17 ms·
Los Alamos Chess
- moffkalast 3y ago> This program was written at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer I see the names of computers have gone significantly downhill since the 60s.
- kijin 3y ago> Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly acronyms for machine names [1] Looks like even MANIAC was deliberately restrained to make it sound less maniac than the names of computers that came before it. Can't beat Manchester Baby, Colossus, The WITCH, SWAC and MADDIDA. Being Los Alamos, they really should have named it ATOMIAC or something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I
- moffkalast 3y agoATOMIAC is a great option, but if you look at today's super computers it's all Sierra, Selene, Summit, etc. Lame ass corporate names. I'm at least glad my university lab named their main GPU server The Crushinator.
- tibbetts 3y agoI dunno, the new Microsoft / OpenAI computer is named “Stargate,” that’s a pretty solid name.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nxobject 3y agoI miss adding "AC" to the end of computer names to emphasize that you indeed have an "automatic computer". ("MACbook Pro" doesn't count, I swear!)
- Y_Y 3y ago1. Feynman to U-235
- jhbadger 3y agoI'm not sure if anyone actually plays this as an actual chess variant, but it is fun to write a chess player for this, mirroring the 1956 version. I remember reading about this in the 1980s and wrote a version in BASIC that could beat me every time (maybe not that impressive objectively, but it impressed me).
- passwordoops 3y agoFor some reason your comment made me think of the classic Simpsons bit, "When I stamp your foot and say 'Hello Mister Thompson' you say hi back." Funny how the human mind works
- huytersd 3y agoI hate sudoku variant videos that rope me in with some impossible scenario and then explain a totally different set of rules.
- alhirzel 3y agoThen you will hate this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4 I love it though, his reactions are priceless.
- huytersd 3y agoIt was this exact person that made me hate it. Oh look an empty puzzle, except you can’t have consecutive numbers, the 2s can’t be in the corners and every alternate cell is the sum of the previous two. It’s stupid.
- lanternfish 3y agoGenuinely curious - what makes it stupid?
- metadat 3y ago
- davidw 3y ago> The computer still needed about 20 minutes between moves. Wow. Coding and debugging that is... a whole other level of difficulty compared to coding these days.
- pacaro 3y agoMy mother describes laying out the program flow on index cards (or recycled punch cards depending on what was available) on the living room floor and walking through the program/room with a notebook tracking the program state. To her that was debugging This was mid to late 60s
- tombert 3y agoEvery time I read about about how slow really old computers were, I say an internal "thank you" to Bell Labs for the transistor. I'll occasionally see a YouTube video about vacuum tube or relay based computers, and they'll show their operations on the order of 3-10 operations per second. And here I am writing this comment with something whose operations are on the order of billions per second.
- kevindamm 3y ago...and that's not all! With access to our modern network you effectively have Teraflops at your fingertips, possibly even Petaflops if you know what you're doing.
- 3y ago
- dvh 3y agoKruskal (author of the kruskal algorithm) won. edit: pardon, wrong Kruskal Joseph Kruskal had two notable brothers, Martin David Kruskal, co-inventor of solitons, and William Kruskal, who developed the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance. One of Joseph Kruskal's nephews is notable computer scientist and professor Clyde Kruskal.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoAnd apparently his mother popularized origami in America! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Oppenheimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Oppenheimer
- mturmon 3y agoAmazing stuff! And origami is not unrelated to (hexa)flexagons, which are a perennial HN favorite and also a math/physics fascination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexagon#Discovery_and_introduction_of_the_hexaflexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexagon#Discovery_and_introdu...)
- thriftwy 3y agoThis one seems to be the author of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates Which are great at challenging commonly held beliefs about black holes.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoSo judging from the omission of the bishop and the queen, the computer really hated calculating diagonals, huh? I would've assumed that calculating the knight's movements would've been the bigger headache.
- InitialLastName 3y agoThe queen is there. It was probably a more interesting game to keep the knights for their moveset rather than keep the bishops (given the need to reduce to 6x6). Between the ~half-sized board, the intrinsic limitations in where they can go, and the reduced pawn movement, bishops would be very clumsy if left in.
- Sharlin 3y agoI don’t think there’s anything difficult in calculating a knight’s moves. On the other hand rooks, bishops, and queens generate many moves at a time, making the game tree much wider, which might make a difference, or it might not. But anyway, as noted by the sibling, queens were there (except in the second game, in which Kruskal played without and the computer played with, to even the odds), and the omission of bishops in particular had nothing to do with evaluation difficulty per se.
- Sesse__ 3y agoHumans are probably worse with knights than any other piece, relative to computers. Queen is a possible second; queen endgames are super-complex for humans since there are so many options and very few of them can be easily pruned. (I guess you can say that humans are bad with knights and computers are good with queens, especially endgame queens.) Diagonal sliders do create lots of headaches for bitboards, but those were not used for chess before 1967 or so, i.e., more than a decade later. Generally one uses magic bitboards today (basically a perfect hashing technique to extract the bits of the diagonals a piece can attack into a neat little linear bit line), but they depend on fast multiplier and a fair amount of RAM for LUTs, which would of course not have been available on the MANIAC. I would assume that MANIAC just looped over all possible moves in the move generation phase.
- OscarCunningham 3y agoHas this been solved?
- bongodongobob 3y agoNo, we only have endgames solved up to 7 pieces. 24 pieces is waaaay too big to solve.
- tbrake 3y ago24 pieces on an 8x8 is a nightmare, sure. However, other smaller chess versions (e.g. 5x5 w/ 20 pieces) are at least weakly solved and given the piece/pawn/move restrictions of this 6x6 variant, I wouldn't be surprised if a weak solution here is possible as well.
- bongodongobob 3y agoI would be. At a minimum you've got 16 moves the first couple moves. There's no way.
- Sesse__ 3y agoWe can do a rough estimate. There are (_very_) roughly half as many squares in 6x6 as there are in 8x8. This means that for every piece you add, you can expect (again very roughly) a 50% bonus to your branching factor. Now look at the best tablebases currently available (Syzygy): Up to 5 pieces: 1GB Up to 6 pieces: 151GB Up to 7 pieces: 17277GB So, let's assume the factor of 140 per extra piece; of course this doesn't hold perfectly, but still: Up to 8 pieces: 2418TB Up to 9 pieces: 338PB Up to 10 pieces: 47320PB Now divide that last number by our 2^10 bonus. That leaves 46PB for 10-piece tablebases. We were asked for 24-piece. This is unlikely to go down well. Of course, there will be some small additional bonus for the fact that fewer positions are possible (easier to be in check), double-pawn-push doesn't apply, no en passant or castling to worry about, and fewer piece types. Still, it honestly doesn't look that good. :-)
- tbrake 3y ago
- abound 3y agoNot to be confused with Atomic Chess: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_chess
- CrociDB 3y ago> The computer played three games. The first was played against itself. The second one was against a strong human player, who played without a queen. The human player won. In the third game, MANIAC I played against a laboratory assistant who had been taught the rules of chess in the preceding week specifically for the game. The computer won, marking the first time that a computer had beaten a human player in a chess-like game I think this paragraph is kinda funny.
- tibbetts 3y agoI was disappointed that the lab assistant is not named.
- ChilledTonic 3y agoI'm actually very interested in picking this up as a varietal to regularly play; the smaller chessboard size and reduced pieces would (theoretically) result in faster, pickup play.
- prometheus76 3y ago5 X 5 is also really fun. It's the queen side basically, with a row of pawns in front. So there's only one row of open spaces between the two sides. It really stretches my brain to play it, but has helped me get better at calculation for sure.
- csmeyer 3y ago"Pawns may not be promoted to bishops;" ?????????? For real, I would absolutely love to know why that constraint was needed. Does anyone have info on why?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- abricq 3y agoThis rule is required because "as in chess", a pawn may promote to bishop. If you only remove the bishops from the starting position, then the rules of chess still allow bishops to come in later in the game (through a promotion). I am assuming they did not have enough memory to hold the rules of bishops, and therefore decided to completely remove them from the set of possible pieces. They allow rooks and knights promotion because these pieces are in the set of initial pieces: their rules are already implemented.
- csmeyer 3y agoOh duh... well my question was not insightful but yes your answer makes sense, there are no bishops on the board lol
- billforsternz 3y agoI don't know why you've put lots of question marks, surely this is completely understandable. The whole point of this was that real chess was too big and complex, hence this dramatically smaller simpler version. There's no bishops in the start position so there's absolutely no way they'd bother implementing the bishop underpromotion corner case. Amusingly enough Rybka, the top engine for many years comparatively recently didn't implement bishop underpromotion either. For a much different reason. The programmer chose a not so great low level bit representation convention that forbid representing this case. He refused to fix the error because it would be too much work for the more-or-less non-existent situations where promoting to a bishop is the best move.
- teo_zero 3y ago
- QuesnayJr 3y agoIf anyone wants to try playing this, it's one of the variants supported by Fairy Stockfish.
- cyberax 3y agoI am disappointed because it doesn't involve nuclear bombs.
- kevindamm 3y agoyeah, I was expecting chess piece variants like Fairy Chess.. but there still can be! But do we add wind and fallout? Or make it a MAD type of thing where the meta-game is a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma? Either way, we could call it Manhattan and give it a go..
- hammock 3y agoI was thinking spontaneous decay - at a random time every so often, one of your pieces may "decay" and be demoted, from a major piece to a minor one, or from a minor one to a pawn :)
- jameshart 3y agoHmm… something like: Each player starts with only a king on the board. Player turns consist of either: 1) adding a pawn to the board 2) moving the king Or 3) launching one, some, or all of their pawns already on the board. Launching a pawn involves removing the pawn from the board, and nominating a square where the pawn will land. If there is an opposing piece on that square at the end of the opponent’s next turn, that piece is removed from the board. If your king is removed you lose.
- michaelcampbell 3y agoLooks interesting as a total looker-on of chess. Does the smaller board and reduced rules make the game any easier?
- School-Cotton 3y agoYes, that reduces the search space
- ryukoposting 3y agoIt makes the game go a lot faster, that's for sure. It lowers the barrier to entry by a lot, while still requiring the same modes of thinking. There are a ton of chess-like games out there that have small boards and play times of 10-20 minutes. IMO as an everyday thing to do with friends, they're a lot more fun than chess.
- mxwsn 3y agoAny suggestions or favorites?
- ryukoposting 3y agoOnitama for sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onitama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onitama It's played on a 5x5 board. You get two cards that tell you what moves you can make. Either card can be used with any of your pieces. Once you've used a card, it will end up in your opponent's hand a couple turns later. Every time you play, it's a little bit different because the cards are different. In addition to the chess-like thinking, there's a lot of strategy in learning when to use particular cards. Some cards are really powerful, and it's worth keeping them in your hand until the right moment. IME a single round of Onitama usually lasts 10-15 minutes. The shortest game I've played was probably about 6 minutes, and the longest was 30. It's simple enough that you can just pull it out and play with anyone, even if they've never seen it before. Pretty much everything you need to know to play Onitama is printed on the cards sitting right in front of you. It's pretty easy to pick up. It's also nice that you only have to clean up 10 pieces after a game instead of 32.
- ryukoposting 3y agoThis looks like fun. I like chess variants that use smaller boards like this. They offer much of the same high-level strategic thinking, but a much shorter play time and a lower barrier to entry. My favorite one is Onitama, it's actually quite different from chess but the same intuitions apply.
- jamager 3y agoOnitama is brilliant. For me the best along with Hive and Santorini.
- frankfrank13 3y agoFound an example to play online with a bot! https://www.chessvariants.org/play/jocly/los-alamos-chess https://www.chessvariants.org/play/jocly/los-alamos-chess
- keid 3y agoI knew one of the authors, Mark Wells. After he retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory he moved, temporarily, to Las Cruces, NM, to be head of the CS department at New Mexico State University, so became my boss as a student employee in the department. I don't recall his authorship of the chess program being mentioned by any of the profs or grad students (it was a very small department). When I moved to Los Alamos many years later I discovered that he lived just down the street--they'd kept their house in Los Alamos while in Las Cruces and had returned (for the skiing, he said). The first article linked below has some details about the chess program not in the Wikipedia article. Chess was his (serious) hobby; his research was in programming language design, specifically concerning type theory. https://ladailypost.com/former-lanl-mathematician-computer-scientist-mark-b-wells-receives-special-services-award-from-u-s-chess-federation/ https://ladailypost.com/former-lanl-mathematician-computer-s... https://ladailypost.com/obituary-mark-brimhall-wells-oct-7-2018/ https://ladailypost.com/obituary-mark-brimhall-wells-oct-7-2...
- chemeril 3y agoI'd keep a house for the skiing at Pajarito too! For those reading along it's certainly worth the trip if you're in the area. I have a vague recollection of coming across a physical 6x6 chessboard somewhere on lab property and found it a little odd, but never knew it had ties to MANIAC. Lots of history floating around in that place.
- QuantumSeed 3y agoI was at NMSU during his time as head of the CS department. His interest in chess inspired to write my first chess playing program
- polynomial 3y agoWhy did they lose the bishops rather than knights? Seems like if you were simplifying the game for early computers to learn, that's the move (remove the one piece that moves weird.)
- kqr 3y agoBishops have a worst branching factor of 9, while knights have only 8. And this difference is even larger on average; a bishop at b2 can move to 7 places, while the knight on the same location can move to just 4. (This can be thought of dynamically as well. If a bishop moves one space closer to a corner, it loses three potential moves, but gains one move in the opposite corner. If a knight moves closer to a corner, it just loses moves, it never gains them.)
- polynomial 3y agoI like the knight on the edge analogy. Bishops control up to 13 squares, knights up to 8. The math maths. Unless you ask ChatGPT, which will tell you bishops do better in closed positions than knights (before going on to say (correctly) that bishops do better in open positions, without acknowledging or seeming to "notice" it is flatly contradicting itself.
- listenlight 3y agoHas anyone here played losers chess? Some of the top players on ICC (chessclub.com) back in the day played losers…
- redbell 3y ago> The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time. I wonder what the authors might have achieved having access to modern computers that are billions times faster than their machines. > The computer played three games. The first was played against itself. The second one was against a strong human player who played without a queen. The human player won. Again, I wonder what they would think seeing AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol [1],[2] 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol 2. https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y
- once_inc 3y agoHow did I go through 4 decades of life without knowing about the en-passant capture? I've never heard of it before...
- vasco 3y agoIt's a common and fun way to make a noob angry that you're breaking the rules before you google it in front of them. I've had tough times "proving" it before Google though!
- alberto_ol 3y agoWhen I was in high schhol I won a game in a tornament because I hoped thet my opponent didn't know the rule. Otherwise it would have been a draw.
- vasco 3y agoAlso had that happen in a school tournamen when I was young! Nowadays, over the board I try to force it in a first game with a new person to see if they know it and if they don't take my piece, I'll bring it up to prevent it being a problem later :)
- QuesnayJr 3y agoWhile a part of the standard chess rules for over a century, it's common for people who learn to play with their family as kids don't learn it. I didn't learn it, either, and only found out about it when I started playing chess programs online. This is common enough that "Google en passant" is a meme in some circles.
- JoeDaDude 3y agoNot to be nitpicky (well, maybe a little)... El Ajedrecista [1], a chess machine designed by Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo in in 1912 and later improved in 1915, defeated chess Grandmaster Savielly Tartakower in 1951 [2], a few years earlier than the unnamed lab assistant who lost to Los Alamos Chess. This would make Savielly the first human player defeated in a chess-like game. The lab assistant loss must have occurred sometime after 1956. To be fair, El Ajedrecista played a very limited game, only capable of playing a white king and rook against a black king moved by a human opponent. Still, I think it qualifies as a "chess like game" As a matter of casual trivia, El Ajedrecista inspired Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, to build his own chess machine [3], which he named Caissac (after the goddess of chess Caissa [4]) in 1950. [1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista [3]. https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-man-who-built-the-chess-machine https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-man-who-built-the-che... [4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa
- keid 3y agoJust to add some details, the Los Alamos Chess people acknowledged that theirs was not the first such computer program, that Alan Turing had previously done created one. Presumably Turing's program didn't ever beat a human, though. https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/at-the-bradbury/2023-aug/maniac-chess/ https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/at-the-bradbury/2023-...