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Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence
- mellosouls 6y agoAlso covered here with a little more technical (chess) info: https://www.chess.com/news/new-alphazero-paper-explores-chess-variants https://www.chess.com/news/new-alphazero-paper-explores-ches...
- colejohnson66 6y agoSurprised they didn’t include the “crazyhouse” and “suicide” variants. I played those a lot on earlier Mac OS X versions.
- smitty1e 6y agoI was interested to see what they were doing with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)
- ipsofacto 6y agoThere's also an interesting video by PowerPlayChess here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31UzlgNtQYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31UzlgNtQYQ which covers the games where self capture is allowed. There are some really fascinating tricks that are now possible in that variation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway4007 6y agoPeople have been wailing about chess being dry and full of draws and memorized openings for a century now. Capablanca wanted to swap bisbops and knights to reset opening theory, and Fischer wanted to just randomize the starting positions. I'm probably missing some other people. All of these attempts failed, because of several reasons: 1) The aforementioned problem of memorizing openings and accumulating draws only occurs at a very, very high level. Even if you're a GM you won't prepare at the level Carlsen et al. do, memorizing entire 30-move games they had against each other twelve years ago. 2) Opening theory moves on and playstyles evolve. AlphaZero shifted the mood from conservative, materialistic, 'computer-like' play to a highly dynamic style that puts an emphasis on piece activity. Just like when we think we got most things figured out, new breakthroughs show we've only barely scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. 3) Most chess players don't see the abundance of draws as a problem. I think it is specifically an American sentiment - in a country where you're either a winner or a loser, the game's failure to rank its top players can be frustrating. 4) Most players see preparation against their opponent as part of competitive play. Think of it as a kind of metagaming. Changing the rules would completely reset that. 5) There's a good chance that any change of rules would aggravate White's marginal first-move advantage. It doesn't matter what the computer says, what matters is how humans play it and how it reflects in the winrates among humans. That doesn't mean the variants are bad or useless though. Bughouse and suicide chess are crazy fun
- fwsgonzo 6y ago960 chess is hugely popular now, and is even being used in tournaments - one of them being today. The only thing that is going out of style in chess is classic chess. Stalemates happen less in 960.
- V-2 6y ago"Even being used in tournaments" is not exactly the same as "hugely popular". There is some interest, and tournaments are played now and again, sure. However, it's nowhere near the popularity of classic chess, which shows no signs of "going out of style". To provide some perspective - on lichess.org (one of the most popular sites for online chess; the one where the high-profile tournament you mentioned took place) in June there have been 70,374,749 classic games played. Chess960 accounted for 285,788 games. That's ~250 times less popular. "Stalemates happen less in 960" - seriously? Why? Do you have any source of that claim? I could believe that draws in general are more rare (lack of opening theory makes equalizing in middle game more difficult). But why would it affect the rate of stalemates specifically?
- fwsgonzo 6y agoI am watching Hikaru Nakamura on stream every day, and he does say that 960 will grow, and classic will not. I just take his word for it. I don't have anything against classic, and as you say, I will probably be playing it forever myself, but from a spectators point of view its more fun if there are less stalemates. There's a lot more room for errors in 960, even among GMs.
- thret 6y agoThe key to chess being entertaining is time pressure. Watching Hikaru and Magnus play blitz is far more enjoyable than a 'normal' game. I've been watching a lot of Hikaru's streams since PogChamps put him on my radar and he is a very entertaining player IMO.
- V-2 6y agoAd 2. Very true Ad 3. This abundance of draws (like #1) only becomes a problem at elite levels, too. Not to mention just because a game ends with a draw doesn't mean it's a dry and boring draw. A draw can be a fascinating back-and-forth struggle full of tricks and swindles. Same as many decisive games can actually be yawn-inducing - think 70-moves long, even endgame that comes to a conclusion only because one of the exhausted players finally blunders.
- shannifin 6y agoPlayed chess in high school and lost interest in actually playing the more I explored AI... I find it much more fascinating to explore Alpha's games. (Probably I'm also mentally lazier now.)
- skc 6y agoFascinating, and genuinely refreshing. Wonder if we could go one further and have tournaments where the rules changed to a different ordered variation after a set number of moves. Now that would be mind bending.
- WalterBright 6y agoWhen I was in college, a Monopoly game appeared on the DEC-10. Playing that for a while completely ruined the game for me. Then someone wrote a bot to play ADVENT, which ruined that, too. My ability to play chess declined precipitously after I learned how to program, because while thinking of my next move I'd always digress into how to design a program to do the work for me. I originally wrote the Empire game because it was unbearably tedious to play manually, but the computer took care of the tedium and what was left was the fun.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago> I originally wrote the Empire game because it was unbearably tedious to play manually, but the computer took care of the tedium and what was left was the fun. This is also the premise behind Factorio.
- kleiba 6y agoBut would you say the net outcome of this process was a loss or a win for you personally? I mean, I for one never played Monopoly with a computer and yet my perception of the game has certainly changed - not because of technology but because I'm an adult now. I think our stance towards everything always evolves. In return, you were able to find a new interest through this irk: programming. And I think being passionate about something is what's required to become really good at something, so the fact that your chess playing started to make you think more and deeper about programming was certainly beneficially for the latter.
- WalterBright 6y ago> would you say the net outcome of this process was a loss or a win for you personally? Oh, absolutely. It was far beyond my abilities when I started, so I learned how to program with it. It also got me interested in compilers, as the compilers of the day didn't generate good code, Empire was slow, and I naturally assumed I could do much better :-)
- kleiba 6y ago
- Quarrelsome 6y agoI believe its very much the arbitrary numbers we gave to pieces that we coded into our brute forced chess AIs that has allowed new chess AIs to be better. As this article hinted, its understanding of piece value fluctuates based on the rules of the game but also as the game changes. Alpha Zero makes sacrifices human players wouldn't because they're too wedded to the idea that a queen is 9, a rook is 5 and a knight/bishop is 3.5. As flexible as a human mind gets is valuing a rook pair, bishop pair or knights if the position is closed. This means that Alpha Go destroys the greedy Stockfish because Stockfish counts the numbers but Alpha Go counts the position of the entire board which is much more complicated.
- hartator 6y agoI thought queen was 8, rook 5, and bishop/knights 3?
- brmgb 6y agoGenerally, a queen is considered to be worth more than a rook and a bishop. Also, knights and bishops are worth the same except they are not. Knights are good in closed play but you can't mate with two knights and a king. Bishops are definitely better when there is more space. But, the value is just a simplification to help players assess situation. A piece which can't be played actively is worth nothing.
- ndand 6y agoStockfish evaluates the position of the entire board, e.g. mobility of pieces, how much opposing space they control, etc. But still, the evaluation function is hardcoded and weaker than AlphaZero. Recently Stockfish introduced neural network evaluation. https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/625828091343896577/introducing-nnue-evaluation https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/625828091343896577/intr...
- Quarrelsome 6y agoBy that I just mean Alpha Go is assuming less about board state than StockFish and other conventional chess AIs do. Evidently the two engines have different assessments which is why Stockfish will greedily lap up a sacrifice by Alpha Zero onto to then lose because of it.
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoHow widespread amongst chess experts is the premise that "AI ruined chess" ?
- brmgb 6y agoNot very. It is poetic licence on the part of the writer. AI had a real impact on how the game was played however. After the advent of computer evaluation, there was a broad consensus that the way to win was to play solid positions. In a way, professional chess became more about not losing than winning. Anish Giri who peaked at number 3 in the world a few years ago is nicknamed the artist because he keeps drawing. Some found that pretty boring. Funnily, salvation might actually have come from AI. AlphaZero doesn't play boring games and reminded everyone that favoring activity and initiative is a viable strategy. Still, all things considered, streaming had probably a much bigger impact on chess than AI in the last few years.
- keiferski 6y agoQuestion for those knowledgeable on AI: what sort of game would be easy for a human to understand, but difficult or impossible for a computer to play or easily defeat humans? I imagine one based purely on randomness, like dice, would be one. I remember reading somewhere that languages like Finnish and Hungarian are difficult for computers to parse, [1] due to their agglutinative grammatical structure. Not sure if that is actually true, but it seems an interesting starting point. [1] Discussion sort of about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572261
- monsieurbanana 6y agoI actually expect computers to do much better on a game with a lot of randomness, since it then becomes statistics. Genres that would be difficult: - any game based on recognizing images (the first example that pops in my mind is codenames) - social deduction like werewolf
- gowld 6y agoCodenames is easyfor an all-computer team; it's simply a word vector problem. There are already AIs published. Pictionary might be harder.
- warrenq 6y agodude, get with the program :) https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/ https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/
- monsieurbanana 6y agoAh yes, I was thinking of codenames the picture version.
- sasaf5 6y agoThere's Arimaa [0], designed by an AI researcher with the goal of favoring humans over AI. However on 2015 AI has overtaken humans in Arimaa. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa
- jka 6y agoThis is a slight tangent to the article, but in the hope HN readers will find this as fascinating as I have recently... There's a three-way battle developing between AlphaZero (as described in the article, courtesy of DeepMind), LCZero[5] (derived from LeelaZero[1] -- an open source interpretation of the same principles as AZ), and Stockfish[2] (a long-standing open source chess engine that has recently begun including neural network support). The 'Top Chess Engine Championship'[3] seems to be a good way to follow the latest news; they also stream matches live on their website[4] (it is quite an information-dense site). You can play against an up-to-date implementation of Stockfish in your browser -- no registration or signup required -- at https://lichess.org https://lichess.org [1] - https://zero.sjeng.org/ https://zero.sjeng.org/ [2] - https://stockfishchess.org/ https://stockfishchess.org/ [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship [4] - https://tcec-chess.com/ https://tcec-chess.com/ [5] - https://www.lczero.org/ https://www.lczero.org/ Edit: correct LeelaZero -> LCZero
- thom 6y agoAlso very much worth reading GM Matthew Sadler's coverage of the superfinal games in the articles, section, e.g.: https://tcec-chess.com/articles/Sufi_18_-_Sadler.pdf https://tcec-chess.com/articles/Sufi_18_-_Sadler.pdf
- NhanH 6y agoLeelaZero is strictly used for the Go AI nowadays, the chess version changed their name to LC0 (or Leela Chess Zero, or LCZero), and the website is at [0] AlphaZero is not involved in any battle with LC0 or Stockfish, as no one outside of Deepmind has accessed to it. The battle for chess supreme is between LC0 and Stockfish, with both trading blows pretty much every update :-) [0] https://lczero.org/ https://lczero.org/
- jka 6y agoMy mistake, thanks for the correction :)
- mk_chan 6y ago
- xiaodai 6y agoShogi is the most complex Chess variant. But seriously. Just play go. New patterns emerge everyday now it seems. The most complex pattern can arise from such simple rules.
- loxias 6y agoI would love to see AlphaZero play go on other manifolds than the plane. I and some friends attempted to play 3-space go, toroidal go, and go with other mathematical roadblocks a long time ago. It was fun for a few weeks, and we even discovered some interesting properties about where life can exist on a torus, but a computer could do much better. And I'd love to just see the answers.
- neolog 6y agoHow do you define "surrounded" on a torus?
- luhem7 6y agoA toroidal plane wraps around left to right and also top to bottom. The left and right edges are connected and the top and bottom edges are connected. I would imagine the definition of surround would have to be modified accordingly.
- joelthelion 6y agoThe actual Go concept is 'no liberties'. That works on any topology.
- kadoban 6y agoI think it's obvious. For capture, the definition doesn't change (it's based on no liberties). Depending on the ruleset you don't need more than capture, territory/score/winner can be defined from that. Conceptually it's fine anyway though, territory is spaces reachable over cardinal directions via empty spaces or dead stones from only one person's living stones.
- in3d 6y agoThere are promising chess variants where all draws are eliminated: no black castling or no black short-castling Armageddon (draws are counted as wins for black). I wish they would test them instead of their picks - they are still chess unlike some variants they tested, which are probably too radical if you want to attract current chess players.
- me_me_me 6y agoI got back to chess few years back, and following scene a bit. The classical long for chess is basically dead. Its boring, with majority draws (close to solved game - de0incentivizing aggressive play). I am glad there is shift towards shorter time formats. Shorter time control creates more urgency and allows to play subpar moves to throw off your opponent. Its much more interesting to observe. Armagedon rules are being used now as tie breakers and there is a lot more discussion about changes/rules tweaks. So who knows what next year will bring.
- dh5 6y agoI strongly disagree with the assertion that chess is a "close to solved game" in human OTB play in particular. Top GMs currently will probably score 0/12 against Leela/Stockfish. We see innovations frequently in recent years as we learn from engines themselves, h4/h5 pushes as a simple example, but also in terms of style like favoring rapid development and attacking play. Yes, draws are frequent but that doesn't mean there is no excitement in long games. Rapid/blitz is damn fun to watch and play but there's a certain, different kind of elegance in carefully considered moves as well.
- me_me_me 6y ago> I strongly disagree with the assertion that chess is a "close to solved game" in human OTB play in particular. I meant 90min +30mins classical format. It really is stale and boring to watch. And it seems like its mainly a memory game with some meta counter preparations pre-tournament. Where you develop and memorize lines to counter your opponent. That's what I meant by "close to solved game" - as both players are almost role playing for first 20-30 moves. With tiny variations throughout the tournament. That results in quite uneventful games, usually same line being played in multiple games. Anyhow that's just an opinion, if someone enjoys classical more power to them.
- _hao 6y agoKramnik is the one to talk about computer chess alright... I remember when I was still in school the huge scandal with him going multiple times to the bathroom in his match against then world champion Veselin Topalov (should be around 2005-2006). It caused huge outrage and upset in my native Bulgaria. On a different note I learned Xiangqi (Chinese chess) this past February and I found it quite interesting and exciting. Rules seem a bit more complicated than chess and I'm not sure how it compares to Shogi for example. Pretty sure Go is still more complex though :)
- pedrosorio 6y agoAnalysis of the 2006 match by a CS professor: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/Elista2006.html https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/Elista2006.htm...
- sasaf5 6y agoA summary to undo the clickbait: AI is making chess beautiful by making it easy to check how new rules affect playability. Rule changes suggested in the article are: - No castling - Allowing self capture - Pawns can move sideways - Pawns can move 2 squares at a time
- david927 6y agoThe rare occasions that I played against my wife and tried to castle, she rejected it outright with, "No fancy moves!"
- curiousllama 6y agoThe true metagame
- dane-pgp 6y agoI'm reminded of this classic bit: https://youtu.be/i-oDOJlWBTw?t=1849 https://youtu.be/i-oDOJlWBTw?t=1849 "That's castling sweetheart... It's an advanced level manoeuvre, they added it in the last patch."
- saalweachter 6y agoIt does feel like a "I am not left handed!" kind of move.
- aidenn0 6y agoWhen I first performed an en passant against my sister she refused to play chess with me for weeks saying I was cheating.
- awb 6y agoEven if a new game mode is found to enhance gameplay, AI would master these variations quickly reducing the novelty of them. The best attempt I've seen is Fisher random chess which attempts to create so many unique starting positions that memorizing openings becomes impossible. It ends up leading to really unique situations, and in some cases even a first move advantage for black.
- bananaowl 6y agoI can heartily recommend "Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins" by Kasparov. It's his story on what happened around Deep Blue.
- soamv 6y agoThere's a really interesting hour-long interview (more of a monologue really, heh) with Kramnik about no-castling chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPe6xQjO98Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPe6xQjO98Q
- rmrfrmrf 6y agoAn important piece of context here is that making a living by playing chess competitively is close to nil, so many even top players like Kramnik end up taking consulting/PR jobs like this in order to pay the bills. I have a hard time believing Kramnik actually believes (or said directly) that AI ruined chess. My read is that he's not really promoting changes to the rules of chess as much as he's trying to build support for new types of chess variants. It's true that the highest levels of play include teams of researchers and computers that develop 30+ move preparation, but what we're also seeing as a result of that are games that are more precise, which IMO is a fundamental component of chess "beauty". Some notable games that were deemed "beautiful" in the past are now seen as less-beautiful as it became apparent that play was suboptimal. Chess beauty now is less about flashy combinations and more about qualities of a position and reverse engineering the "logic" behind certain AI moves, which is still great but admittedly requires more of an investment on learning the game than a spectator might care about. That framing, though, leaves out the massive benefit that AI has had in training and improving new players. It used to be that you needed to hire a chess master to play against and learn from in order to improve. Now your phone can easily give you a challenge of master-level strength, as well as analyze your games over the board to look for improvements.
- misja111 6y ago> Chess beauty now is less about flashy combinations and more about qualities of a position No it's the opposite. Since the advent of strong computer programs it has become clear that there are tactical intricacies in lots of positions that have long been overlooked by everyone, including top players. Gambits that everyone thought should not be accepted because it would give away a too strong positional advantage turned out to be winnable by clever defence moves. End games that were thought to be draws turned out to be winnable by although sometimes it would take more than 100 moves. The bottom line is that the tactical part of chess is deeper than most people thought.
- jayparth 6y agoWell I agree with your first example. But would you call someone who wins a supposedly drawn endgame after 100 moves a tactical player or positional player? No one I know would claim that what happened on the 100th move was a tactic. It was 90+ moves of jockeying for position.
- msla 6y agoAI ruined chess the same way horse riding ruined running.
- dhairya 6y agoLichess has great variants to play. If you haven't tried crazyhorse or multi-player version bughouse, highly recommend it. In crazyhorse you can put captured enemy anywhere on the board as your own piece. Likewise in bughouse, you play with a partner (where you are opposite colors) against another team. You each play your own game against the opponent but each opponent piece you capture you can give to your partner to place on their board and vice versa. First person to win the game wins for their team. It requires good communication and a different strategies than traditional chess as you need to account for two games and the flow of pieces on both boards.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI did't like the article in the sense that AI hasn't ruined chess. Its more popular than ever, but the focus has moved to shorter time controls...which can be quite exciting to watch. I watch chess tournaments on twitch.tv with two grand masters commentating...and honestly, its like watching a godly hockey match. That said, I'd like to see some of these variations get implemented on chess.com. A lot of the variations (aside from 960) are a bit silly feeling (e.g. a variation where when you take a piece, all pieces within a 1 square radius get blown to smithereens).
- floe 6y ago> In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces. Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more natural, than prior chess engines. 'doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces' - really? How would the world be different if it did 'know'? I know this is kind of a nitpick, but I'm tired of all the metaphors in tech journalism that hold no informational value. I think giving a sense of false understanding is worse than just saying nothing at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shmageggy 6y agoI think it's an imprecise way of saying that AlphaZero isn't given the game rules, so it doesn't know the difference between legal and illegal moves, and also that before any training it would evaluate a caputure no differently than any other move.
- floe 6y ago> isn't given the game rules, so it doesn't know the difference between legal and illegal moves But it does have some way to determine a list of legal moves from any given state, and a way to determine whether a state is winning. To me, that's being 'given the game rules'. > before any training it would evaluate a capture no differently than any other move. That's a good way to say it!
- shmageggy 6y ago> But it does have some way to determine a list of legal moves from any given state No it doesn't. That's the Zero part.
- ummonk 6y agoIt's weird that they the start of this article seems to imply that AI has taken the joy out of chess. I guess I was only a kid for the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov days so maybe I don't know any different, but to me fundamentally chess is joyful because it's a sport. It's not about trying to be the best algorithm in the world, it's about trying to put out strong consistent performance on the spot in a game. Sure, your moves won't be as good as a computer's but that doesn't take the joy out of making them try to be as good as possible.
- osyed1 6y agoI invented a game called Arimaa that could be played with a chess set but the rules were very different to make it harder for computer. I put up a $10k challenge to develop an AI that could defeat the top human players. A challenge match was run every year from 2004 to 2015 when it was finally claimed (one year before AI took over Go). There was a variant of Arimaa that I didn't go with since the games did not seem that interesting. It was the same as current Arimaa, but without any trap squares. So no pieces were captured and the game seem to take longer to finish, but I think it may have been a more strategic version (less tactics). I still wonder sometimes if that would have been helped the humans stay ahead a bit longer. I avoided that version since I was not sure if it could lead to deadlock positions. Play testing to check for flaws especially at high level play would be way to much effort for humans. It would be less effort to have an AI check the game rules. Although there is still a big cost to doing that. The AI researchers in the Arimaa community have recently developed an AI that has learned to play Arimaa through self play. They have also brought down the cost of training from about $1 million to about $1 thousand. If anyone is interested, there is a discord channel where we discuss this kind of stuff https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR More information about the Arimaa game as well as a gameroom where you can play it available here: http://arimaa.com/ http://arimaa.com/