Kriegspiel
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
1) Start with all pieces off the board. To make a move, you can either put a piece onto your half of the board, or move an existing pieces. Captured pieces cannot be reused (or maybe they can, if you want some sort of bughouse variant).
2) Put a sticker under one pawn on each side. These are the 'assassins'. Be sure to randomise your pawns without looking at their bases. During the game, as a move, you may turn over one of your opponent's pawns - if it is the assassin, you may choose to reveal it. If you do, you now control that piece as if it's your colour and may move it immediately. This of course means you have a 1/4 chance of the opposing king being in check, in which case you can capture it and end the game right there.
3) Ghost pieces. Whenever a piece is captured, remember the square on which it died - it now haunts this square. Any time during the game, a ghost piece may make any capturing move from its square, but instead of capturing the opposing piece, it merely frightens it. Frightened pieces can't move during your opponent's next turn.
4) Tunnels! Cut out some cardboard or paper in a randomish shape to overlay any number of squares in the middle of the board. This represents rock, into which pieces cannot move. The first move a piece makes into the rock weakens it. The second clears the rock out of the way (keep a pair of scissors handy).
Some of this seemed like a good idea at the time.
> 1) Start with all pieces off the board. To make a move, you can either put a piece onto your half of the board, or move an existing pieces. Captured pieces cannot be reused (or maybe they can, if you want some sort of bughouse variant).
Can a piece be moved into any unoccupied position on your half of the board, or only its usual starting position? Can this be done when your king is in check (in hopes of blocking the check)?
> This of course means you have a 1/4 chance of the opposing king being in check, in which case you can capture it and end the game right there.
I think I don't understand this. The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to describe the starting set-up, but I guess it's the usual one for chess. Are you referring only to the first move? (Otherwise it seems to me that the chance of check depends in an extremely complicated way on the game so far.) In that case, I agree that there's a 1/4 chance of one of the pawns that could check the king being the assassin, but you still have only a 1/2 chance of picking that pawn correctly (even if it's there), so it seems more like a 1/8 chance to me.
With the assassins, yes it's just a normal setup. But if your first move as white is to turn over the black d7 or f7 pawn, and one of those is the assassin, then you get to take the king. If they're normal pawns, you've spent the move, setting you back in development. Probability-wise I just mean there's a 2/8 chance that it's one of these pawns.
Unless I misunderstood the concept somehow, your calculation seems to be, as the great GM Finegold would put it, "incorrect!"
How many ways are there to pick 2 pawns out of 8? (8x7)/2, or 28. How many ways are there to pick 2 pawns out of 6? (6x5)/2, or 15.
In other words, there are 28 combinations in total, and only 15 combinations where NEITHER of the 2 crucial pawns is an assassin.
This means the actual probability is (28-15)/28, or 13/28, or about 46% (rather than 25%).
Let's do a sanity check. "Safe" combinations:
ab ac ae ag ah
bc be bg bh
ce cg ch
eg eh
gh
"Unsafe" combinations:
ad af
bd bf
cd cf
de df dg dh
ef
fg fh
Yup, math works out.
Right—there's a 2 in 8 chance that the assassin is one of those pawns, and a 1 in 2 conditional probability, given that one of them is the assassin, that the one you pick is the assassin; so, by 'deconditioning', a 1 in 8 chance overall.
(I think it might make this more plausible—just in terms of probability, not a better rule—to imagine that the rule is changed so that the assassin has to be one of the pawns who can check the king. Then the probability of one of those pawns being the assassin is 100%, by fiat; but you've still only got a 50% chance of picking that one.)
I developed an online version of Hand and Brain Chess to play against a computer. In each move the BRAIN (stockfish engine) will highlight the piece or pieces that are the best move and are the only pieces that you can move. It is your job as the HAND to play the correct move.
In the original variation 2 players plays together against someone, one say the piece name to move (BRAIN) and the other must move it (HAND). There are some really funny videos online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL2pn1yIs2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-fSQAX4wkg
Edit: Is there a variant of this without limit the piece you can move? Basically I just want the instant feedback without getting told which piece to move.
Other of my projects http://vitomd.com/blog/projects/
Can someone explain to me why this was called an "excellent move"? https://imgur.com/a/Fyg4PuW I eliminated a night but I feel like the pawn could eliminate my bishop easily. See also the second picture for another (to me) inexplicable situation.
You can use lichess.com to analyse the moves. Here is the position if you want to take a look https://lichess.org/analysis/standard/r3k2r/pb1pqppp/1ppb4/4... Also You can copy & paste the generated moves of the game (like 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 c6 )to the pgn text area.
If you want to learn more chess https://lichess.org/learn/ it´s a fantastic resource
I built it in 2013 and am in the slow process of improving it for a relaunch at some point.
I’m of the opinion that this game is a step up from chess, go, and poker, in that current deep learning tech can’t be used to build a competitive engine, due to the lack of information available.
I’m sorry but I disagree with this point since the process of asking about pawns, knowing about the state of the game (checked, unchecked or checkmate) and knowing if a move is legal can be used with reinforcement learning to accurately model the unknown environment and build a play strategy.
How do you know that? It must be experimented and proven. It's not something that can be handwaved. With machine learning, I would say "not possible until you prove beyond a doubt".
In SC2, you can perform realtime monitoring of changes and track them with multiple maneuvers all at once. In kriegspiel you cannot.
Also in SC2, when you see something, you know what it is. You don't know what kind of pieces are where in kriegspiel. Mistaking a queen for a pawn in kriegspiel can be a game-loser.
So taking your analogy, and saying an AlphaStar game lasts 5 minutes, at 60 fps, thats 18000 frames. Kriegspiel games average about 50 moves total (or 100 half moves).
So lets tally these up: SC2 has 18000 frames where on visible turf, full knowledge of occupant enemy pieces are available. Kriegspiel has 100 frames where there is no such concept as visible turf of enemy pieces.
Deduction of if and which piece is occupying a square is the only way to have knowledge of the enemy, and the probability for the deduction to be correct drops significantly after each move.
With such a small amount of information available, the problem becomes significantly different.
The key to successful machine learning is available data. There is so little data that the model you are training will collapse or overfit quite quickly and become useless.
I doubt this variant would present a fundamental challenge to DL techniques.
I recommend playing several games with someone else, and then rethinking your assessment.
In my previous life as a teaching assistant, I co-led a seminar that borrowed this problem from Knuth. At the end, our students' White and Black bots played a tournament. The feedback was: "since Black loses this endgame sooner or later, those who developed bots playing White had more fun". Next year, we came up with a symmetric game.
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/79/707/CS...
I, for one, would love to see professional players attempt to play this game. It does seem extremely frustrating to play, however.
This is a little different, but I think/speculate they would still have enough heuristic knowledge to crush most people.
He trained an NN to predict the pieces and then used Stockfish on the resulting position.
https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA, "30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World"
An intricate and lengthy account of several different computer chess topics from my SIGBOVIK 2019 papers. We conduct a tournament of fools with a pile of different weird chess algorithms, ostensibly to quantify how well my other weird program to play color- and piece-blind chess performs. On the way we "learn" about mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perversions of game tree search, spicy oils, and hats.
Is this also why it showed up just now?
From Wikipedia article describing features of the platform:
> In addition to enabling blindfold chess,[18] the website supports the following chess variants:[19]
Antichess (Losing chess)
Atomic chess[20]
Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess)
Crazyhouse [21]
Horde (a variant of Dunsany's chess)
King of the Hill
Racing Kings
Three-check chess
As I was reading the description, I immediately felt that a online version of it would be much simpler and quicker to play than real world version. No need for umpire and multiple boards (handled by game server), all the announcements could be automatic and visual, immediate feedback on blocked moves etc.
> "No", when the attempted move is illegal, given the opponent's position. [...]
>"Hell no" (or "Impossible"), when the attempted move is always illegal regardless of the opponent's position. [...]
All the pieces are one color, but on the bottom of the pieces you mark the true color (black or white).
When it's your turn, you can either move, or challenge your opponent that their last move was false. If you challenge, they turn over the piece they just moved. If it was their color, you lose your turn. If it was your color, they move the piece back and you get to move.
Don't even get me started on Go Chess, a hybrid of Go and Chess played on a chess board with both Go and Chess pieces, where in the Go world even Chess pieces are treated as Go pieces.
Seriously awesome information based system design way before computers, it seems like such an advanced game/simulator. One of the things I'm most interested in is how sophisticated past humans could get with their tech & circunstances they had at their time, this is one of those to me.
Amazing.
"In Debord's view the game represents the totality of factors at play in wartime maneuvers, what he called "the dialectic of all conflicts."
We definitely see Kriegspiel as one of the next challenges.
AMA if you're interested :)
Otherwise, it's almost impossible to fight back and win a chess match through audacious, if risky play, in normal chess. Once a person is in a position of advantage, they almost always win, unlike say in backgammon, where the player at disadvantage can deny victory to the other, for sometime, during which they might figure out some striking counterplay.
I seem to remember a simpler variation involving rolling dice to determine what pieces are allowed to move, but I can't seem to find anything about it.
It creates a strange desire for her to get her pawns captured so she can plop it down somewhere else, and a strange desire for me not to capture any pawns.
It's rare to see that much expertise and skill in action.
Is there a Go equivalent? If so, is AI any good at that?
And, if either answer is no: then why did DeepMind go straight to trying to solve a game that was both incomplete-information and realtime (Starcraft) instead of merely incomplete-information (Kriegspiel)?
At one point Stratego was the standard for incomplete-information (but non-random) games in AI research. That may no longer be considered challenging, but either way, crushing an AI tournament in that wouldn't attract the level of publicity DeepMind get from chess, go or Starcraft.