds like a number of variations more than no castling, while still keeping the same feel.
- Cybiote 7y ago
  Hi, can you point to the source for this? I failed to find any mention of it in the article. Or did you mean the two games annotated by Kramnik? Thanks.
  - EduardLev 7y ago
    Thanks for pointing this out. I meant the games annotated by Kramnik. Would have been interested to see his results.
jstanley 7y ago
> The no-castling restriction means that players cannot rely on memorized patterns; they are forced to think creatively from the beginning. It's not obvious that this is true at all. Once top-level players have played no-castling-chess as much as they've played ordinary chess, I don't see why they wouldn't have just as many patterns memorised.
- kohanz 7y ago
  While it is true that eventually, the patterns would be recognized and we'd have the same problem, I think the gambit (to use a chess term) Kramnik is making here is that for the current form of chess, it took us hundreds of years of practice, experience, and study to get to this point. Before we reached this stage, chess was, as Kramnik is arguing, more exciting and entertaining. This time around the adjustment period would no doubt be significantly shorter for a couple of reasons: 1) Computer-aided analysis will greatly accelerate the evaluation of new openings and positions 2) This change does not really affect end-game theory, so that part doesn't change
- michaelscott 7y ago
  It just removes a large swathe of current possible lines I guess. Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings). I don't think it'll produce amazingly creative chess, it's true, but it may produce more interesting opening games?
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    > Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings) This is only true for the brief period until someone modifies an engine to train on the new ruleset.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    Analysis through an engine is trivial with a 'hack' of inputing an artificial chain of fixed moves in the beginning. No-castling chess rules are exactly equivalent to ordinary chess rules after both players move both knights, move both rooks, and return them to the original positions.
calhoun137 7y ago
Meh. I dont believe we have even come close to finding the best chess strategy for humans and strongly disgagree with the premise of this article that chess strategy for humans is at some kind of ending and we need to change the rules or else it will never get better. In fact, I have done a lot of research into chess engine theory and believe flaws in the stockfish algorithm directly contrubute to the "boring" chess we see today, since all pros use engines to train now. The old engines cant see lines that alphazero sees which involve long term positional sacrifices, and use a linear evaluation function which in principle can never capture the strong non linearities inherenit in chess. (alphazero uses a non linear evaluation function, which is its nueral net) Considered as a mathematical space, the universe of possible chess strategies is an extremely large order of infinity. There are also many aspects of time management in relation to the computational complexity of the position which modern engines dont model at all. I believe that modern engines are overly materialistic and that aggresive positional sacrficies in the style of Tal and alphazero are the future of chess strategy for humans
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  To me the whole concept of chess always getting better is a little puzzling. Most games of this type don't change, and therefore don't get better. The point is local challenge, not global optimization. To most, the point of games (and much other human endeavor) is competition for competition's sake, not a search for some maximum of abstract skill. To avoid chess (real chess, with castling and all that) because AlphaZero exists is like avoiding singing because Taylor Swift exists. Or like avoiding painting because Chagall existed. Or like avoiding Starcraft because Serral exists. Yeah, with a 99.999999% chance, you're not going to exceed the performance of these individuals (or others I could name) in their respective fields. That doesn't take the joy out of learning and growing, at least not for me. AlphaZero and similar add a few more nines to chess, in terms of the likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game. But that should hardly make a difference except to maybe the two or three very best human players in the world.
  - calhoun137 7y ago
    I am 1000x more interested in chess engine's and "a search for some maximum of abstract skill" than I am in getting good at chess. During my research into this topic I discovered many facts which led me to conclude that there exist multiple chess strategies which humans can use which are currently unknown and which are far more powerful than anything currently used by grand masters or chess engines. This was all before alphazero was released, and I feel strongly that alphazero proved the hypothesis that chess strategy theory will continue to improve and there is still so much to learn. Chess theory is "always getting better". This is because chess has the property that the skill curve is so extreme and the game so deep that it is seemingly always possible to continue to improve and find new ideas. Chess engines play a fundamental role in modern human chess. There is a causal relationship between the state of the art in chess engines and the play styles of the top pro's. This is because better engines can find new idea's in positions previously thought to be completely explored. It happened recently with an alphazero game in a spectacular way iirc There is a theorem which says that given any chess engine, it's impossible to decide if that chess engine is playing in an optimal way. So when you say "in terms of the likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game", I think its important to be very precise about what we mean, even though in spirit I agree with that statement =) I started working on a project to build a chess engine that is specifically designed to beat other chess engines by playing in a non-optimal way specifically tailored to find and exploit bugs in the opposing chess engine code/flaws in its algorithm. I also once proved that any chess engine based on the principles of stockfish will necessarily contain positions where it can be exploited into making bad moves. If you fixed the algorithm to make it not exploitable in that specific position, the theorem says there would exist another position where it would be exploitable. This is what I call the theory of "exploitative chess engines" (in the sense of maximizing the possible gain), as opposed to ones which attempt to play in an "optimal" way (minimizing the maximum loss)
DonCopal 7y ago
I guess a submission won't gain traction if you don't mention "AlphaZero" in the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118
arunix 7y ago
Rather than banning castling outright, what if opposite wing castling was the only type of castling allowed? That should also make draws more unlikely.
k_sze 7y ago
While we're at it, we can possibly create a new variant every few years with the aid of AlphaZero, to curb the memorisation trap. Here are the steps: 1. Think of a new rule change; 2. Train AlphaZero for a period of time with the new rule; 3. Validate the viability of the new rule, based on two criteria: a) enough interesting lines discovered by AlphaZero; b) no obvious advantage for either black or white, based on the results of the AlphaZero training games; 4. Make the new rule officially accepted at FIDE for the next N years. 5. Repeat for the next cycle.
lifeformed 7y ago
I wish he posted the draw percentage.
deegles 7y ago
Is there an adaptive difficulty AlphaZero engine? It would be interesting to learn by playing one set to "try to win 50% of games" as a difficulty.
cjlars 7y ago
Presumably the reason for changing the rules is to limit the number of draws, because wins and losses are more exciting. As he mentions, high level, full length chess has a rather disappointing percent of games ending in a draw. However, he doesn't even show that alphazero produces less draws in this variant (even the example game is a draw through repetition!). It may be interesting because it's different, but I don't really think Kramnik successfully argues that it's any better.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  Yeah, I'd just make a draw an automatic win for Black, who is normally considered to be playing with a slight disadvantage as compared to White, who has the slight advantage of making the first move.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    At the top level chess is too easy for either player to force into a draw-like position for this to be fair. If you added some additional advantage for white (e.g. only white can castle) it might work. Having a game where one player always tries to win and the other player always tries to draw might not really be the effect you want though.
mindgam3 7y ago
Former world-ranked youth chess player here. 100% agree with the desire to reduce draws and get people out of opening theory. Not sure though why Kramnik felt the need to invent a new variant when Chess960 already exists, is thriving, and changes the game far more drastically than no-castling rule. The post reads more as an submarine advertisement for DeepMind (0) than a serious article for chess players. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- schoen 7y ago
  Kramnik briefly addresses this question in the article: > Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game. (I have no idea if his view would be persuasive to you.)
  - mindgam3 7y ago
    Yeah, I don't find these arguments particularly convincing. > In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. Actually the nontraditional start is part of what makes it fun. It's fresh and forces you to start using your brain from move one. I don't buy the claim that the main enjoyment of chess is due to familiar positions. > The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. I can't speak to Kramnik's private conversations, but as a serious player what I can say is that my competitive advantage over an amateur diminishes considerably in Chess960. Perhaps what Kramnik's friends are complaining about is the fact that it's harder for them to win at Chess960 than standard. > Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game. Yeah, there's a difference in aesthetics for sure. But who is to say that it is "worse"? Some piece configurations do feel a bit "ugly" but to me this is more than balanced out by the beauty of new patterns emerging where they weren't expected.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game." I'm an amateur who's a fan of the Fisher Random chess variant, and feel it is a tremendous improvement over the enormous amounts of opening memorization that is required in traditional chess, and which is yet another thing that gives computers (who have a perfect memory) an edge over humans.

138 points by lawrenceyan 7y ago

Game designers usually have to do tons of playtesting to find all the broken strategies in their games. As self-learning AI becomes more accessible, it'll give designers much quicker feedback. I'm curious to see how this will affect the games we play. Maybe someone will discover a new game as deep as Go and Chess!

sanxiyn 7y ago
For chess variants, it has been possible to describe the rule in Zillions of Games format and get a serviceable AI for playtesting in return.
shagie 7y ago
Consider then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa - playable on a standard chess board, but has a combination all explosion of movers larger than go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity
- mrob 7y ago
  The huge game tree of Arimaa is somewhat misleading, because a lot of moves are just simple transpositions. It's a fun game but it doesn't feel more complex to play than Go. Note that despite the anti-computer design, classical computer chess techniques (with some clever hand-written heuristics) were enough for computers to exceed humans.

gwd 7y ago

The idea is incredibly simple. Basically: Don't allow castling. And the claim is that if you don't allow castling, it's basically impossible to set up a "drawish" defense. You have to attack or die. In fact, it's so simple that it's sort of hard to believe. They've done tons of analysis with a retrained-from-the-ground-up AlphaZero and are convinced of it, so I definitely think it's worth a try, and look forward to see its effect. If it does turn out to be true, it will be kind of amazing how one simple rule tweak affected the highest level of Chess play.

Isofarro 7y ago
The first no-castling match has already taken place earlier this month as part of the London Chess Classic https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm The current castling rule was an innovation of the Italians when the game was brought in from India. It, along with pawns moving two squares on their first move, ushered in the Italian School of Chess, known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression. However, the Indian form of the game did have something like castling, the king could move from its start square to g2, where a fianchetto'ed bishop would normally sit.
- nwsm 7y ago
  >known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression Interestingly this goes against the entire point of the article, that castling results in defensive play which results in draws.
igravious 7y ago
They haven't rethought chess though. They've merely invented a game called chess' and the suggestion that it opens up "new possibilities" is because it's a new game. Of course every micro-variant of chess is going to open up new vistas, the challenge is this, is it better (how do we define better?) than the original chess? I think they're confusing novelty for the qualities their seeking. The better chess has already been invented and it's called go. And the top human player of that has called it a day in the face of machine learning advancements (wrongly I think). Also I think go is a much more obvious and flexible game to tweak, if you so wanted.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  How would you tweak Go?
  - roenxi 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Sunjang_Baduk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Sunjang_Baduk Very entertaining variant with a proud history. None of the usual defensive corner forms work.

adiM 7y ago

I grew up in India and learnt chess from my grand father, who taught me two versions of chess: the standard western version and the Indian version. The Indian version differed in two rules: no castling (as Kramnik is proposing) and the pawn cannot move two steps in the first move. Some other differences are mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess It will be interesting to compare how Alpha Zero learns with the Indian chess rules.

have_faith 7y ago
> pawn cannot move two steps in the first move Does this add much variation to the game or does it slightly delay getting into the same positions we already know? Not castling is interesting though but would change the game quite dramatically, perhaps even making it slightly more predictable? I'm unsure. Interesting concepts.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  Pieces are ranked by power because of their reach. Chess is not continuous-time (I have this theory that the tactical essence of football-soccer is continuous-time chess) which makes it very awkward. There's also a lot of literature on chess openings, which means a lot would need to be re-discovered). I find chess very frustrating because I can analyze positions but almost always get thwarted because of misreading tempo. But honestly maybe I don't have a high enough IQ to play chess.
  - glitchc 7y ago
    I highly doubt that your chess acumen is tied to IQ. AlphaZero can probably beat every chess player, past or present, yet you would trounce it in a whole range of intelligence tests. Perhaps just try counting the moves, and look for counters at each step? Most pro chess players think in patterns anyways, subset of moves that obtain a predefined position on the board. Then the game is more about rock, paper, scissors, where you try to guess the opponent’s pattern and employ a counter-pattern.

carokann 7y ago

I wonder about the win rate distribution for colors in Fischer chess vs. No castle chess. Either way, this would have to go through FIDE (to be widely implemented) and they're too corrupt to bring community together and make a significant contribution to the game of chess.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sanxiyn 7y ago

If you want to read about what chess players (some of them, anyway) think of this, you can visit this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_proposes_a_variant_nocastling_chess/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_propo...

tempguy9999 7y ago

There is a variant that allows you to take your own pieces https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.html https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.... This always attracted me as a concept and seems well received, per link above. It should increase the branching factor considerably, and complicate its evaluation - not saying good or bad, just is.

pingyong 7y ago
>It should increase the branching factor considerably Is branching factor actually that relevant? Just from writing some naive AIs for fun I got the impression that the only thing that actually mattered is how well you can evaluate a position without branching further. Whether you have 40 or 100 (or 1000) moves available, you usually just want to only look at "the best" 10-15 (ideally even less if you can), and how reliable this determining of "the best" is seems like a way larger factor than just how many branches there are in theory.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  If you've done game AI then you're the expert, not me. I threw it in as it seemed relevant. I dunno. Granted evaluation is key but so is branching, surely, as that is what generates new positions, and their complexity in evaluation as there are more factors to consider. How does one 'look at "the best" 10-15 [positions]' without culling all the others first, however cheaply? I thought evaluation really was just tree searching (hence branching factor is crucial) with various weights (obviously this is traditional chess evaluation, not fancy NN stuff). I honestly am clueless.
  - pingyong 7y ago
    You do have to cull the others, but the culling isn't what is costly. What is costly is the exponential nature of searching the tree, i.e. if you want to evaluate 3 of your moves in advance, with 50 moves being available every time, you have to generate 50^6 moves, which is pretty fast on a modern CPU, but for 4 moves it's 50^8 which is definitely not that fast anymore. So at some point you have to sacrifice breadth for depth drastically, and as soon as you do that pretty much the only thing that matters is how well you can evaluate positions as they are (without searching further down the tree). Even if you didn't cull searches, at some point you have to stop searching and fundamentally decide what the best move is. If this evaluation isn't good, all your searching didn't do anything. This is, from my understanding, also the reason why traditional AI approaches struggled so much with Go. Not because Go has so many possible moves, but because given a certain game state it is so difficult to evaluate which player is ahead.

devit 7y ago

I think no-castling just generates a different opening theory, and Chess960's 960 starting positions are also not enough: it should be possible to memorize at least the best white move for each of the 960 positions, and probably the main variation and even more. The only way to be sure is to have a random chess variant with at least a billion different possible opening starting positions: the conceptually simplest way seems to be to place all pieces completely randomly in the first three ranks (in the same way for each color), while rejecting any position that allows white to make a capture, check or threaten to capture a non-pawn piece on the first move.

have_faith 7y ago
> it should be possible to memorize at least the best white move for each of the 960 positions Seeing how there is no consensus on "best opening" for the normal game of chess, introducing 960 more variations is not going to be a simple case of memorising the "best opening". I would go as far to say that simply introducing 10 new standard opening positions would introduce more than enough complexity to shake up high level play. There's only so much a human can remember once the computer is turned off and you are over the board.
- devit 7y ago
  Just run the most sophisticated chess engines available 960 times and publish the results. Even if not the "best" in an absolute sense, the moves those engines find are going to better than the move that an human comes up on the spot. This means that memorization will still be necessary in Chess960 to be competitive at the highest levels and in fact it's probably going to be worse because memorizing those 960 starting moves sounds far more tedious than memorizing classic opening theory. Scrabble players can memorize 10K+ word dictionaries in languages they don't know, and since (starting position, move number, chess move) triples can be encoded as words, it should be possible to memorize the main variation found by chess engines for each Chess960 position.
  - have_faith 7y ago
    But this hinges on there being a computable best opening, which there isn't for standard chess and there won't be for most(all?) starting positions in 960 (chess isn't a solved game). It's also not just an enum of [starting position, move number, chess move], there's also "why is this move strong in this position" which isn't something scrabble players have an equivalent of with just memorising lists of words. I personally can't imagine any of the current top chess players memorising hundreds of opening lines for all 960 starting positions and then being able to remember them over the board. Only a few players have a mastery of current known chess theory that's just one starting position. I am happy to be proven wrong though when some new chess savant presents themselves.

EduardLev 7y ago

I find it interesting that both games of this variant between Kramnik and AlphaZero ended in a draw. That suggests to me that we would quickly see the same problem in the variant as we do now. The question would be, how long would it take for humans to catch up? My guess is a couple of years, until the variant has to be changed again (That is, mostly draws in high level competitions). What are other similar games that have a higher level of variation? Go comes to mind. How about we increase the size of the chess board to 9x9, while keeping the same 8x8 setup? That sounds like a number of variations more than no castling, while still keeping the same feel.

Cybiote 7y ago
Hi, can you point to the source for this? I failed to find any mention of it in the article. Or did you mean the two games annotated by Kramnik? Thanks.
- EduardLev 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I meant the games annotated by Kramnik. Would have been interested to see his results.

jstanley 7y ago

> The no-castling restriction means that players cannot rely on memorized patterns; they are forced to think creatively from the beginning. It's not obvious that this is true at all. Once top-level players have played no-castling-chess as much as they've played ordinary chess, I don't see why they wouldn't have just as many patterns memorised.

kohanz 7y ago
While it is true that eventually, the patterns would be recognized and we'd have the same problem, I think the gambit (to use a chess term) Kramnik is making here is that for the current form of chess, it took us hundreds of years of practice, experience, and study to get to this point. Before we reached this stage, chess was, as Kramnik is arguing, more exciting and entertaining. This time around the adjustment period would no doubt be significantly shorter for a couple of reasons: 1) Computer-aided analysis will greatly accelerate the evaluation of new openings and positions 2) This change does not really affect end-game theory, so that part doesn't change
michaelscott 7y ago
It just removes a large swathe of current possible lines I guess. Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings). I don't think it'll produce amazingly creative chess, it's true, but it may produce more interesting opening games?
- arcticfox 7y ago
  > Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings) This is only true for the brief period until someone modifies an engine to train on the new ruleset.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Analysis through an engine is trivial with a 'hack' of inputing an artificial chain of fixed moves in the beginning. No-castling chess rules are exactly equivalent to ordinary chess rules after both players move both knights, move both rooks, and return them to the original positions.

calhoun137 7y ago

Meh. I dont believe we have even come close to finding the best chess strategy for humans and strongly disgagree with the premise of this article that chess strategy for humans is at some kind of ending and we need to change the rules or else it will never get better. In fact, I have done a lot of research into chess engine theory and believe flaws in the stockfish algorithm directly contrubute to the "boring" chess we see today, since all pros use engines to train now. The old engines cant see lines that alphazero sees which involve long term positional sacrifices, and use a linear evaluation function which in principle can never capture the strong non linearities inherenit in chess. (alphazero uses a non linear evaluation function, which is its nueral net) Considered as a mathematical space, the universe of possible chess strategies is an extremely large order of infinity. There are also many aspects of time management in relation to the computational complexity of the position which modern engines dont model at all. I believe that modern engines are overly materialistic and that aggresive positional sacrficies in the style of Tal and alphazero are the future of chess strategy for humans

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
To me the whole concept of chess always getting better is a little puzzling. Most games of this type don't change, and therefore don't get better. The point is local challenge, not global optimization. To most, the point of games (and much other human endeavor) is competition for competition's sake, not a search for some maximum of abstract skill. To avoid chess (real chess, with castling and all that) because AlphaZero exists is like avoiding singing because Taylor Swift exists. Or like avoiding painting because Chagall existed. Or like avoiding Starcraft because Serral exists. Yeah, with a 99.999999% chance, you're not going to exceed the performance of these individuals (or others I could name) in their respective fields. That doesn't take the joy out of learning and growing, at least not for me. AlphaZero and similar add a few more nines to chess, in terms of the likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game. But that should hardly make a difference except to maybe the two or three very best human players in the world.
- calhoun137 7y ago
  I am 1000x more interested in chess engine's and "a search for some maximum of abstract skill" than I am in getting good at chess. During my research into this topic I discovered many facts which led me to conclude that there exist multiple chess strategies which humans can use which are currently unknown and which are far more powerful than anything currently used by grand masters or chess engines. This was all before alphazero was released, and I feel strongly that alphazero proved the hypothesis that chess strategy theory will continue to improve and there is still so much to learn. Chess theory is "always getting better". This is because chess has the property that the skill curve is so extreme and the game so deep that it is seemingly always possible to continue to improve and find new ideas. Chess engines play a fundamental role in modern human chess. There is a causal relationship between the state of the art in chess engines and the play styles of the top pro's. This is because better engines can find new idea's in positions previously thought to be completely explored. It happened recently with an alphazero game in a spectacular way iirc There is a theorem which says that given any chess engine, it's impossible to decide if that chess engine is playing in an optimal way. So when you say "in terms of the likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game", I think its important to be very precise about what we mean, even though in spirit I agree with that statement =) I started working on a project to build a chess engine that is specifically designed to beat other chess engines by playing in a non-optimal way specifically tailored to find and exploit bugs in the opposing chess engine code/flaws in its algorithm. I also once proved that any chess engine based on the principles of stockfish will necessarily contain positions where it can be exploited into making bad moves. If you fixed the algorithm to make it not exploitable in that specific position, the theorem says there would exist another position where it would be exploitable. This is what I call the theory of "exploitative chess engines" (in the sense of maximizing the possible gain), as opposed to ones which attempt to play in an "optimal" way (minimizing the maximum loss)

DonCopal 7y ago

I guess a submission won't gain traction if you don't mention "AlphaZero" in the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118

arunix 7y ago

Rather than banning castling outright, what if opposite wing castling was the only type of castling allowed? That should also make draws more unlikely.

k_sze 7y ago

While we're at it, we can possibly create a new variant every few years with the aid of AlphaZero, to curb the memorisation trap. Here are the steps: 1. Think of a new rule change; 2. Train AlphaZero for a period of time with the new rule; 3. Validate the viability of the new rule, based on two criteria: a) enough interesting lines discovered by AlphaZero; b) no obvious advantage for either black or white, based on the results of the AlphaZero training games; 4. Make the new rule officially accepted at FIDE for the next N years. 5. Repeat for the next cycle.

lifeformed 7y ago

I wish he posted the draw percentage.

deegles 7y ago

Is there an adaptive difficulty AlphaZero engine? It would be interesting to learn by playing one set to "try to win 50% of games" as a difficulty.

cjlars 7y ago

Presumably the reason for changing the rules is to limit the number of draws, because wins and losses are more exciting. As he mentions, high level, full length chess has a rather disappointing percent of games ending in a draw. However, he doesn't even show that alphazero produces less draws in this variant (even the example game is a draw through repetition!). It may be interesting because it's different, but I don't really think Kramnik successfully argues that it's any better.

pmoriarty 7y ago
Yeah, I'd just make a draw an automatic win for Black, who is normally considered to be playing with a slight disadvantage as compared to White, who has the slight advantage of making the first move.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  At the top level chess is too easy for either player to force into a draw-like position for this to be fair. If you added some additional advantage for white (e.g. only white can castle) it might work. Having a game where one player always tries to win and the other player always tries to draw might not really be the effect you want though.

mindgam3 7y ago

Former world-ranked youth chess player here. 100% agree with the desire to reduce draws and get people out of opening theory. Not sure though why Kramnik felt the need to invent a new variant when Chess960 already exists, is thriving, and changes the game far more drastically than no-castling rule. The post reads more as an submarine advertisement for DeepMind (0) than a serious article for chess players. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

schoen 7y ago
Kramnik briefly addresses this question in the article: > Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game. (I have no idea if his view would be persuasive to you.)
- mindgam3 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't find these arguments particularly convincing. > In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. Actually the nontraditional start is part of what makes it fun. It's fresh and forces you to start using your brain from move one. I don't buy the claim that the main enjoyment of chess is due to familiar positions. > The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. I can't speak to Kramnik's private conversations, but as a serious player what I can say is that my competitive advantage over an amateur diminishes considerably in Chess960. Perhaps what Kramnik's friends are complaining about is the fact that it's harder for them to win at Chess960 than standard. > Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game. Yeah, there's a difference in aesthetics for sure. But who is to say that it is "worse"? Some piece configurations do feel a bit "ugly" but to me this is more than balanced out by the beauty of new patterns emerging where they weren't expected.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately. Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game." I'm an amateur who's a fan of the Fisher Random chess variant, and feel it is a tremendous improvement over the enormous amounts of opening memorization that is required in traditional chess, and which is yet another thing that gives computers (who have a perfect memory) an edge over humans.