
Kramnik and AlphaZero: How to Rethink Chess‎ - lawrenceyan
https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik-alphazero
======
adiM
I grew up in India and learnt chess from my grand father, who taught me two
versions of chess: the standard western version and the Indian version. The
Indian version differed in two rules: no castling (as Kramnik is proposing)
and the pawn cannot move two steps in the first move. Some other differences
are mentioned here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_chess)

It will be interesting to compare how Alpha Zero learns with the Indian chess
rules.

~~~
have_faith
> pawn cannot move two steps in the first move

Does this add much variation to the game or does it slightly delay getting
into the same positions we already know? Not castling is interesting though
but would change the game quite dramatically, perhaps even making it slightly
more predictable? I'm unsure. Interesting concepts.

~~~
thanatropism
Pieces are ranked by power because of their reach. Chess is not continuous-
time (I have this theory that the tactical essence of football-soccer is
continuous-time chess) which makes it very awkward. There's also a lot of
literature on chess openings, which means a lot would need to be re-
discovered).

I find chess very frustrating because I can analyze positions but almost
always get thwarted because of misreading tempo. But honestly maybe I don't
have a high enough IQ to play chess.

~~~
glitchc
I highly doubt that your chess acumen is tied to IQ. AlphaZero can probably
beat every chess player, past or present, yet you would trounce it in a whole
range of intelligence tests.

Perhaps just try counting the moves, and look for counters at each step? Most
pro chess players think in patterns anyways, subset of moves that obtain a
predefined position on the board. Then the game is more about rock, paper,
scissors, where you try to guess the opponent’s pattern and employ a counter-
pattern.

~~~
new2628
IQ is largely pseudoscience. It is tied to chess in the same sense it is tied
to most other things, as a baseline filter: IQ below 80 means one can hardly
do anything at a high level, beyond that it has almost no meaning.

~~~
JamesBarney
This is not what any of the science says. IQ is the most studied psychometric
in the world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient)

~~~
new2628
[https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-
pseudoscientific-...](https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-
pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39)

Or a more gentle summary:
[https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Taleb:_IQ_is_a_pseudoscientific_...](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Taleb:_IQ_is_a_pseudoscientific_swindle)

~~~
JamesBarney
Also here's an actual study on chess and IQ.

[https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-vaci.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-vaci.pdf)

> most “achievements” linked to IQ are measured in circular stuff s.a.
> bureaucratic or academic success, things for test takers and salary earners
> in structured jobs that resemble the tests

This is the point of the test. That people who do well on this test, do well
at their job.

>Psychologists do not realize that the effect of IQ (if any, ignoring
circularity) is smaller than the difference between IQ tests for the same
individual.

This is actually evidence that IQ tests are measuring something that is even
more predictive. Say I use an MRI and I'm able to predict schizophrenia far
better than chance. The argument that the MRI I used was faulty and sometimes
returned back false results is not evidence that my test is bogus, but
evidence that it's even more powerful because it worked well despite the
machine being wonky.

> if you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis
> playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need
> theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged
> psychologists

This is referencing industrial psychology research. What he's referring to is
a work-sample test, and IQ tests are equally predictive. With IQ tests
outperforming when the jobs requirements are less defined, and work sample
tests outperforming when the job is more defined.(think startup wear many hats
lot of on the job learning vs enterprise DBA)

He also makes an argument that iq is less predictive of success at higher
levels which isn't the case and is based on some bad research. (They measured
childhood IQs instead of adult IQs)

Most of the article is a collection of strawmen, ad hominems, and just plain
weird whatboutism. (just because the high IQ janitors score better than low IQ
professors doesn't really tell us whether or not IQ is pseudo scientific)

------
jstanley
> The no-castling restriction means that players cannot rely on memorized
> patterns; they are forced to think creatively from the beginning.

It's not obvious that this is true at all. Once top-level players have played
no-castling-chess as much as they've played ordinary chess, I don't see why
they wouldn't have just as many patterns memorised.

~~~
michaelscott
It just removes a large swathe of current possible lines I guess. Analysis
through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line
which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is
obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings). I don't think
it'll produce amazingly creative chess, it's true, but it may produce more
interesting opening games?

~~~
arcticfox
> Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might
> produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this
> restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings)

This is only true for the brief period until someone modifies an engine to
train on the new ruleset.

------
gwd
The idea is incredibly simple. Basically: Don't allow castling. And the claim
is that if you don't allow castling, it's basically impossible to set up a
"drawish" defense. You have to attack or die.

In fact, it's so simple that it's sort of hard to believe. They've done tons
of analysis with a retrained-from-the-ground-up AlphaZero and are convinced of
it, so I definitely think it's worth a try, and look forward to see its
effect.

If it _does_ turn out to be true, it will be kind of amazing how one simple
rule tweak affected the highest level of Chess play.

~~~
igravious
They haven't rethought chess though. They've merely invented a game called
chess' and the suggestion that it opens up "new possibilities" is because it's
a new game. Of course _every_ micro-variant of chess is going to open up new
vistas, the challenge is this, is it better (how do we define better?) than
the original chess? I think they're confusing novelty for the qualities their
seeking.

The better chess has already been invented and it's called go. And the top
human player of that has called it a day in the face of machine learning
advancements (wrongly I think). Also I think go is a much more obvious and
flexible game to tweak, if you so wanted.

~~~
gwd
> Of course every micro-variant of chess is going to open up new vistas, the
> challenge is this, is it better (how do we define better?) than the original
> chess?

They talk about that specifically. The claim is that at the moment, one
grandmaster, unilaterally, can play in such a way as the result will be an
inconclusive draw with a very high probability. I say "unilaterally" because
even if the other grandmaster they're playing wants a higher-risk-higher-
reward game, they can't force the game that way. Such games certainly require
a lot of skill, but they're very boring to play and to watch.

"Better" in this case means more entertaining; and specifically, the claim is
that with the king in the center, it's not possible to "bunker down" and play
a very static, defensive version of chess.

It is not however, a _completely_ new game. All the skills regarding pins,
forced sacrifices, open files, and so on still hold. It's the same as if both
players been forced early in the game to not be able to castle: the basic game
is the same, but certain "boring" states are hard to get to.

I do agree that the whole thing about opening book seems a bit overblown to
me: obviously getting rid of castling means you have to mostly throw out the
current "book"; but surely a new one will be written.

I'd always thought another way to make tournaments more interesting would be
to take a page from wrestling. In wrestling matches, each player takes a turn
starting from a disadvantaged position, where it should be easier for the
other person to pin them. They get points if they manage to break out of the
position while avoiding the pin. Having some games start "in the middle" after
an early "blunder" by one side would make things more interesting as well.

~~~
igravious
> "Better" in this case means more entertaining; and specifically, the claim
> is that with the king in the center, it's not possible to "bunker down" and
> play a very static, defensive version of chess.

> I do agree that the whole thing about opening book seems a bit overblown to
> me: obviously getting rid of castling means you have to mostly throw out the
> current "book"; but surely a new one will be written.

This is my point. I wasn't denigrating the effort to make chess more
entertaining. I'm arguing that they haven't made a _more_ entertaining
version, they're confusing novelty with entertainment.

I'm really not trying to troll you by suggesting that a more entertaining
variant of chess is go. I mean, if we have to stick with the current set of
pieces and how they move then I think that Fischer Random (Chess960) or
something like it is the obvious improvement to go for. NoCastlingChess to me
is a strange route to go down. Of course novelty makes an old form less jaded
but that I'm not convinced it's intrinsically more entertaining – if it were
shouldn't we ditch boring old chess?

~~~
gwd
> I'm arguing that they haven't made a more entertaining version, they're
> confusing novelty with entertainment.

Well I'm afraid you're missing the main point of the change; but since I've
said it twice now (and you've actually quoted me once), I'm not sure how to
explain it any better. It's not primarily change for change sake; but rather,
the entire class of possible games changes from "safe, boring, and almost
always a draw" into "dangerous, dynamic, and someone almost always wins". At
least, that's what I understood from the article.

EDIT: As an example, consider the shot clock in basketball [1]. From
Wikipedia:

> The NBA had problems attracting fans (and positive media coverage) before
> the shot clock's inception. Teams in the lead were running out the clock,
> passing the ball incessantly. The trailing team could do nothing but commit
> fouls to recover possession following the free throw. Frequent low-scoring
> games with many fouls bored fans.

The introduction of the shot clock in basketball wasn't simply change for
change sake; it forced teams to actually have a more active, interesting game.

Kramnik is claiming that the same thing has happened now to professional
chess: the vast majority of games are boring draws. And he furthermore claims
that when they trained AlphaZero from scratch without castling, the games were
in fact much more dynamic and more interesting, not just different.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_clock)

~~~
igravious
I promise you I'm not – if I may copy my reply to a sibling comment of yours:

“What I'm arguing is that disallowing castling totally changes the opening
book and that a lot of the supposed increased "entertainment" being felt by
Kramnik is the delight in having an a plethora of opening lines to explore
(opening lines having long being exhausted by humans and machines in trad.
chess). The fact that it leads to games which are more exciting because the
king is more exposed is a small bonus – notice most of the article talks about
all the changes you have to make to opening theory owing to the fact that you
can't castle.

My argument is that Kramnik is not recognising that most of the entertainment
value comes from the fact that this is a new game (granted that it is an
existing game tweaked), not that it forces more aggressive less draw-y games.

Which is why I suggested, either go for a lot more novelty and combinatorial
complexity within the game (Fischer960) or drastically overhaul the game (but
in my opinion that has been done, and the game is called go).

You can disagree with my opinion but it's not as if I'm not understanding what
being said to me, it's just that I disagree with what's being said to me.”

F.T.A.

> The win/loss percentages for both White and Black are similar to classical
> chess

So just as many draws?

> suggesting that the no-castling variant should be quite playable without
> favoring a particular player. Preventing the king from retreating to a safe
> distance means that

Ok, so the game isn't broken

> all of the pieces have to engage in the melee, making the play more dynamic
> and entertaining, with a number of original patterns.

I'm saying that it is the original patterns where Kramnik is getting most of
the dopamine boost from

\---

Does that clear things up?

~~~
gwd
> > The win/loss percentages for both White and Black are similar to classical
> chess

> So just as many draws?

Right, we interpret that differently. He said "win/loss" ratio, not
"win/loss/draw" ratio. It's possible your interpretation is correct, but I
think the full sentence favors my interpretation:

> suggesting that the no-castling variant should be quite playable without
> favoring a particular player.

The question he's trying to answer is, "Does a lack of castling make it harder
for Black (or White) to win?" And the answer is, "No; Black and White still
win about the same percentage of the time, so removing castling will not
suddenly make it harder for Black (or white) to win." The draw ratio isn't
important to answering the question, and isn't mentioned, so I assume he
wasn't saying that the draw ratio was the same.

> I'm saying that it is the original patterns where Kramnik is getting most of
> the dopamine boost from

That's possible, but it doesn't necessarily follow, even if your
interpretation about the draw percentage is true. A draw after a dynamic and
unpredicatable battle down to a pair of kings is a lot more interesting than a
draw after a "trench battle" of small moves.

But in any case, time will tell. :-)

~~~
igravious
Look, no worries. A straight-forward interpretation of the article favours
your reading of it for sure.

I know it's bad form around here to complain about downvoting but god damn I'd
like to know why I got downvoted so much for the opinions I expressed :(

Oh well, must try harder to be more articulate.

~~~
gwd
I do appreciate you trying to clarify your position.

I don't have a huge amount of experience here, but people seem to value 1)
politeness and 2) correct information.

I haven't talked to the people who downvoted you obviously (and in case you
didn't know, you can't downvote a direct reply, so it wasn't me). But to me
the first reply sort of came off as, "chess sux0rz, just play go". Go is of
course a very nice game, but it's very different than chess; seeming to show
disdain for all the people who like to play chess and watch chess played fails
somewhat on the "politeness" front.

The second reply didn't really articulate well your position, so seemed to be
just "repeating the mistake" from the first post, and so failed (it seemed) on
the "correctness" front.

I think if your first reply had been more like the previous reply in this
thread -- _asking_ whether there actually were fewer draws, and whether the
gameplay was actually more "dynamic" or was simply "different" \-- or perhaps
adding in your take on games played that way; say from the recent exhibition
in London, or from analyses of AlphaZero games played under these rules (e.g.
[1]) -- it would have been seen more as a contribution than a detraction.

That's my guess anyway. :-)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOqmLYlFdBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOqmLYlFdBo)

------
cjlars
Presumably the reason for changing the rules is to limit the number of draws,
because wins and losses are more exciting. As he mentions, high level, full
length chess has a rather disappointing percent of games ending in a draw.
However, he doesn't even show that alphazero produces less draws in this
variant (even the example game is a draw through repetition!). It may be
interesting because it's different, but I don't really think Kramnik
successfully argues that it's any better.

~~~
pmoriarty
Yeah, I'd just make a draw an automatic win for Black, who is normally
considered to be playing with a slight disadvantage as compared to White, who
has the slight advantage of making the first move.

~~~
jacobolus
At the top level chess is too easy for either player to force into a draw-like
position for this to be fair. If you added some additional advantage for white
(e.g. only white can castle) it might work.

Having a game where one player always tries to win and the other player always
tries to draw might not really be the effect you want though.

------
tempguy9999
There is a variant that allows you to take your own pieces
[https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator....](https://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.html)

This always attracted me as a concept and seems well received, per link above.

It should increase the branching factor considerably, and complicate its
evaluation - not saying good or bad, just is.

~~~
pingyong
>It should increase the branching factor considerably

Is branching factor actually that relevant? Just from writing some naive AIs
for fun I got the impression that the only thing that actually mattered is how
well you can evaluate a position _without_ branching further. Whether you have
40 or 100 (or 1000) moves available, you usually just want to only look at
"the best" 10-15 (ideally even less if you can), and how reliable this
determining of "the best" is seems like a way larger factor than just how many
branches there are in theory.

~~~
tempguy9999
If you've done game AI then you're the expert, not me. I threw it in as it
seemed relevant.

I dunno. Granted evaluation is key but so is branching, surely, as that is
what generates new positions, and their complexity in evaluation as there are
more factors to consider.

How does one 'look at "the best" 10-15 [positions]' without culling all the
others first, however cheaply? I thought evaluation really was just tree
searching (hence branching factor is crucial) with various weights (obviously
this is traditional chess evaluation, not fancy NN stuff). I honestly am
clueless.

~~~
IanCal
> I dunno. Granted evaluation is key but so is branching, surely, as that is
> what generates new positions, and their complexity in evaluation as there
> are more factors to consider.

I think this is where the slight issue is. The branching factor of your game
is related to but not the same as the branching factor of your search.

> I thought evaluation really was just tree searching (hence branching factor
> is crucial)

The most basic way would be to play every possible game through to completion,
fully exploring the tree. If you have no way of estimating the value of a
position you have to try it out and see what happens, and your branching
factor of the game is the same as for your search. A small increase in
possible moves makes an enormous difference - 5 to 10 for a 10 move game is a
1000x jump.

However, imagine the complete opposite. You have a _perfect_ way of estimating
your chance of winning for any particular board move. In that case, you'd just
check all the moves you can make right now and not look any deeper in the
tree. Going from 5 to 10 is a doubling of positions to check, no matter how
many moves in the game.

Because of the exponential here, the number of positions to evaluate per move
that you don't explore further is almost negligible (similarly it's easier to
just calculate the size of the lowest expanded bit of the tree as that
dominates the total).

So, the better you get at evaluating your position without searching, the more
deeply you can explore because you're not branching off so much,

------
pmoriarty
_" Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In
particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many
amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The
same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me privately.
Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional
chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if it
does occasionally result in an exciting game."_

I'm an amateur who's a fan of the Fisher Random chess variant, and feel it is
a tremendous improvement over the enormous amounts of opening memorization
that is required in traditional chess, and which is yet another thing that
gives computers (who have a perfect memory) an edge over humans.

------
sanxiyn
If you want to read about what chess players (some of them, anyway) think of
this, you can visit this Reddit thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_propo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/e2n3df/kramnik_proposes_a_variant_nocastling_chess/)

------
panic
Game designers usually have to do tons of playtesting to find all the broken
strategies in their games. As self-learning AI becomes more accessible, it'll
give designers much quicker feedback. I'm curious to see how this will affect
the games we play. Maybe someone will discover a new game as deep as Go and
Chess!

~~~
shagie
Consider then
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa)
\- playable on a standard chess board, but has a combination all explosion of
movers larger than go.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity)

~~~
mrob
The huge game tree of Arimaa is somewhat misleading, because a lot of moves
are just simple transpositions. It's a fun game but it doesn't feel more
complex to play than Go.

Note that despite the anti-computer design, classical computer chess
techniques (with some clever hand-written heuristics) were enough for
computers to exceed humans.

------
k_sze
While we're at it, we can possibly create a new variant every few years with
the aid of AlphaZero, to curb the memorisation trap.

Here are the steps:

1\. Think of a new rule change;

2\. Train AlphaZero for a period of time with the new rule;

3\. Validate the viability of the new rule, based on two criteria: a) enough
interesting lines discovered by AlphaZero; b) no obvious advantage for either
black or white, based on the results of the AlphaZero training games;

4\. Make the new rule officially accepted at FIDE for the next N years.

5\. Repeat for the next cycle.

------
calhoun137
Meh. I dont believe we have even come close to finding the best chess strategy
for humans and strongly disgagree with the premise of this article that chess
strategy for humans is at some kind of ending and we need to change the rules
or else it will never get better.

In fact, I have done a lot of research into chess engine theory and believe
flaws in the stockfish algorithm directly contrubute to the "boring" chess we
see today, since all pros use engines to train now. The old engines cant see
lines that alphazero sees which involve long term positional sacrifices, and
use a linear evaluation function which in principle can never capture the
strong non linearities inherenit in chess. (alphazero uses a non linear
evaluation function, which is its nueral net)

Considered as a mathematical space, the universe of possible chess strategies
is an extremely large order of infinity. There are also many aspects of time
management in relation to the computational complexity of the position which
modern engines dont model at all.

I believe that modern engines are overly materialistic and that aggresive
positional sacrficies in the style of Tal and alphazero are the future of
chess strategy for humans

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
To me the whole concept of chess always getting better is a little puzzling.
Most games of this type don't change, and therefore don't get better. The
point is local challenge, not global optimization. To most, the point of games
(and much other human endeavor) is competition for competition's sake, not a
search for some maximum of abstract skill.

To avoid chess (real chess, with castling and all that) because AlphaZero
exists is like avoiding singing because Taylor Swift exists. Or like avoiding
painting because Chagall existed. Or like avoiding Starcraft because Serral
exists. Yeah, with a 99.999999% chance, you're not going to exceed the
performance of these individuals (or others I could name) in their respective
fields. That doesn't take the joy out of learning and growing, at least not
for me.

AlphaZero and similar add a few more nines to chess, in terms of the
likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game. But that should
hardly make a difference except to maybe the two or three very best human
players in the world.

~~~
calhoun137
I am 1000x more interested in chess engine's and "a search for some maximum of
abstract skill" than I am in getting good at chess. During my research into
this topic I discovered many facts which led me to conclude that there exist
multiple chess strategies which humans can use which are currently unknown and
which are __far __more powerful than anything currently used by grand masters
or chess engines. This was all before alphazero was released, and I feel
strongly that alphazero proved the hypothesis that chess strategy theory will
continue to improve and there is still so much to learn.

Chess theory is "always getting better". This is because chess has the
property that the skill curve is so extreme and the game so deep that it is
seemingly always possible to continue to improve and find new ideas.

Chess engines play a fundamental role in modern human chess. There is a causal
relationship between the state of the art in chess engines and the play styles
of the top pro's. This is because better engines can find new idea's in
positions previously thought to be completely explored. It happened recently
with an alphazero game in a spectacular way iirc

There is a theorem which says that given any chess engine, it's impossible to
decide if that chess engine is playing in an optimal way. So when you say "in
terms of the likelihood of being the best-performing entity at that game", I
think its important to be very precise about what we mean, even though in
spirit I agree with that statement =)

I started working on a project to build a chess engine that is specifically
designed to beat other chess engines by playing in a non-optimal way
specifically tailored to find and exploit bugs in the opposing chess engine
code/flaws in its algorithm.

I also once proved that any chess engine based on the principles of stockfish
will necessarily contain positions where it can be exploited into making bad
moves. If you fixed the algorithm to make it not exploitable in that specific
position, the theorem says there would exist another position where it would
be exploitable. This is what I call the theory of "exploitative chess engines"
(in the sense of maximizing the possible gain), as opposed to ones which
attempt to play in an "optimal" way (minimizing the maximum loss)

~~~
schoen
> There is a theorem which says that given any chess engine, it's impossible
> to decide if that chess engine is playing in an optimal way.

Careful with that formulation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game)

Several major strategy games, notably checkers, have been formally solved.
That _does_ make it possible to prove that some engines for those games behave
in an optimal way (although it would still be impossible to verify whether an
arbitrary program is equivalent to an optimal engine, because the arbitrary
program could do something else first whose outcome couldn't be foreseen by
the optimal-engine detector).

Although chess has a higher branching factor and a greater depth in various
ways than games that have been solved, nobody has found a theoretical barrier
to solving it, which in turn means that we can't rule out the possibility of a
proof that a particular engine is optimal.

From the formal computation theory standpoint, the situation is even more
extreme: the game tree given the threefold repetition rule _is finite_ , which
means that we can immediately write down an explicit game tree brute force
engine which is guaranteed to perform optimally in every position. This is
probably just a handful of lines of code! While this engine can't actually
make a single move in a human timescale, from an algorithmic point of view it
plays perfectly and we can be sure of that.

The theorems on undecidability of program behavior don't include time
constraints like this because they're established using models of computation
like Turing machines, where physical limitations of real computing devices are
no issue.

~~~
calhoun137
I guess the word "theorem" is a little strong, since it depends on the real
world. I stand by the statement that it's literally impossible to decide this
in practice. If we are allowed to say in a few lines of code you could
formally compare any chess engine to a theoretically optimal one, then
obviously it is possible to decide by just comparing.

Without being allowed to compare a given engine to a theoretically optimal one
which is based on brute forcing the full game tree, and being careful about
the problem statement, I suspect it would be possible to prove something along
these lines

I would argue something like: "Gods evaluation function" takes as input a
chess position and returns whether the position is a forced win, lose, or
draw. The rules of chess are so complicated that to go from a continuous
evaluation function to a discrete one like that would require an infinite
number of steps (this last statement is the one that needs to fleshed out)

I will stop calling it a theorem until I remember why I started calling it
that. This situation exists in many non-linear optimization problems, a
subject I find really interesting, and in many cases in practice there is no
way to decide if a given solution is optimal. For some reason I thought there
was a theorem in non-linear optimization theory that was directly relevant
here

------
EduardLev
I find it interesting that both games of this variant between Kramnik and
AlphaZero ended in a draw. That suggests to me that we would quickly see the
same problem in the variant as we do now. The question would be, how long
would it take for humans to catch up? My guess is a couple of years, until the
variant has to be changed again (That is, mostly draws in high level
competitions).

What are other similar games that have a higher level of variation? Go comes
to mind. How about we increase the size of the chess board to 9x9, while
keeping the same 8x8 setup? That sounds like a number of variations more than
no castling, while still keeping the same feel.

~~~
Cybiote
Hi, can you point to the source for this? I failed to find any mention of it
in the article. Or did you mean the two games annotated by Kramnik? Thanks.

~~~
EduardLev
Thanks for pointing this out. I meant the games annotated by Kramnik. Would
have been interested to see his results.

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mindgam3
Former world-ranked youth chess player here. 100% agree with the desire to
reduce draws and get people out of opening theory. Not sure though why Kramnik
felt the need to invent a new variant when Chess960 already exists, is
thriving, and changes the game far more drastically than no-castling rule.

The post reads more as an submarine advertisement for DeepMind (0) than a
serious article for chess players.

[0]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
schoen
Kramnik briefly addresses this question in the article:

> Fischer Random is an interesting format, but it has its drawbacks. In
> particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for many
> amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved. The
> same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me
> privately. Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in
> traditional chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and
> viewers, even if it does occasionally result in an exciting game.

(I have no idea if his view would be persuasive to you.)

~~~
mindgam3
Yeah, I don't find these arguments particularly convincing.

> In particular, the nontraditional starting positions make it difficult for
> many amateurs to enjoy the game until more familiar positions are achieved.

Actually the nontraditional start is part of what makes it fun. It's fresh and
forces you to start using your brain from move one. I don't buy the claim that
the main enjoyment of chess is due to familiar positions.

> The same is true for world-class players, as many have confessed to me
> privately.

I can't speak to Kramnik's private conversations, but as a serious player what
I can say is that my competitive advantage over an amateur diminishes
considerably in Chess960. Perhaps what Kramnik's friends are complaining about
is the fact that it's harder for them to win at Chess960 than standard.

> Finally, it also seems to lack an aesthetic quality found in traditional
> chess, which makes it less appealing for both players and viewers, even if
> it does occasionally result in an exciting game.

Yeah, there's a difference in aesthetics for sure. But who is to say that it
is "worse"? Some piece configurations do feel a bit "ugly" but to me this is
more than balanced out by the beauty of new patterns emerging where they
weren't expected.

------
arunix
Rather than banning castling outright, what if opposite wing castling was the
only type of castling allowed? That should also make draws more unlikely.

------
DonCopal
I guess a submission won't gain traction if you don't mention "AlphaZero" in
the title:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684118)

------
devit
I think no-castling just generates a different opening theory, and Chess960's
960 starting positions are also not enough: it should be possible to memorize
at least the best white move for each of the 960 positions, and probably the
main variation and even more.

The only way to be sure is to have a random chess variant with at least a
billion different possible opening starting positions: the conceptually
simplest way seems to be to place all pieces completely randomly in the first
three ranks (in the same way for each color), while rejecting any position
that allows white to make a capture, check or threaten to capture a non-pawn
piece on the first move.

~~~
have_faith
> it should be possible to memorize at least the best white move for each of
> the 960 positions

Seeing how there is no consensus on "best opening" for the normal game of
chess, introducing 960 more variations is not going to be a simple case of
memorising the "best opening". I would go as far to say that simply
introducing 10 new standard opening positions would introduce more than enough
complexity to shake up high level play. There's only so much a human can
remember once the computer is turned off and you are over the board.

~~~
devit
Just run the most sophisticated chess engines available 960 times and publish
the results.

Even if not the "best" in an absolute sense, the moves those engines find are
going to better than the move that an human comes up on the spot.

This means that memorization will still be necessary in Chess960 to be
competitive at the highest levels and in fact it's probably going to be worse
because memorizing those 960 starting moves sounds far more tedious than
memorizing classic opening theory.

Scrabble players can memorize 10K+ word dictionaries in languages they don't
know, and since (starting position, move number, chess move) triples can be
encoded as words, it should be possible to memorize the main variation found
by chess engines for each Chess960 position.

~~~
have_faith
But this hinges on there being a computable best opening, which there isn't
for standard chess and there won't be for most(all?) starting positions in 960
(chess isn't a solved game). It's also not just an enum of [starting position,
move number, chess move], there's also "why is this move strong in this
position" which isn't something scrabble players have an equivalent of with
just memorising lists of words.

I personally can't imagine any of the current top chess players memorising
hundreds of opening lines for all 960 starting positions and then being able
to remember them over the board. Only a few players have a mastery of current
known chess theory that's just one starting position. I am happy to be proven
wrong though when some new chess savant presents themselves.

~~~
devit
All you need is a method to compute the first white move that produces a
significantly better win rate than thinking about it during the match, and
then memorizing them becomes advantageous, if doing so is feasible.

It doesn't have to be chess engines (although that seems the best approach),
it can also be 100 people each spending 10 days analyzing one position per
day, or it can be win-rate stats from high-level tournaments once Chess960 is
widely played and there is enough data.

~~~
slau
I’m not sure you understand opening theory. It takes years to learn a single
opening, and I don’t think any serious player would claim they know all
variations/sidelines of a given opening.

There’s no single “best” opening because you can always employ a defence for a
specific opening. For example, there’s a trap against the London which is to
play 1. d4 d5 2. Bf4 h5. 3. e3...

------
deegles
Is there an adaptive difficulty AlphaZero engine? It would be interesting to
learn by playing one set to "try to win 50% of games" as a difficulty.

------
lifeformed
I wish he posted the draw percentage.

------
carokann
I wonder about the win rate distribution for colors in Fischer chess vs. No
castle chess. Either way, this would have to go through FIDE (to be widely
implemented) and they're too corrupt to bring community together and make a
significant contribution to the game of chess.

