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Now that computers can be cheaply trained to play chess at greater than human skill level without any pre-existing knowledge of the game, has anyone looked at t
by jessriedel 7y ago
Now that computers can be cheaply trained to play chess at greater than human skill level without any pre-existing knowledge of the game, has anyone looked at the question of whether the rules of chess are optimal or non-optimal under some measure of interestingness and simplicity? Like, there was some evolutionary pressure on the rules of chess to be simple and yet yield interesting games in the early days before the rules had solidified. It's now possible to take an arbitrary chess rules variant and cheaply train a machine to be (with high confidence) at least as good as a grand master would be in the universe where those rules had persisted for a thousand years. Are there better rules out there?
- elfexec 7y agoNot sure if this is what you are asking, but Bobby Fischer thought the current chess rules led to boring games so he invented Fischer Random Chess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess It makes the games far more complex and dynamic since the pieces are placed somewhat randomly. There are other variants which remove castling which makes the game even more dynamic as it prevent castling to secure your king from the middle of the rank.
- galaxyLogic 7y agoHow about this simple rule, has this been tried? To begin with each player puts one piece of their color on the board on their turn where-ever they want. When all pieces are on table, the player who placed the last piece gets the first move, to compensate for the fact that the other player had the advantage to place the first piece on the board where-ever they wanted to.
- jeffdavis 7y agoIt seems like you'd end up with a lot of pawns placed near the end of the board, quickly (instantly?) turning into queens.
- torgian 7y agoThen add a rule where pawns are limited to the middle rows of the board, amd/or reduce the amount of pawns
- galaxyLogic 7y agoThat would seem to work. Another approach could be that yes you must fill the first two rows of your side initially, but players would take turns in doing that piece by piece. You would see how your opponent places their army piece by piece on their side and you would adjust your placements accordingly.
- galaxyLogic 7y agoI see. So I guess it wouldn't make much sense, without adding more new rules.
- jessriedel 7y agoThanks, I'm aware of many chess rule variants. The question is whether these have ever been studied systematically by training human-level computers on each rule set and then analyzing the games played.
- emmelaich 7y agoThere is chess960 among others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
- chongli 7y agoThere was a story on here a few weeks ago [1] where retired grand master Vladimir Kramnik advocated for getting rid of castling. He worked with the Alpha Zero team to investigate the ramifications. They re-trained the network from scratch on the rule change and Kramnik claims it’ll lead to way more interesting games at the top level. It remains to be seen whether this plays out in practice, given that humans are more risk-averse (particularly in sharp positions) than Alpha Zero. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21789224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21789224
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago> cheaply Citation needed. AlphaZero was 'cheap' only if you have Google-scale resources at hand.
- jessriedel 7y agoAlphaZero beat Stockfish, which is substantially more powerful than humans. Much fewer resources would be needed for human level performance.
- lazyant 7y agoI think moving the pawn two squares forward is one such rule innovation (as in the movement was not there in old time chess, also because of this en passant had to be implemented as well)