Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero

Yes Tata Steel tournament was great, I just don't think we need variants like Fischer random chess. There is still lot to explore in classical chess.

Anyway, how is the first variant you described called? (one starting with empty board). My favourite is crazychess, lot of tactical fun there.

When I was in high school I attempted to code a "Fog-of-War" chess where different pieces had different sight ranges.

The King had no sight individually, but their range was the sight-range of all pieces within one piece from them (because they could relay information)

Start-up/Consulting idea: use ML/RL strategies and tools and help gaming companies improve their AI. In a variety of games, the AI should be a big component of gameplay (all single player games) and ends up being such a liability. I can imagine the litany of issues that prevent this, but I wonder if a company could accumulate some general templates/models/toolkits that could help AI improve for a variety of gaming companies. Most AI in games are more like Stockfish than AlphaZero and the cost to train these models for each of these games is probably prohibitively high. However, I imagine a variety of gaming companies that provide a 1st person game would not mind outsourcing their NPC AI and perhaps a company could find some synergy across games such that the marginal cost of going from game to game could be decreased.

An example game that fits your board game template more or less are turn based games like Civilization. I love Civ games but the AI stupidity is the weakest part of the game. I know RTS games like starcraft are super hard (probably why Deepmind chose to do it) but perhaps turn based games or games with a slower pace and limited action space are doable for a consulting company.

Idk, food for thought, but if you make a billion dollar company I'm saving this post for my records :P

Another funemployed xoogler here! I've been making games for the last year, and one thing I would definitely love to explore is designing a deep but easy to learn game using learning techniques. We should talk!

You can reach me on: melonmousegames@gmail.com

Too many draws is not a new criticism. Capablanca believed in the risk of "draw death", in that the majority of grandmaster games would eventually end in draws. He proposed a change to chess boards introducing two new pieces, the archbishop and the chancellor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_chess

He wasn't the first to propose these sorts of changes (see the Wikipedia article).

In 1925, his comments on why he proposed these things is as follows:

"I spoke with Dr Tartakower, a great master and also a friend of mine, and he published, in very condensed form, my ideas on certain reforms that I believed it would be appropriate to make in chess. I told him that previously in various newspapers and magazines things had been attributed to me which I had never said, and this seemed to me a good opportunity to clarify the facts and to expound the only modifications that I really considered appropriate, while at the same time clarifying that it was untrue that I had ever declared that chess had reached its limit and that to draw was easy. It is of course easy to understand how much has been written and said on this matter. In reality, what I have heard and read on it demonstrates that I have not been understood."

"...In reality, today there exists, as it were, a separate form of chess, which is understood only by the most select of the great masters, and which very often relies on a highly-developed technique which already today threatens to make talent equal to genius; that would make chess rather similar to what the game of draughts is today. Thus despite the old history of chess and the thousands of books written on chess played on a 64-square board, it is necessary to avoid what would undoubtedly be a disaster. In order to prevent, for a few centuries at least, technique from again becoming such a dominant factor, I have suggested increasing the field of operations."

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/2xxl2p/what_do_you_t...

>plenty of decisive games (84 out of 182)

So the majority of games were draws. Do you really think that would be accepted without appeal to tradition? If you released a new game with so many draws, people would call it broken. If a minor rule tweak can reduce the draw count without substantially changing the feel of the game, it seems to me the common sense thing to do.

> The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are,

Classical, white wins 18/1000 and black wins 3/1000 with 1 minute per move. Semi-torpedo, this is 27 & 6/1000, so it's both less imbalanced and less drawish than classical chess with very high level play.

(White's 6x advantage is reduced to 4.5x).

It also has a slightly richer set of interesting moves per position on average.

A bit more imbalance in other variants isn't a catastrophic problem, either, IMO, with tournaments consisting of multiple games and equal numbers of games as white and black.

Your other point-- yes, any benefits of tinkering with the rules needs to be balanced against what it does to the traditions and continuity of the history of the game.

Software rendering of these rules might lag a bit—but if you have dedicated hardware, it should be possible to make this work.

“Variants such as Torpedo, Pawn-sideways, No-Castling, and Self-capture are now a reality, playable on a major chess portal such as chess.com.5 On the back of the initial evidence, the first No-castling tournament was held in Chennai in January 2020.” - one of the last few paragraphs in the article

Yeah, chess.com and Lichess both have a bunch of variants.

>Do any chess games support these modes or is these possible to play today?

Chess.com currently supports most of the modes in the list - except, I think, semi-torpedo, no-castling (10), and pawn-back. Which, to me, are the least exciting mods anyway.

I'm particularly surprised that the stalemate = win rule doesn't result in more decisive games. Intuitively, it would seem that an entire class of endgames that are classically draws would become winning for the stronger side.

Perhaps computers are so strong they can "see through" the rule change?

Are those goals not somewhat contradictory? How would a more even game not lead to more draws instead of fewer? Unless the new rules punish slight mistakes much more severely, perhaps? But that would lead to other issues in the balance and feel of the game.

That's a funny idea, but I can't imagine you get past the point of having 4-5 sequential moves without finding a forced mate?

The game is most likely degenerate?

It's hard to avoid a game losing position if opponent is making 5+ moves in a row next turn

Interestingly I think that would be a trivially solvable game with traditional methods (like checkers, connect 4, or tic-tac-toe were) due to the seemingly overwhelming likelyhood the game could always be forced to end in 5ish ply or less. Could be a fun weekend programming challenge to prove it!

Yes! White moves first, then black makes two moves in a row, followed by regular back and forth moves after.

This would theoretically allow black to start on equal terms.

Hmm? Chess is already very drawish at the top level, a specific goal that they highlight in this paper is to unbalance the game.

Allow Black to choose White's first move. They aren't allowed to pick f3 (huh, looks like Stockfish greatly prefers f3 to g4)

Or more, based on https://lichess.org/analysis you'd have to ban a couple more moves like a4/h4, but you could opt to restrict picking first moves within Stockfish range at some depth of -0.1 to 0.1 (looks like c4 is enough to be 0.1 at depth 47)

This may increase the draw rate

If you want to keep engine analysis out of the rules, you can go the "evenly split candy between siblings" route: after White's first move & before Black's response, Black may elect to trade positions

Time auctions, used in armageddon chess

There is one problem: there are too many draws at top human level.

That would make most major tournaments almost completely luck based.

It would be interesting to see what happens if draws were only worth a third of a point. Presumably that would encourage one of the players to risk more trying to win.

As done in Checkers: http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo010201.htm

& how TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) runs

Don’t rapid and blitz already kind of fill that role? I’m really not sure that having fewer draws is a great metric to guide optimization for classical chess. First, some games that end in draws are actually fantastic, back-and-forth battles that are as exciting as any win. Second, if there are fewer draws, each win becomes less special, especially for the major tournaments. For a cautionary tale, see baseball. They optimized the game for home runs, and now it’s a less interesting sport because it’s become much more one dimensional, and viewership is still trending down anyway. I feel like classical human chess is in a pretty good position right now, having survived the rise of the machines. Chess YouTubers like Gotham and agadmator (and many others) have sizable followings. And I would argue that the biggest popularity boost chess has gotten recently has been the Queen’s Gambit. So maybe leave the rules alone and make more chess TV shows and movies.

The perennially controversial opinion is that rapid chess (the time control) should replace classical chess. But I don't play chess tournaments so it's not my place to decide.

Indeed. Depth and balance are part of a fun astract, and those are objective enough to be analyzed this way.

That's not chess, that is a completely different game. The only similarity is that they are both board games.

Is this playable anywhere? Search engines only show me Frozen themed chess sets, and people playing regular chess in cold weather.

There is only one way to fix chess and it's called Go.

Of course, this isn't exactly chess anymore but like any design decision there are no perf-

Wait a minute, Go is perfect. If we forget about ko rules.

There's more than one way to address the problem of draw death besides bughousing captured pieces. Other win conditions are sometimes proposed - something like your king reaching the enemy king's starting square or back rank. Or count stalemate as either a win or some fraction between 0.5 and 1 for the side that inflicted it. Or do the same for draw by insufficient material (bishop or knight) for the superior side.

(I'm not advocating for any of these in particular. Although that's the problem - even if everyone agreed that we should add some kind of win or scoring condition, we'd never get a majority to agree on one solution.)

I can't tell if this is satire. Draws by insufficient material almost never occur in Grandmaster chess. I have not seen a single grandmaster game end this way in a year of watching top-level chess games daily. If you inspect all of the dozens of draws in this world's Tata Steel, which included ~300 GM-level games, you won't find a single that ends this way.

Top-level chess leads to draws because of how points are awarded, not because of the rules. Yes, sometimes you just run out of material, but much of the time draws happen because players shut down the game or agree to a draw in a position that is just too dangerous to both parties. Chess rewards draws with far too many points.

If you could agree to a draw in tennis, you would see a lot of draws where players want to save their energy and don't think this match counts that much.

In other sports players don't play for draws. In chess, because draws are worth so much, some players will try to draw with black and win with white. If chess were more combative players would intentionally stay away from drawish lines.

Many ways to change the game have been put forward before. Including banning draws in positions that are not known to be draws from a table base, changing how many points you get for a draw (you could get less than 1/2), forbidding early draws, changing what happens if a tournament is drawn.

These kinds of rule changes make a big difference. Like, 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw. Now, you can't comfortably sit as black and bank a lot of draws because you won't be able to as easily catch up.

Rules for draws in tournaments are really absurd these days. A drawn classical tournament or even the world championship gets decided by rapid games. What's the point in playing classical if you win by playing rapid? The world championship is particularly problematic in this regard.