
Survival in chessland [pdf] - bgschulman31
http://tom7.org/chess/survival.pdf
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modernerd
This is beautifully written and worth downloading.

“Ben does not prefer to use the shift key, a typographic quirk I replicated
faithfully here even though it burns my eyes:”

The premise is: “if you were forced to be one of the chess pieces, which piece
should you choose to give you the best chance of survival?”

The king is the obvious choice, but the author assumes kings will have to be
sacrificed under victory conditions or when time runs out. This is lovely:

“Many games also end in a time forfeit, which is like the king's poor diet and
lifestyle choices leading to a death by natural causes.”

The author uses 500 million chess games from lichess.org to estimate each
piece's survival probability, and even makes heatmaps for which squares each
piece usually dies on.

For those digging for the answer, it's in figure 3 under 4.1. It differs
depending on the game style (bullet, blitz, classical). There's one piece
that's common to almost all categories with a 70% chance of survival.

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symmetricsaurus
Tom7 made a video also:
[https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA](https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA)

If you haven’t seen them his other videos are well worth watching as well.

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pronoiac
He's a mad genius! I like his compiler that generates executables made up only
of printable characters:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA)
/
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312317)

He's super playful and awesomely smart!

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k_sze
Just me or something isn't quite right about the numbers? Intuitively,
shouldn't the survival rates of the white and black kings add up to exactly
100% in each type of game, even given the rules and interpretations that the
author laid out at the beginning of the article?

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Presumably draws were counted as both surviving? The author suggested two
different ways to count a draw ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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thom
Fascinating stuff! Sadly Windows only, otherwise I'd be interested in seeing
if the results are any different run against KingBase or another collection of
mostly GM games.

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LeifCarrotson
Windows only? Lichess is a web app first, works great on any modern browser.
There are Android, and iOS native apps, a few 3rd party clients, and no Mac or
Linux official clients, but you're definitely not limited to Windows.

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thom
I just meant the code behind the paper, it'd need some work to get it
compiling in Linux.

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akkartik
Such a chess game actually plays out in the novel "Carrion Comfort" by Dan
Simmons.

