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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but I'm surprised the chess bots are good even with impossible pieces combinations.

[spoiler alert]

My favorite strategy for Ches39 is using 13 bishops in the 4 and 3 ranks. That is outside the training set, or at least any sensible training set. (Protip: Learn how to check mate with only two bishops of different colors.)

For the reverse I'd like to give the AI 13 knights, that would overwhelm any human player. I never dare to try it.

And I think the wall of 39 pawns is a good idea for a human, but for some reason the AI beats me anyway.

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I beat Chess39 on my second try on the hardest setting, using a wall of all pawns (27 pawns and 4 bishops.) Keep advancing your rear pawns whenever there's space so that no pawn is ever unprotected. Eventually the pawns will advance far enough that the opponent has no room and you'll start getting traps and forks.

The key is to make sure you never leave a defensive opening - you have to watch out for two enemy pieces attacking a pawn that's defended only once. The computer/opponent will sacrifice the first piece to get the second to break through behind the pawn ranks, and it can often demolish all the pawns from there or checkmate your cramped king.

I think that comes from the way they can "learn" the game. I don't think more modern models rely on the knowledge of how many pieces there are in the game, probably they model it as given these pieces in this grid table, and rules for each piece and player actions, how do you reduce the state of the table to one where the opposing player has 0 kings (the rules probably can just be the engine replying invalid move don't even need to be stipulated, would be my guess). Then you could generalize it to any sized grid, with how many pieces you wanted, even 2 or more kings per side. At least that's how I imagine it to go or how I would try to do it.

To be honest haven't played chess for years - I did MtG for a while even as I got older but then it just annoyed me and haven't played in years - it was when I started working on my own take on tcg's

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