It's a cool concept but the first naive thought that comes to mind for me is that white could just easily dominate by taking advantage of the fact that taking a queen is almost always the top engine move. So just by maintaining relative king safety on white's side, you just open your queen early and make sure that every move there onwards hangs your queen in some fashion. It's very easy to hang a queen. You just have an invincible juggernaut for the first half of the game until you've demolished enough pieces to make it hard to find ways to hang your queen, and by that point the material advantage is such that the opponent might just resign.
The title "Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden" kinda suggests that the top move just isn't available to the player.
However, the thought you had, and similar ones, are very much the intentional side-effect of the rules. The only way to win the game, as stated, is forcing your opponent to make the top engine move. Or, of course, correctly claim that your opponent made such a move (even though it wasn't forced). Or, having your opponent make the incorrect claim about your move.
So, it isn't necessarily "playing good chess". Though, I must say, I'm not qualified to have any good idea of what it would mean to be good at this game. It definitely helps to be good at chess, and have a good command of what are the correct engine moves. Especially since you lose if you incorrectly claim a position and opponent move was "the top engine line".
I suppose most would reduce this to leaving the opponent to only one legal move. In which case, the problem is is trivial. But, after move 2? You need to know most opening lines, and probably play intentionally bad in many situations.
Hm, this is cooler the more I think about it.
Imagine intentionally setting up material sacrifice with a resulting choice of multiple moves for the opponent to capitalize. If you can correctly evaluate the best computer move, you have a strong advantage. If it is not obvious, then the opponent might not dare to gamble the challenge.
Has Hikaru tried this in one of his streams? I'm certain he would have a blast.
The only thing about this that doesn't "spark joy" are the ambiguous practical implementations.
- Which engine? This matters a lot.
- How do you define the computational cut-off? CPU-minutes? Move depth? Etc. Not necessarily a simple problem.
- The rule "When multiple moves have the top score, they are all top moves". Needs a specific score evaluation delta for grouping "top moves".
All of these could rather simply be resolved if it isn't very important... might even add some uncertainty to it, for fun. Like, say: 1. Stockfish 15. 2. Allow the computer whatever resources it has available, 1 minute, and play some drum roll sample. 3. Pawn-evlauation of 0.05.
I'd also be interested in a variant where the engine-recommended move is displayed to the players. It would take out the uncertainty of whether a move is illegal, but would allow for different win conditions (e.g. approach checkmate without ever using an optimal move).
Not wasting time with claims would be another very practical advantage.
A further variant for fairness purposes: let each player bring their preferred chess engine, instead of arguing about the choice of only one; and have each player run both engines for mutual anti-cheating verification.
Then either the two engines agree on the best move (likely case if they are both strong) or all moves that either engine considers better than the other engine's best move (at least 2, usually not too many) can be interdicted.
This is what I thought it would be from the title. Top players say that they don’t necessarily see a top engine move but can immediately identify one when it is played on them.
It’s an exaggeration but with some truth to it. Outside of openings and end games the top move for a chess engine is often different from the top move for a player. That said, grandmasters do of course often play the top engine move.
Human players are dealing with both human limitations and human limitations which really changes the game. So a grandmaster can for example benefit from playing a slightly weaker but less well known opening that they have recently studied in depth with the assumption that their opponent hasn’t done the same.
Actually no, the top choice would be to force your opponent into a position where the series of second best moves literally destroys them.
You're looking for traps where only a particular move can save you.
A minimally modified engine lookup wins here.
There's a whole bunch of openings that ensure it for white, this game is rigged even more than playing the best move, even if you do enforce a random opening.
I wonder — at the top end the chess engines clearly compete with each other and produce different results, that’s how one can be said to be better than the other, right? But against us puny humans, especially novices, do they produce very different outputs? Or is it just like, the moves to crush a silly meat-brain are just super obvious, no need for creativity.
Especially in this game, the humans will be trying to play badly.
Some games from the most recent chess engine tournament look whacky as hell. Like if you showed the games to a grandmaster they would probably estimate it was 2 completely new 400 elo players.
I think some of the moves the engine suggests in human games look whacky to human grandmasters.
Hikaru Nakamura is a top GM that does commentary streams — and frequently comments things like “but what do I know about chess?” when responding to AI suggestions. It’ll suggest a weird move that seems to leave a mess on the board while insisting that everything is great. And obviously if you actually tried to play against Stockfish from that position, it would crush you.
Looks like 400 ELO, but hey — what do we know about chess?
One of the big issues with engines is that they don't assume they're playing against human players. Of course in an engine v engine tournament they're not. But it makes it hard to use them to study things, especially below elo 2000. Many times the chess.com "best move" seems utterly ridiculous, and when I click for it to follow through on the suggested move line, it shows the opponent making a response no human would ever ever make. I think we need to have some sort of division between "this engine will win any game ever" and "this engine will always win against a human."
There's been times when the chess.com calls my move a mistake, and suggests something nonsense that leads to a guaranteed mate in 15, when I got a (non-guaranteed but real) mate in 5 from my move, because I know I'm playing against a human. The engine move is more guaranteed, but very illogical unless your brain can do the equivalent of the 30 turns of minmax.
I had a similar naive thought, but it doesnt resolve easily. For starters, Black can do the same thing just a move behind.
Second, if you ever hang your queen two ways at once - one of them could be a less optimal take (-5 is not as good as -8)
Third, whoever is a move ahead in a race of taking pieces will be the first to run out of weak pieces to take. Their available move pool is shrinking faster. Not sure how it would play out, black would need to cater to it by removing defenders and hanging pieces of their own, etc.
That said, first move advantage does seem strong still due to how forcing a queen can be. An example would be 1.e4..e5 2.Qh5..d5 3.Qxf7#
The best way to find out the best strategy for Human Chess is to train AlphaZero to play it, and learn from its example. Then we can make a Human Human Chess variant where you lose the game by playing the top move suggested by this newly trained engine.
It is an interesting theoretical question whether we can have Aleph Zero Human Chess where Human(Human(...(Chess))) is applied infinitely, approaching Aleph Zero trainings of AlphaZero, or we get a redundant variant after some application where further application of Human() no longer produces a new variant.
The answer is no: every time you apply Human(), you reduce by one the number of legal moves at every given game state. After some finite number of iterations, there are no longer any legal opening moves.
With this variant, since there are a finite number of legal board positions in chess, and Human^n chess is simply chess with a finite number of moves prohibited at each board position (claiming is the same as resigning, in this formulation), there are a finite number of distinct Human^n chess, so the mapping Human^n-1 chess -> Human^n chess must eventually reach a cycle (potentially of length 1, i.e. a fixed point).
I’m not sure about a straight-up cycle. I think it requires determinism, whereas the engine is not necessarily deterministic (eg. NN based ones like AlphaZero).
I think it’s possible that at least 1 position (and probably a lot more) will have more than 1 optimal solution. If the engine is not fully deterministic, then it’s possible instead of a normal cycle, there are a fixed set of strategies at each n that form a cycle, but no single sequence that repeats.
The other thing that would compound this is that no current chess engine solves the game fully. There would be even more positions that have multiple “optimal” solutions if the engine only looks ahead to bounded x.
That's a good point about non-determinism, although I wonder if there are known convergence/stability results in the ML literature that allow you to effectively ignore that detail (i.e. it seems plausible that you could get something like "human^n chess always stabilizes at some fixed amount of training time/computational power"). You can also just fix the randomization seed, but that's obviously a less satisfying result.
> The other thing that would compound this is that no current chess engine solves the game fully. There would be even more positions that have multiple “optimal” solutions if the engine only looks ahead to bounded x.
I'm not sure this is an obstacle; we're explicitly excluding the computer's preferred move, rather than the necessarily optimal move, after all. You could easily play human chess with the engine from (e.g.) Battle Chess, which honestly is sort of an interesting idea in its own right.
There will be opening theory soon, and it will be essential in many cases.
For instance after 1.e3 e6 2.Qh5, White threatens Qxf7+ which would force black to play the top engine move. Then 2...g6 3.Qxg6 is one idea -- but there are two recaptures, fxg6 and hxg6, and only one of them can be the top engine move (hxg6, I'm guessing). So 3...fxg6 probably refutes this idea. But are you sure enough as white to try to claim a win if black goes hxg6?
And after say 1.e3 e6 2.Qh5 g6 3.Qxh7 (avoiding that line and going for material), not only does black not have to care about their rook (white can't take it, it would be the best move), black actually has 3...Qh4 winning -- he threatens 4...Qxf2+, white can't play 4.Qxh4 as that's the best engine move, and white's queen is threatened twice, so black will be able to take it -- provided he checked this line before the game to know which piece to take with.
Edit: it doesn't actually win, white has 4.Qf5 to defend f2... what a strange game.
Edit 2: once a piece is _en prise_ somewhere, the game can otherwise become somewhat normal as taking it would be the best move and so would moving it to a safe spot - so other moves can be played as usual. But would they be good?
The article states that if there are multiple moves the engine recommends, that they all count as the "optimal" move, even if there's an indication of preference by the engine.
I'm approaching 40 years old, have played chess off and on since I was a kid, and I'm not sure I've ever played a match that didn't include several blunders. Like, on the off chance I'm playing someone who doesn't blunder often, I'll certainly pick up their slack.
My game quality is measured in how many times I say "fuck!" right after moving a piece. A very good game for me is about a two-fuck game.
The fun thing about chess, you don’t seem to think you are good, but I can’t imagine only
making two obvious mistakes in a game! It grows with you, haha.
Most of them it's more like four or five "oh my god I hope they don't see that thing I spotted the second I took my hand off" moments—and that's just the ones I notice before they're exploited. I'm sure I make tons of moves that anyone half-decent would call blunders but that simply go unnoticed by both players at the board.
I'm so very bad at spotting diagonal attacks, especially. Anyone who can open up their bishops then play for time will eventually see me put my queen in some dumbshit situation that lets them take it free or cheap in a single move, for instance, not even any multi-move planning required.
Lichess has a variant called "Antichess". If you can take a piece, you have to. No checks/checkmate rules. First person to have zero remaining pieces wins.
You basically want to "blunder" into giving your opponent long chains of captures while avoiding any positions that allow your opponent to hang a piece.
That was my thought too. Does the engine know that the other player is forbidden to play the top engine move on the next turn? Then you can't just do something like c3 Nf6 Qa4 e5 Qe4!? to hang the queen in the center, knowing that Nxe4 is prohibited, because the strongest move for white if Nxe4 is prohibited would have been Qe4!
Any move the human chess engine makes would be losing by definition if it is also used as the bench mark.
Therefor, such an engine can only hang in computation - being unable to produce a top move because if it were to make a suggestion then the actual best move changes to avoid it. Since the engine is unable to produce a move - there is no top engine move which makes every move legal.
A normal game of chess is played while the engine locks up on the sideline
You forgot that the engine user may cheat and even if they declare the engine there's no real way to detect if they're truthful and not using a certain of the engine tuned for Human Chess specifically.
My first naive counterthought is that if you try to do that then black can ignore your queen and use their queen to take your pieces. You're a move ahead but you don't get a snowballing advantage.
I bet if you hang your queen 5-6 times, for one of those, taking the queen won't be the top move. Just think about if your queen would _still_ be hanging after a check that maybe captures some other piece first. And then that strategy has lost you your queen.
I like this strategy, but I don't think it's necessarily clear cut: while taking the queen is forbidden, the opponent also has the opportunity of putting their queen en prise.
So you end up in this scenario where both players are taking one another's pieces while leaving their queens en prise the whole time. Is it a draw, or is there some clever way to break this loop?
giving checkmate is a loss, the win condition for human chess is giving check in such a way that there is only one legal move. So hanging your queen might be good offensively, but its not good defense.
Moreover if you hang your queen in more than one way, your opponent can still take it in whichever way the computer evaluates as worse. Which is often easy to guess. The weird part of this will come from the fact that accuracy of engines diverges very rapidly off of the critical path. Once you're down a queen, you're basically free to play however you like.
You could have two engines: a strong engine and a weak engine. If the weak engine suggests a move then it's allowed. But if the strong engines suggests a different move than it's forbidden.
But you'd need to fine-tune the stupidity of the weak engine to have decent but not too good moves: an extra chore that would amply offset any increase of fun.
There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the best engine move and needs to be allowed.
No; checkmates are not needed. You win the game by almost checkmating the opponent: by leaving them only one legal move, which is thus necessarily the top engine move.
As others have mentioned, that is accounted for in the rules.
My immediate first reaction was also that it would be interesting to have a variant that is the same except you are allowed to checkmate, except then I realized the recursive nature of how board positions are evaluated makes that problematic. For instance, if there's a mate in 2, the first move of the mate in two is now certainly the "best move". Creeping up on a checkmate without ever making the "best move" until the very last one might actually be harder than the win condition based on strangling the opponent described in the current rules.
It just doesn't make sense though for that reason. You can't sneak up on an engine. There's not a single engine out there that wouldn't recognize a mate in 2 moves. Unless the opponent blunders (which actually might be forced if the best defensive move is blocked).
It just seems like you're changing the objective of the game entirely to the point where it's only slightly related to chess.
The article had an illustration of this: the player put their opponent into check where there was only one move to get out of check. The opponent would have to make that move, whether they were human or machine, so the player who made the original move wins the game.
It is an interesting variation on chess given the current state of tournament play, yet it isn't really a solution to the cheating problem since it is effectively a new game with a new end-state. But you are probably right about there needing to be some sort of threshold. While there the rules of the variation says that any move with equal scores is considered equivalent, I would imagine the players would need a very intimate knowledge of how the engine scores moves in certain scenarios.
If you deliver checkmate, you lose. You have to instead force your opponent into a situation where they only have one legal move (which is trivially the best engine move).
You can force the opponent into a position where the only move that saves them is a top engine move. Since they cannot play that move, the other option is to surrender.
So essentially this converts most mates in two into mates in one, but some become ties by repetition.
I don’t see how one way of checkmating could be worse than another way of checkmating? Do some engines give different scores for different check-mating moves? (Different moves from the same position I mean)
Wouldn't human^2 chess be similar to regular chess? The human-chess AI is guaranteed never to play the regular-chess optimal move, so you can get a checkmate by always playing the optimal move (according to the engine). And unlike human chess, there's nothing preventing you from checkmating your opponent.
(I believe a chess engine could play human^2 chess exactly like it plays regular chess. A human couldn't because a human doesn't know what moves the chess engine would pick.)
Presumably human^2 chess would prohibit both the top engine move from human^1 chess and the top engine move from human^0 chess. That is, it's human^1 chess with the added restriction of not playing top engine moves.
There may not always be 1 possible move in a given position either; how does regular chess handle that? (Presumably you'd use the same rule by default for human^n chess.)
I loved the idea, but on further thought, the AI has a huge advantage in knowing what the engine move is, so they can never lose to incorrectly calling the last move and engine move.
AI can't win at human chess, because any move that it attempts to make is by definition the top move choice of an engine, and so causes immediate defeat.
The meta is different because they know their opponent also can't play the best move which impacts what move you play (ie. intentionally hanging queen for advantage)
I expect that if I were offered a veto against a stronger player, I would not be skilled enough to spot which move to veto, and would probably end up hoarding my veto, like in video games where you have a great-but-rare ability that you keep perpetually in reserve.
(“Too Awesome to Use” on TV Tropes. Link omitted - you’re welcome).
Nah, you’d spot one pretty fast when you blundered and they went to take advantage of it. Instead you’d more likely have the opposite problem where you’d veto after a blunder but still be at such a huge disadvantage that it wouldn’t matter much.
It would be pretty neat between players of similar skill level though, then I could see the hoarding taking place.
True, and I can see some fun mind-games where a player might try baiting an opponent into wasting their veto on an apparently-strong move, or by intentionally playing a weaker move that still somehow looks strong but actually masks a now-unvetoable killer move…
Maybe for players under say 1800 elo online, but for players above that this won't work -- "bluffing" isn't really a thing until you're at the very very highest levels of chess, and even then the bluffs are only during the openings and if they call your bluff you are only worse by 0.1-0.4 at the most.
I think if this was played at a GM level, games would be dreadfully boring, for one simple reason: the first player that ever allows a winning threat with only one defence, will lose the game.
This will lead to extremely cagey games where no one ever dares make the game sharp and imbalanced.
Is there a known family of "functors" for games like this, e.g. veto or having one opportunity to swap positions with your opponent etc.? It would be cool to see what you could say about the rule modification in a general sense before applying to a particular game.
There is some literature on this, yes. I don't know quite how general it gets.
See for example several books by Elwyn Berlekamp.
One outcome of this work was Berlekamp (IIRC) solving a small class of endgame problem that has eluded professional (full-time) go players for literally hundreds of years.
That actually looks hilarious, especially the part where checkmating is illegal since it would always be the best move. The first game highlighted is also fun. I'll have to try this next week at the chess club!
Should that always be the case, though? We could try to force a position where 2 separate moves checkmate. Then only 1 (presumably the one that results from capturing the highest valued piece?) would be the engine result.
This is a good point. If you can check with your queen but hang it, the “best move” would be to take it. Make it so they have to take it, for example in a back rank, and you win.
Which it quite often is. Like the example they show with the early-game check with the queen, putting the king in check by placing a totally undefended piece within one square of the king is (usually) a suboptimal move, and the king taking that piece will (often) be the most optimal way of getting out of check.
In this variant the attacking piece will effectively be protected by how bad its move was. Creates some interesting incentives - the only way to checkmate is a move that is normally not optimal and has only one way out of check.
Not necessarily. The check with forced answer could be a terrible move in normal chess. E.g. a check with the queen where the queen can simply be taken by the king.
Aren't there situations where 2+ moves cause checkmate? Only one can be the top engine move. Or are all of those effectively impossible to reach unless your opponent helps?
> When multiple moves have the top score, they are all top moves, even if visual markers (like move arrows) suggest the engine prefers one over the other.
Since all moves that checkmate the opponent will have the same score (M1 or -M1) they'll all be illegal.
Two players compete to win a chess game, where you only win if you work tirelessly to play perfect chess moves on every turn (as determined by benevolent artificial superintelligence). The loser is tortured in a virtual reality simulation.
But if you are playing Basilisk Chess it means you are aware of the Basilisk.
So both players need to stop playing immediately after the first move and start working towards making strong AI happen, or they will be VR tortured forever.
What? No, Basilisk Chess is where two players compete to make the chess move that optimizes some future AI's utility function. If you lose you get tortured forever.
Machines would have an even greater advantage here. They know exactly the second best move, and would easily calculate it based on any set of constraints. Humans are worse at the increased complexity
But then they'd just always play second best until they at best drew, or (more likely) meet with a forced move that's inherently the best engine move and lose.
You need a different engine that's focussed on not only avoiding conventionally top moves itself, but also forcing its opponent into them.
The catch here is that the engine doesn't understand the objective in its search. To the engine, getting the king in check with an obvious response is no issue, in human chess its game over.
My bet (uninformed, very novice at chess) is that it's likely there's guaranteed setups that would always catch an engine.
> If a player only has one move available, that move will always be the top engine move, which loses the game.
It's interesting that this brings another degree of indirection to victory conditions.
If you never played chess before, you'd assume the goal is to take the opponent's king. But as we know, making a move that would allow your opponent to take the king is forbidden, so the goal of normal chess is force your opponent into a position where you could take the king next turn (checkmate).
This variant takes this another step further: Now any move which could result in checkmate (or check with only one exit) is forbidden, and the goal is to force the opponent in a position where any next move would result in checkmate or check.
When I read the title, I assumed it would show you the top move and that move would be blocked. But instead it lets you do whatever move you want and then you lose if you happen to chose the same one. Interesting.
The game would never end, then. The win condition is challenging when a move is the best move. It’s similar to games of deception. You WANT the person to think you made the best move without actually making it, because if they challenge and are wrong, you win.
Because you win by your opponent making the top move (and you correctly calling it).
But I assume the top-level commenter meant make winning exactly like conventional chess - just neither party can use the top moves to get there. You could even start from move 1 instead of 2 too, take the best openings off the table.
I think that's like saying you can't play scrabble because the dictionary changes over time. You specify the engine and wait time before you start a game.
Only in the general case, for simple (mostly endgame) positions it is quite possible to exhaustively search the move tree and find the absolute best move. Those can be found by current engines and future engine development won't change them anymore. Such a move would therefore always be the top engine move.
That wouldn't work as the speed at which the engine runs is not deterministic.
Engines can be configured to limit search to a certain depth, which will produce a result after every branch has reached the limit or been pruned. That process will vary in time but be deterministic.
Recent neural based engines tend to not be deterministic, especially if ran multi-threaded.
This is not necessarily true. Sometimes there are emultiple best moves, and in this case the order might be arbitrary depending on all sorts of hard to control things like thread interleavings and caching effects which can be affected even by other processes on the system. You could run it single threaded with no transposition table, but then you have a pretty shitty engine because modern engines are fundamentally designed around having a transposition table. Then you get situations where the top engine move might actually be a bad move.
Yeah, deterministic is not actually the concept I want here I think. It's fine if it's random, it just needs to be unambiguous.
So you just choose in advance what settings to run with and the stopping condition. And then it doesn't matter that if you had run it with different settings, you may have gotten a different answer.
It is less fun if the outcome is non-deterministic. It means that occasionally the win is determined randomly. That takes away a certain element of skill.
I guess if you let it run for a long time it should converge on a first move?
I don't think there's a real fix for the issue, unless someone effectively solves chess someday. Otherwise your win/loss is fundamentally based on the imperfect evaluation of a particular engine.
If it's really just the nondeterminism that bothers you (which is fair enough, preferences vary), there's engines that either are deterministic or can be made so with settings.
Interesting to think how you would go about defeating this.
Even though you could modify an engine to evaluate each of it's moves against the selected "top engine" move to avoid them, there is no clear route to success since there's going to be a lot of overlap between human and computer for more obvious moves... So you'd need some kind of tunable difficulty threshold above which it avoids the best solution.
Even then, your difficulty setting is a gamble on whether your opponent will call your bluff.
In the opposite case, because of the same overlap, false positives are going to be a combination of frustrating and flattering.
I find this is the case in most of the online FPS I have played, the knowledge that cheating is possible combined with the disbelief of the ceiling on human ability makes a huge number of people think you are cheating even if your ability is merely above average. There are also confusing overlaps between cheating behaviour and pros on FPS when trying to evaluate replays e.g wallhackers (especially pro wallhackers) and pros sometimes look very similar, because the pros are attempting to track through the walls in their mind... if they get lucky, a replay makes them look super suspicious and hard to distinguish in a single case. There are going to be a ton of games like this where the cheating behaviour are close or identical to the top pros.
I've played and lost enough games against engines that I would say I've learnt some of the "best moves" (as suggested by the engine, when analysing why I lost) in almost every "usual" scenario for my "usual" openings all the way to maybe the fourth move. There are a lot of variations, but even past the fourth move I still remember some engine suggestions based on my own errors.
Checkmate is forbidden because it's what the engine suggests. Check with a single escape is suddenly the goal.
But if you're in check, do the rules say you need to try to escape it? Or can you take the opportunity to capture the queen, thumbing your nose at the false threat?
The goal of the game is to capture the opposing player's King. Technically, you don't have to escape a check. But the other player can take your King and you'd lose. That's why checkmate is seen as a win, because on the player's next turn he can take the opponent's King and there's nothing the opponent can do about it.
In rapid chess, if you overlook check or put your own King in check, your opponent can claim the win.
Now, what happens in Human Chess, I don't know. Because I would assume that the best move would be to capture the King and win the game. Assuming that you can't capture the King because it's the recommended move, this does seem like something you could exploit to some degree.
> When multiple moves have the top score, they are all top moves, even if visual markers (like move arrows) suggest the engine prefers one over the other.
If we train recursively-restricted reinforcement learning agents, could there be interesting differences in the behaviors that emerge? Could it even be used as a method for exploration?
Some set-up considerations: 1) Actions must be discrete, or at least binned for restriction, 2) The number of times to restrict is limited by the size of the action space
I would imagine for CartPole, the balancing would become more wobbly, while still somewhat successfully balancing. But in more complicated environments, it could result in much more different behaviors because the states visited (and trajectories) could be different.
I would assume that this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion; a commentary on the state of chess in 2022. Otherwise it makes zero sense, because what you're doing is using the rules of one game, Real Chess, to determine what moves are allowed in a completely different one, Human Chess, in a way that is very complicated and awkward. How would the top engine move be defined in an endgame where you have few enough pieces to use a table-base? Is any move that leads to a win a top-move? Or just the one that does so the quickest? Madness :)
So basically chess with landmines. Every move will be contested (because why wouldn't you? there are no downsides and only upsides)
So every move you make (I'll be watching you) could end up being the top move. Even if you run the chess engine yourself to decide what not to play, you're still at risk of bad luck because you happen to run the chess engine on a faster or slower machine than the person checking for the top move, and they diverge.
EDIT: Never mind, contesting and getting it wrong causes you to lose - that's the downside.
It seems like it would be fun to watch people play this. What would happen if one player cheated by using the same engine that was selected at the start and consistently picked the second, third, fourth, or fifth engine move? I don’t think that would work out for them because the game incentivizes you to win by forcing your opponent to take a high-level piece like your queen to win and then calling them out for being forced to have used the top engine move, right?
Rather than play something like this, there are many chess variants that people could try instead. Like Hexagonal Chess [1]. No one has written engines for them or otherwise invested huge amounts of time and effort in research. So you can be reasonably certain that your opponent isn't using an engine to score a cheap win against you.
I've been thinking about a possible chess variant to eliminate opening preparation drudgery.
The Fisher 960 variant tries to do this, but it can be very different from regular chess, and some of the positions are unbalanced.
I think we can use the fact that engines know when a position is even. There must be millions of even positions in the first 10 or so moves. Pick one of those randomly, and start the game.
I think in the context of top level chess, eliminating opening prep is the wrong way to go. And I don't like 960 either for that reason. I think the problem with opening prep today is that there are so many drawish openings and forced draws, constructed repetitions etc. In other words it's just too easy for top players to make a low effort draw.
To make top level chess more interesting I have a handful of ideas that work in tandem.
1. Change the scoring and rating systems so that a win is worth more than two draws. E.g a win is 3 points for the winner, draw is 1 point to each player. Game theoretically this should favour players that play for a win and avoid easy draws. But also modifying the rating system is crucial, otherwise we'll get the same drawmeisters dominating the rating list.
2. Change the repetition rule to be similar to xiangqi(Chinese chess) where repetitions are illegal and don't lead to a draw. This eliminates most of the lowest effort draws right out of the gate.
3. Make the game sharper and more complex. The easiest way to do this is just to remove the concept of castling altogether. Former world champion Kramnik has advocated this, and computer analyses of the ruleset is promising. King safety is suddenly a hard problem to solve in most openings and the game becomes much, much sharper.
4(optional). add more pieces. The best way is Seirawan-chess, a modification of Capablanca chess that adds a knight-bishop(hawk) and knight-rook(elephant) without changing the board geometry and starting position.
Yeah, there are chess tournaments that do this now, like Norway Chess. But because a single tournament can't change the FIDE rating system, it's sort of a fart in the wind.
Norway chess also has the spectaculary stupid idea that if a game is drawn, the players play an armageddon(white gets more time, black wins with a draw) blitz game, and the winner gets half a point extra, so 1.5 to 1. This just ruins it to me. A draw should still be a draw, sometimes the players were just equal and not all draws are lazy. And this makes drawing more attractive again because if you win the armageddon you still get half a victory worth of points. And decided by a blitz game in a classical tournament.
I remember someone on /r/chess actually evaluated every single starting position in Fischer Chess. This was the most balanced position: https://preview.redd.it/4o4kfv2kfcw91.png
This is already how some engines tournaments work.
They don't start from move zero, they start from some uncommon position after a few moves, but one still considered even or at least not unbalanced.
I would wonder if you need to add an 'ease of play' consideration to how even the positions are. Positions may be technically even but the play for one side could be more complicated to see your way through.
Yeah, that would be a real problem. It's even if you see some amazing combination.
One way to adjust would be to have everyone in a round play the same position, and calibrate. As in if black wins 90% of the games, a white win counts for more.
An interesting variant of chess; Alan Turing is said to have introduced another, outdoors version of chess where you'd move, then run around the house, and if the opponent hasn't moved by the time you're back, you'd get to move a second time.
That change of rules ought to push Turing's variant somewhat outside the tree of possibilities of traditional chess.
There are a lot of examples here of where that would fail (openings, checks). Would it make sense to introduce rules like letting people pick any move they want for the first three turns, or allowing any checking move and counter-checking move? Or is that one of those situation where trying to fix an obvious problem lead to move issues with defining the problem clearly?
Okay I love where this goes if explored a bit. Imagine "Shitty Chess" where you can't play the top 10 moves (or if fewer are available, you must pick the worst option).
I feel like this would be a funny novelty for a YouTube video. Maybe we can get some YouTube grand-masters like Nakamura to tolerate a few games for the schadenfreude.
This will definitely have unintended consequences - once you know that your opponent cannot make the top move, you would start abusing it. It might be fun though - I am recently playing Fischer's chess on lichess.org and it is crazy - you beat a 2200+ player and lose against 945 the very next game. A lot of fun though.
I think this would also be fun to try with Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, which also has the advantage of being much faster to resolve with AI than taking a minute.
I dont follow the chess world that closely, but could someone explain why chess960 isn't more popular? Its been around for awhile and solves the problem of people memorizing opening lines, and boring chess games where the first n moves are predetermined.
It may solve opening lines, but it doesn't really solve the general concept of mass memorization. After a few moves more than 960 possible configurations of chess exist from a normal board anyway.
And you can say, "oh well but the boards are roughly the same" and that's sort of true, but it doesn't really solve the problem of the people memorizing the tree. It just changes the shape of the tree. It goes from looking like a pine to a maple.
In three plies (one sided moves) of chess, there are over eight thousand possible games. By making the game 960 times as wide before you start you're not meaningfully changing the impact of memorization on the outcome of the game. You're just changing how deep you memorize the various trees.
You can say, "well then, mission accomplished!" but the reality is that most of the tree memorization goes pretty deep at the highest levels before a new game is found because you're in effect following the games before it or you're blundering, or, at best, gambling if you've found something kinda unexpected and interesting.
Put another way, any given top rated chess player has a finite set of possible game memorizations. Introducing a mere 960 new configurations at move 0 is only trading 2 to 4 plies worth of depth to the game. It's more complicated than that, because board positions can be essentially forced and board positions can overlap between pre-configurations, etc. But that's the essence of my argument.
You're not meaningfully changing the impact of memorization on the outcome of the game, even if one thousandth sounds like a lot, it isn't really when dealing with permutations.
So, everyone has to play to lose and who loses first wins? If I leave my king open to checkmate, the best move from AI would be to take that.. but the opponent cannot do that. So, I get to leave my key pieces open and the opponent tries to do the same??
The instructions should be clearer as to whether the engine is visible at all times or only accessed in the case of a challenge. Seems like it would be a hassle to do this except in a mode where the engine is visible at all times...
> Starting from move 2, players can claim their opponent’s last move was a top engine move. This immediately ends the game.
> Claims are settled by asking the chess engine to evaluate the position before the contested move. If the chess engine suggests the opponent’s move, the claimant wins the game. If not, their opponent wins instead.
So your suggestion would be a completely different game.
What about positions where there are multiple moves that are indistinguishable to the engine? The order in this case is somewhat arbitrary and might change randomly each time you run the engine depending on which engine it is.
I’d say an interesting variant would be regular chess with Swap2 rule from gomoku. Which is basically the first player makes the first few moves for both sides, and the other player can decide to swap black and white.
So the only way to win in the end-game is to set up for a position where the are two possible moves to mate? There would never be any practical reason to resign I don't think.
> Checkmating loses the game, as it is always the top engine move. Rather than aiming for checkmate, players seek to force their opponent to make a top engine move. If a player only has one move available, that move will always be the top engine move, which loses the game.
How would such engine work? Chess engines work by evaluating a lot of positions. But in order to evaluate a single Human Chess position, you need to run a normal chess engine for a minute to determine the top move.
I think you overestimate how much you would have to defer to this external engine that would have to say which move is "top".
Every move you advance you chessboard situation by one move only and that move is already part of the tree calculated previously. You don't need to search through massively more new moves because, assuming sane players, the move each player makes is one of the very few top moves previously considered by the engine.
This could be fun for spectators streaming the match at home, who could see the top engine move in real time while the players are considering their next move
I think it is a joke on the accusations among professional chess players that some players cheat by using a chess engine to determine their next move. In other words: claiming the move of your opponent is the top engine move is equivalent to accusing them of "cheating".
Yes, but this new rule also adds interesting new mechanisms, like for instance the kamikaze check move with the queen, where the opponent's only move is to take with the king, hence losing the game (as it is also engine top move).
Mastering that kind of new threats does not seem easy IMO, and in fact could well be mastered by... computers ;-)
I've heard it said that the best parodies are almost as good as the things they parody (and a sign that the comedians in question both love and understand the thing they are making a parody of). It could be argued that this chess variant is a really good "parody" in that sense, but encoded in the rules of the game itself.
I don't think so, but it is deterministic and given equal depth all search-based engines should theoritically pop the same one. The AI-based (е.g. AlphaZero) ones are obviously different.
Obligatory reference post to Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess960). A variant designed to "make gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely more on their skill and creativity over the board." A combination of Human Chess and Chess960 might be interesting...
How about American Liberal Chess: playing the top move selected by the asian or white male is forbidden, because it reduces accessibility and diversity.
