I feel compelled to say that, Coronavirus shenanigans aside, Wijk an Zee has just finished and was a fantastic event with many interesting and decisive games. Classical chess does not need fixing, even at the highest level.
It’s fun that we can run these experiments though. I’d love to test out some of the variants a friend and I came up with! One of my favourites was starting with all the pieces off the board and a move was either to put a piece on your own half of the board (king had to come first) or move an existing piece. Another was having a mark on the bottom of one pawn on either side, and as a move you could look to see if a pawn was the “assassin” and if so, immediately move it. This of course meant that in some circumstances you could win on the first turn by capturing the king.
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)
However exploring chess variants is fun. Gary Kasparov very much enjoyed his random chess tournament as did spectators. What is good can be made better.
We didn’t really give them names, these were things we came up with ourselves (perhaps not original ideas though!) I suspect the first would be ruined quite quickly by computer analysis or really any calculation at all but we had fun. :)
Is anyone interested in doing this kind of analysis for games that are in development?
I am a SWE with 16 years of experience at Google with lots of practical/applied ML. I am about to be funemployed, and I'd love to incorporate an AI player/analysis into the playtest feedback loop of a board/card game in development.
I've won the Race for the Galaxy tournament 4 times in 7 attempts at the World Boardgaming Championship (average size of field around 80?) and placed in the Dominion tournament a few times. I created rftgstats and councilroom.com (Dominion), which did analysis/modelling on game logs, but didn't have AI players.
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
An AlphaZero type AI for Civ is my absolute dream. A huge problem in these sorts of games is that developers have the computer players cheat to artificially raise the difficulty to compensate for the poor skill and decision making of the AI.
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!
I'm surprised that so many comments talk about "too many draws in classical chess problem" as just yesterday we just finished Tata Steel that was a terrific tournament with plenty of decisive games (84 out of 182) and even most of the draws were thrilling games. During commentary, GM Naroditsky mentioned that he asked past World Champions Anand and Topalov about influence of Magnus Carlsen on the game and both responded with "people have stoped offering draws in many different types of positions where 10-15 year ago they would shake hands and go home" [1]. Additionally modern computer analyses show that even dead drawn positions can be won if opponent makes slightest inaccuracy and players do try to capitalise on that often.
Maybe World Championship matches format needs some tweaking. Draws are much more common there as losing one game can easily mean losing whole match and players are extra cautious.
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.
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.
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."
The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main complaints about chess either, which as far as I can tell are:
1) It’s too drawish
2) It requires too much memorization to learn
Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of people actually love about chess, which is that chess as a body of knowledge is continually growing forever. You can learn something about chess today by reading Morphy’s games from the 19th century, and any time you play or watch a game today you’re most likely going to see a brand new game of chess, that nobody’s ever seen before (and if it’s a top level game it could be a very interesting brand new game of chess).
I personally doubt tinkering with mechanics has any improvements to offer chess, and I don’t think most people actually want the most frequently complained about “problems” with the game to actually be fixed.
> 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.
Interesting variations to the rules. Here's an annotated quote:
"The nine changes considered in this study are listed in Table 1. No-castling and No-castling (10) involve a full and partial [not allowed during first 10 turns / 20 plies] restriction on the castling rule. Pawn-one-square, Semi-torpedo [can move 2 squares on 2ed and 3rd ranks], Torpedo [can move 2 squares], Pawn-back [up to your 2ed rank, don't count against 50 limit], and Pawn-sideways involve changes to pawn mobility. Self-capture chess allows players to also capture their own pieces. Finally, Stalemate=win recasts stalemate as a win for the attacking side, rather than a draw."
Do any chess games support these modes or is these possible to play today?
“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
I think it's just a subtle way of saying "Implementing these rules in software might take a while, but you can use a physical chess board to try these 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 found pawn-back to be the most interesting just from the changes to existing chess logic. Pawn-back resulted in the most change in piece-value from classical and during simulations were used 100% of the time.
I was hoping that it would help find the changes in rules that would at the same time 1) result in more even game between white and black and 2) result in fewer draws. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell all the alterations of rules that they explored turned out worse than classical chess on at least one of those criteria.
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?
From the posted stats, the Stalemate=win rule does result in more decisive games (fewer draws). But it has an even bigger effect in giving white a further advantage over black.
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.
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!
If you find chess variants interesting, I would recommend looking at Go [1] as well. It is similar to chess in that it is an ancient turn-based strategy game for two players and with perfect information, but I find it much more pleasing from a game-design perspective. The rules are much simpler, there are no draws, and the starting player does not have an advantage. Also, you can have handicaps so that two players with different playing strengths play a evenly-matched game.
To me, this shows that it is possible to solve most of the commonly cited issues in chess by changing it into a radically different game. But can you do it with only a minute adjustment? I find it difficult to imagine chess without draws, but it is not inconceivable. [2]
"Basque chess - A chess competition in which the players simultaneously play each other two games on two boards, each playing White on one and Black on the other. There is a clock at both boards. It removes the bonus in mini-matches of playing White first. Basque chess was first played in the 2012 Donostia Chess Festival in the Basque Country, Spain. Also called Basque System." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_chess
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
Yes, but it'll get _much_ closer to 0 than e4 or d4, which are already close enough to 0 to produce good games won by black. I wouldn't call it needlessly unfair
It also means White still gets the edge of being able to prepare for the first move vs their opponent, ie they may've studied 1.Nc3 lines much deeper in preparation, whereas currently White gets the edge of choosing the first move & it's advantage
ie White gets to decide whether they prefer their e4 prep or d4 prep against their opponent's prep as Black, so if White doesn't want to play against their opponent's Sicilian they play d4. This is a theoretically moot but real advantage. See Fischer's performance with c4: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer?pid=19233&side=whit...
See also how well 1.g3 or 1.b3 have performed while Stockfish gives both a solid 0 eval
In short, while I started with Yes, I mean No. Because b3/g3 are equal enough that White gets an edge by deciding whether the game will be a g3 or a b3 game
I'm in top 1% of rapid chess players on lichess, and I hardly ever see a draw. If top 100 or 500 players on the whole planet have this problem, well, they can try some other game, probably, I don't mind.
You can't reach top 1% without being very good at taking advantage of time pressure, though, or am I wrong? The term rapid chess includes many time controls - both with and without increment, so I'm not sure how to understand you.
It doesn't matter, if there is a time increment, there are still rarely any draws. Maybe 1 in 15 or 20 games. Of course, I'm at the very bottom of that 1%, maybe things are somewhat different higher up.
And seriously speaking, the more time given, the higher the probability of a draw: games are usually won or lost because of blunders. If you have time to evaluate all moves and play very patiently, and your opponent does the same, draw is the likely result. But playing this way is boring.
A very different variation is to keep all the same rules, but remove the turn-based nature of chess and allow pieces to be moved simultaneously. One implementation is here:
https://kungfuchess.org/
Modern chess is the culmination of centuries of experience, as well as an evolutionary sequence of rule adjustments from its inception in the 6th century to the modern rules we know today.
While classical chess still captivates the minds of millions of players worldwide, the game is anything but static.
Many variants have been proposed and played over the years by enthusiasts and theorists.
They continue the evolutionary cycle by altering the board, piece placement, or the rules—offering players "something subtle, sparkling, or amusing which cannot be done in ordinary chess
I think the best thing that can be done for human vs human chess is to reduce the number of draws.
I think this can be done with a very simple rule change:
In a draw, instead of a both players receiving half a point, one player will randomly receive a full point. The expected value of a draw is still the same (0.5 points per draw) but I think it does change the psychology of it.
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.
If you want say less draws or no advantage for White or less memorization, the easiest solution to me seems to be to just have engines evaluate a few trillion random positions and then filter out those with 0 advantage and low chance of draws in explored lines and then use those as the starting positions.
I think what this analysis really shows is that less time lead to less draws. Maybe we could rethink time controls. Classic could maybe be something like 1h+20sec increment for both sides. This would also make it more interesting to watch such an event live.
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.
I agree that draws and the possibility of draws increases excitement. But I do think top-level chess results in a draw a bit too often: half or more of games in high-level tournaments, and vast majority of world championship games.
Rules that draw 10-20% less often, and remove a little bit of white's advantage, would be nice.
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.
Is there a plan to add the best chess variants to the open source alpha zero clone leela chess zero (lczero.org)? I'd love to play capture anything/no castling variant with lc0!
> New Egg Fusion ability: fused eggs(any allied egg can be fused to another on the board) grow as N eggs would grow in single turn(similar to quickening:60 turns become 20 with 3x egg) and produce 1 dragon.
There is only one way to fix chess and it's called Shogi (A chess style game played in Japan). Shogi is similar to the bughouse chess variant in that captured pieces return to the board on the opponent's side. This prevents draw by insufficient material which is the real bane of Grandmaster level chess. Of course this isn't exactly chess anymore but like any design decision there are no perfect solutions.
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.
Well, GMs agree on a draw well before it actually gets down to insufficient material. Many draws-by-agreement would degenerate into that if they kept playing.
Well yeah, they usually do that, but draws by insufficient material still happen pretty frequently. Also, king vs. king is not the only way it can end; you'll see king vs. king and knight (or bishop) pop up pretty often too.
In addition to what my sibling comment says-- there's a whole lot of draws by agreement because the position is one that everyone knows becomes draws by insufficient material.
While this is slightly nitpicky, from what I gather many of those draws are because neither side can make progress against the opponent. These are positions where in order for the game to move "forward" both sides would need to individually choose to weaken their position, leaving them playing non-moves until triggering threefold repetition or agreeing to a draw.
> These are positions where in order for the game to move "forward" both sides would need to individually choose to weaken their position, leaving them playing non-moves until triggering threefold repetition or agreeing to a draw.
Sure, but there's also a whole lot of draws where insufficient material is inevitable. E.g. pawn vs nothing, where the king cannot reach the pawn to defend.
And there's also draws where the only move "forward" doesn't weaken the position, but lead towards an end of insufficient material. E.g. most situations pawn vs. bishop.
Because they are ending the game before it gets to that stage. Similar to seeing check mates 3, 4, 5 moves in advance, they can see with perfect play that the reduction in pieces will end in an end game with insufficient material.
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.
You'd have to make the points awarded differ with white vs black.
World champs wouldn't have been a lot different other than it would end earlier. If you lose a game, you need to win a game to be even. That doesn't change even if you make it 100 points for a win.
It would impact multi person events more, but not incredibly. I think some interesting options are things like .7 for draw and 1.2 for win as black. Other options are to make 3 move repetitions illegal (now they're a kind of zugzwang). Last option that I like would be to add a time penalty for drawing in future matches. I think chess needs to become less even, and you could do that in interesting ways if you were willing to mess with the time (or even who moves first) in future matches. Incentives to win now (vs maybe win later) should reward aggressive play early in tournaments and make players who are falling behind more incentivized to fight mid tourney.
This seems great in theory but it doesn’t address the time when people complain the most about draws in chess: the world championship match. There, no matter how little you award for draws, one single win can be decisive and so the games can be very dry until one player breaks.
the draw problem isn't entirely human. computers draw something like 80% of games even with openings specifically chosen to reduced the number of draws.
But it's that because we optimize the algorithms under the same ruleset?
I imagine if a draw was counted as a loss to both sides, there would be a lot more aggressive plays, since just stonewalling a skilled opponent would be the same as losing.
Humans and machines draw for totally different reasons.
Machines don't have any concept of a tournament. Humans go into drawn lines and get rid of tension in order to play the tournament meta-game. Since draws are worth so much, it's often a good idea to just bail out with a draw.
A lot of human positions wouldn't be drawn by machines, they would keep hammering the opponent.
I was really impressed by "AlphaGo - The Movie", despite not knowing much about Go, because the way they told the story, people from the Asian countries were so sure their champion would win a Go tournament against a computer, that were stunned into a new consciousness about artificial intelligence when the computer won. This started an arms race in AI is what I gather.
Edit: Full movie for free on YouTube: AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary
Some ko rules only address a subset of repeating positions, and still allow for infinitely long games (sometimes ruling those as a no-result requiring the game to be played over).
The so-called superko rule simply states that no previous position can be repeated, which seems preferable.
excepting some crazy multi step ko that is possible in theory, it never happens in practice. There is nothing wrong with ko, it adds depth to the game. maybe they dont like ko becauase they have a weakness in their play and cant take advantage of them or defend against them. if you give your opponent a lot of ko threats they will end up winning most kos.
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.)
It’s fun that we can run these experiments though. I’d love to test out some of the variants a friend and I came up with! One of my favourites was starting with all the pieces off the board and a move was either to put a piece on your own half of the board (king had to come first) or move an existing piece. Another was having a mark on the bottom of one pawn on either side, and as a move you could look to see if a pawn was the “assassin” and if so, immediately move it. This of course meant that in some circumstances you could win on the first turn by capturing the king.