from Hacker News

Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence

by x43b on 9/10/20, 11:53 AM with 133 comments

• by WalterBright on 9/11/20, 9:00 AM

  When 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.

• by jka on 9/11/20, 10:24 AM

  This 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

  [1] - https://zero.sjeng.org/

  [2] - https://stockfishchess.org/

  [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship

  [4] - https://tcec-chess.com/

  [5] - https://www.lczero.org/

  Edit: correct LeelaZero -> LCZero

• by sasaf5 on 9/11/20, 10:43 AM

  A 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

• by keiferski on 9/11/20, 10:20 AM

  Question 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

• by in3d on 9/11/20, 9:34 AM

  There 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.

• by rmrfrmrf on 9/11/20, 2:09 PM

  An 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.

• by soamv on 9/11/20, 1:20 PM

  There'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

• by mellosouls on 9/10/20, 3:08 PM

  Also covered here with a little more technical (chess) info:

  https://www.chess.com/news/new-alphazero-paper-explores-ches...

• by throwaway4007 on 9/11/20, 1:04 AM

  People 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

• by xiaodai on 9/11/20, 9:27 AM

  Shogi 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.

• by SubiculumCode on 9/11/20, 3:59 PM

  I 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).

• by osyed1 on 9/14/20, 5:43 PM

  I 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

  More information about the Arimaa game as well as a gameroom where you can play it available here: http://arimaa.com/

• by loxias on 9/11/20, 9:32 AM

  I 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.

• by msla on 9/11/20, 3:22 PM

  AI ruined chess the same way horse riding ruined running.

• by dhairya on 9/11/20, 3:24 PM

  Lichess 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.

• by ummonk on 9/13/20, 9:22 PM

  It'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.

• by floe on 9/11/20, 4:27 PM

  > 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.

• by _hao on 9/11/20, 9:39 AM

  Kramnik 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 :)

• by skc on 9/11/20, 8:57 AM

  Fascinating, 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.

• by FartyMcFarter on 9/11/20, 10:17 AM

  How widespread amongst chess experts is the premise that "AI ruined chess" ?

• by shannifin on 9/11/20, 8:52 AM

  Played 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.)

• by bananaowl on 9/11/20, 11:11 AM

  I 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.

• by Quarrelsome on 9/11/20, 10:05 AM

  I 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.