
Exploring new forms of chess using artificial intelligence - x43b
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-ruined-chess-now-making-game-beautiful/
======
WalterBright
When I was in college, a Monopoly game appeared on the DEC-10. Playing that
for a while completely ruined the game for me. Then someone wrote a bot to
play ADVENT, which ruined that, too.

My ability to play chess declined precipitously after I learned how to
program, because while thinking of my next move I'd always digress into how to
design a program to do the work for me.

I originally wrote the Empire game because it was unbearably tedious to play
manually, but the computer took care of the tedium and what was left was the
fun.

~~~
technofiend
Walter, your D source code link on classicempire.com fails with a permission
error. Kudos to you for creating what Wikipedia credits as (according to one
ranking in 1996) the 8th most popular game of all time.

Considering the power of most portable devices these days have you considered
revisiting Empire for an IOS or Android version?

~~~
WalterBright
I'll just put the code up on github. It'll take me a bit, so check back in a
day or two.

[http://classicempire.com/](http://classicempire.com/)

I'll announce it here:

[https://twitter.com/ClassicEmpire](https://twitter.com/ClassicEmpire)

~~~
WalterBright
[https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-D](https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-D)

It'll likely need some minor work to work with the latest D compiler, attend
to that in a bit.

~~~
technofiend
Thank you!

------
jka
This is a slight tangent to the article, but in the hope HN readers will find
this as fascinating as I have recently...

There's a three-way battle developing between AlphaZero (as described in the
article, courtesy of DeepMind), LCZero[5] (derived from LeelaZero[1] -- an
open source interpretation of the same principles as AZ), and Stockfish[2] (a
long-standing open source chess engine that has recently begun including
neural network support).

The 'Top Chess Engine Championship'[3] seems to be a good way to follow the
latest news; they also stream matches live on their website[4] (it is quite an
information-dense site).

You can play against an up-to-date implementation of Stockfish in your browser
-- no registration or signup required -- at
[https://lichess.org](https://lichess.org)

[1] - [https://zero.sjeng.org/](https://zero.sjeng.org/)

[2] - [https://stockfishchess.org/](https://stockfishchess.org/)

[3] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship)

[4] - [https://tcec-chess.com/](https://tcec-chess.com/)

[5] - [https://www.lczero.org/](https://www.lczero.org/)

Edit: correct LeelaZero -> LCZero

~~~
NhanH
LeelaZero is strictly used for the Go AI nowadays, the chess version changed
their name to LC0 (or Leela Chess Zero, or LCZero), and the website is at [0]

AlphaZero is not involved in any battle with LC0 or Stockfish, as no one
outside of Deepmind has accessed to it. The battle for chess supreme is
between LC0 and Stockfish, with both trading blows pretty much every update
:-)

[0] [https://lczero.org/](https://lczero.org/)

~~~
jka
My mistake, thanks for the correction :)

------
sasaf5
A summary to undo the clickbait: AI is making chess beautiful by making it
easy to check how new rules affect playability. Rule changes suggested in the
article are:

\- No castling

\- Allowing self capture

\- Pawns can move sideways

\- Pawns can move 2 squares at a time

~~~
david927
The rare occasions that I played against my wife and tried to castle, she
rejected it outright with, "No fancy moves!"

~~~
curiousllama
The true metagame

~~~
dane-pgp
I'm reminded of this classic bit:

[https://youtu.be/i-oDOJlWBTw?t=1849](https://youtu.be/i-oDOJlWBTw?t=1849)

"That's castling sweetheart... It's an advanced level manoeuvre, they added it
in the last patch."

------
keiferski
Question for those knowledgeable on AI: what sort of game would be easy for a
human to understand, but difficult or impossible for a computer to play or
easily defeat humans? I imagine one based purely on randomness, like dice,
would be one.

I remember reading somewhere that languages like Finnish and Hungarian are
difficult for computers to parse, [1] due to their agglutinative grammatical
structure. Not sure if that is actually true, but it seems an interesting
starting point.

[1] Discussion sort of about this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572261)

~~~
exDM69
Not the answer you're looking for, but motor racing and simulations of it.

Sounds counter intuitive, but despite doing fast laps when on the circuit
alone, even the best AI racers have difficulty surviving a race distance in
close pack racing without crashing.

Roborace, the autonomous racing league in development has barely managed to
put two cars on track and doing an overtake safely. A lot of money and state
of the art research has gone into this.

I expect that AI will be able to beat humans on the (simulated) race track in
a decade or two but we aren't there yet.

~~~
klmadfejno
I get that this is true of real cars, but is it really true of simulated cars?
Can you share an example?

~~~
exDM69
There are no racing simulators or even games that have reasonable AI opponents
that don't cheat.

I, mid-tier sim racer, have no chance against good AI in hotlapping on track
in some popular sims, but all of them either yield or cause a crash that would
take them to the stewards (or grave) when racing for position on the same
piece of track.

Pro racing team have excellent sims these days but they don't have AI
opponents.

~~~
klmadfejno
Do you have any particular reason to believe that the "AI" you refer to are
sophisticated ML models built over the sim, rather than hand crafted bots. You
say "don't cheat" which makes me think you're referring to the bots included
in the sim. Because an AI that's not built into the game shouldn't have any
way to cheat.

Forgive this comparison, but the ai drivers in mario kart games also cheat,
but aren't particularly representative of current state ML tech. There's
likely no ML involved in them at all. There's not much in the way of actual
attempts to do this with ML either so it's not proof either way (especially on
new untrained courses).

~~~
exDM69
No, they are not sophisticated ML models. Such things don't exist in this
space as far as I know.

The ones that cheat are in racing games. The hardcore sims that have AI bots
don't usually cheat, and they are the ones that are fast by themselves but
hopeless and/or dangerous in a pack.

Roborace is the only place where this kind of research has been done, and
after many years and millions of dollars they're past their first baby steps,
but still learning to walk before they can run.

------
in3d
There are promising chess variants where all draws are eliminated: no black
castling or no black short-castling Armageddon (draws are counted as wins for
black). I wish they would test them instead of their picks - they are still
chess unlike some variants they tested, which are probably too radical if you
want to attract current chess players.

~~~
me_me_me
I got back to chess few years back, and following scene a bit.

The classical long for chess is basically dead. Its boring, with majority
draws (close to solved game - de0incentivizing aggressive play). I am glad
there is shift towards shorter time formats.

Shorter time control creates more urgency and allows to play subpar moves to
throw off your opponent. Its much more interesting to observe.

Armagedon rules are being used now as tie breakers and there is a lot more
discussion about changes/rules tweaks.

So who knows what next year will bring.

~~~
dh5
I strongly disagree with the assertion that chess is a "close to solved game"
in human OTB play in particular.

Top GMs currently will probably score 0/12 against Leela/Stockfish. We see
innovations frequently in recent years as we learn from engines themselves,
h4/h5 pushes as a simple example, but also in terms of style like favoring
rapid development and attacking play.

Yes, draws are frequent but that doesn't mean there is no excitement in long
games. Rapid/blitz is damn fun to watch and play but there's a certain,
different kind of elegance in carefully considered moves as well.

~~~
me_me_me
> I strongly disagree with the assertion that chess is a "close to solved
> game" in human OTB play in particular.

I meant 90min +30mins classical format. It really is stale and boring to
watch. And it seems like its mainly a memory game with some meta counter
preparations pre-tournament. Where you develop and memorize lines to counter
your opponent. That's what I meant by "close to solved game" \- as both
players are almost role playing for first 20-30 moves. With tiny variations
throughout the tournament.

That results in quite uneventful games, usually same line being played in
multiple games.

Anyhow that's just an opinion, if someone enjoys classical more power to them.

~~~
gowld
Slow chess is not solved by any human; it's broken. It's dead-ended because
some better players avoid aggression so they can play short-time tiebreakers
instead.

~~~
me_me_me
agreed - 'solved' is wrong term. Maybe peaked to the point top players are
almost equal.

------
rmrfrmrf
An important piece of context here is that making a living by playing chess
competitively is close to nil, so many even top players like Kramnik end up
taking consulting/PR jobs like this in order to pay the bills. I have a hard
time believing Kramnik actually believes (or said directly) that AI ruined
chess. My read is that he's not really promoting changes to the rules of chess
as much as he's trying to build support for new types of chess variants.

It's true that the highest levels of play include teams of researchers and
computers that develop 30+ move preparation, but what we're also seeing as a
result of that are games that are more precise, which IMO is a fundamental
component of chess "beauty". Some notable games that were deemed "beautiful"
in the past are now seen as less-beautiful as it became apparent that play was
suboptimal. Chess beauty now is less about flashy combinations and more about
qualities of a position and reverse engineering the "logic" behind certain AI
moves, which is still great but admittedly requires more of an investment on
learning the game than a spectator might care about.

That framing, though, leaves out the massive benefit that AI has had in
training and improving new players. It used to be that you needed to hire a
chess master to play against and learn from in order to improve. Now your
phone can easily give you a challenge of master-level strength, as well as
analyze your games over the board to look for improvements.

~~~
misja111
> Chess beauty now is less about flashy combinations and more about qualities
> of a position

No it's the opposite. Since the advent of strong computer programs it has
become clear that there are tactical intricacies in lots of positions that
have long been overlooked by everyone, including top players. Gambits that
everyone thought should not be accepted because it would give away a too
strong positional advantage turned out to be winnable by clever defence moves.
End games that were thought to be draws turned out to be winnable by although
sometimes it would take more than 100 moves. The bottom line is that the
tactical part of chess is deeper than most people thought.

~~~
jayparth
Well I agree with your first example.

But would you call someone who wins a supposedly drawn endgame after 100 moves
a tactical player or positional player? No one I know would claim that what
happened on the 100th move was a tactic. It was 90+ moves of jockeying for
position.

~~~
ohyes
I'd call them a stubborn player.

A human can't normally predict out 100 moves of optimal play, so that's why it
is jockeying instead of being part of an intricate plan.

I mean, it does bring the question, do you play a game for the experience or
solely to win?

I play games for the experience, the world's best chess player probably gets a
thrill from being the best and winning. Obviously both experiences are
legitimate and in competitive chess, studying historical games to learn
patterns has always been a thing, so who's to say that studying scenarios
'solved' by a computer is really any different? Possibly there's a little less
romance because a human didn't do it on their own? It doesn't appeal to me
personally, but neither did studying chess moves. It really looks like a
question of scale of preparation to me.

------
soamv
There's a really interesting hour-long interview (more of a monologue really,
heh) with Kramnik about no-castling chess:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPe6xQjO98Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPe6xQjO98Q)

------
mellosouls
Also covered here with a little more technical (chess) info:

[https://www.chess.com/news/new-alphazero-paper-explores-
ches...](https://www.chess.com/news/new-alphazero-paper-explores-chess-
variants)

~~~
colejohnson66
Surprised they didn’t include the “crazyhouse” and “suicide” variants. I
played those a lot on earlier Mac OS X versions.

~~~
smitty1e
I was interested to see what they were doing with
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_\(chess\))

------
throwaway4007
People have been wailing about chess being dry and full of draws and memorized
openings for a century now. Capablanca wanted to swap bisbops and knights to
reset opening theory, and Fischer wanted to just randomize the starting
positions. I'm probably missing some other people.

All of these attempts failed, because of several reasons:

1) The aforementioned problem of memorizing openings and accumulating draws
only occurs at a very, very high level. Even if you're a GM you won't prepare
at the level Carlsen et al. do, memorizing entire 30-move games they had
against each other twelve years ago.

2) Opening theory moves on and playstyles evolve. AlphaZero shifted the mood
from conservative, materialistic, 'computer-like' play to a highly dynamic
style that puts an emphasis on piece activity. Just like when we think we got
most things figured out, new breakthroughs show we've only barely scratched
the surface of what the game has to offer.

3) Most chess players don't see the abundance of draws as a problem. I think
it is specifically an American sentiment - in a country where you're either a
winner or a loser, the game's failure to rank its top players can be
frustrating.

4) Most players see preparation against their opponent as part of competitive
play. Think of it as a kind of metagaming. Changing the rules would completely
reset that.

5) There's a good chance that any change of rules would aggravate White's
marginal first-move advantage. It doesn't matter what the computer says, what
matters is how humans play it and how it reflects in the winrates among
humans.

That doesn't mean the variants are bad or useless though. Bughouse and suicide
chess are crazy fun

~~~
ajkjk
I really doubt (3) and (4). I think most chess players would agree that the
draw-ish nature of high level play is boring and uninspiring, and that careful
preparation of openings dozens of moves deep isn't the interesting part of the
game.

~~~
throwaway4007
I assure you that drawish games are only boring on the part of the spectators,
not on the part of the players. People often struggle epically to catch that
half-point, it doesn't feel boring at all when playing from the inside. There
are many records of epic draws between titans where both sides played
incredibly accurately - see Alekhine - Reti or Korchnoi - Topalov off the top
of my mind.

And as I said, people rarely if ever prepare openings 'dozens of moves' deep
at all but the absolute top level play.

At this point you have to choose if you want chess to cater to competitive
chess players (who are mostly content with the rules as they are) or amateur
spectators and organizes (who want to see blood).

------
xiaodai
Shogi is the most complex Chess variant. But seriously. Just play go. New
patterns emerge everyday now it seems. The most complex pattern can arise from
such simple rules.

------
osyed1
I invented a game called Arimaa that could be played with a chess set but the
rules were very different to make it harder for computer. I put up a $10k
challenge to develop an AI that could defeat the top human players. A
challenge match was run every year from 2004 to 2015 when it was finally
claimed (one year before AI took over Go). There was a variant of Arimaa that
I didn't go with since the games did not seem that interesting. It was the
same as current Arimaa, but without any trap squares. So no pieces were
captured and the game seem to take longer to finish, but I think it may have
been a more strategic version (less tactics). I still wonder sometimes if that
would have been helped the humans stay ahead a bit longer. I avoided that
version since I was not sure if it could lead to deadlock positions. Play
testing to check for flaws especially at high level play would be way to much
effort for humans. It would be less effort to have an AI check the game rules.
Although there is still a big cost to doing that. The AI researchers in the
Arimaa community have recently developed an AI that has learned to play Arimaa
through self play. They have also brought down the cost of training from about
$1 million to about $1 thousand. If anyone is interested, there is a discord
channel where we discuss this kind of stuff
[https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR](https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR)

More information about the Arimaa game as well as a gameroom where you can
play it available here: [http://arimaa.com/](http://arimaa.com/)

------
SubiculumCode
I did't like the article in the sense that AI hasn't ruined chess. Its more
popular than ever, but the focus has moved to shorter time controls...which
can be quite exciting to watch. I watch chess tournaments on twitch.tv with
two grand masters commentating...and honestly, its like watching a godly
hockey match.

That said, I'd like to see some of these variations get implemented on
chess.com. A lot of the variations (aside from 960) are a bit silly feeling
(e.g. a variation where when you take a piece, all pieces within a 1 square
radius get blown to smithereens).

------
loxias
I would love to see AlphaZero play go on other manifolds than the plane.

I and some friends attempted to play 3-space go, toroidal go, and go with
other mathematical roadblocks a long time ago. It was fun for a few weeks, and
we even discovered some interesting properties about where life can exist on a
torus, but a computer could do much better. And I'd love to just see the
answers.

~~~
neolog
How do you define "surrounded" on a torus?

~~~
joelthelion
The actual Go concept is 'no liberties'. That works on any topology.

------
ummonk
It's weird that they the start of this article seems to imply that AI has
taken the joy out of chess. I guess I was only a kid for the Deep Blue vs.
Kasparov days so maybe I don't know any different, but to me fundamentally
chess is joyful because it's a sport. It's not about trying to be the best
algorithm in the world, it's about trying to put out strong consistent
performance on the spot in a game. Sure, your moves won't be as good as a
computer's but that doesn't take the joy out of making them try to be as good
as possible.

------
msla
AI ruined chess the same way horse riding ruined running.

------
dhairya
Lichess has great variants to play. If you haven't tried crazyhorse or multi-
player version bughouse, highly recommend it. In crazyhorse you can put
captured enemy anywhere on the board as your own piece.

Likewise in bughouse, you play with a partner (where you are opposite colors)
against another team. You each play your own game against the opponent but
each opponent piece you capture you can give to your partner to place on their
board and vice versa. First person to win the game wins for their team. It
requires good communication and a different strategies than traditional chess
as you need to account for two games and the flow of pieces on both boards.

~~~
cybwraith
Also, if you really want to dive into the crazyhouse idea you can try learning
Shogi which is effectively the Japanese version of western chess and has the
drop rule and interesting promotion mechanics.

~~~
dhairya
thanks for sharing!

------
floe
> In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces.
> Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful
> incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more
> natural, than prior chess engines.

'doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces' \- really? How would the world
be different if it did 'know'?

I know this is kind of a nitpick, but I'm tired of all the metaphors in tech
journalism that hold no informational value. I think giving a sense of false
understanding is worse than just saying nothing at all.

~~~
shmageggy
I think it's an imprecise way of saying that AlphaZero isn't given the game
rules, so it doesn't know the difference between legal and illegal moves, and
also that before any training it would evaluate a caputure no differently than
any other move.

~~~
floe
> isn't given the game rules, so it doesn't know the difference between legal
> and illegal moves

But it does have some way to determine a list of legal moves from any given
state, and a way to determine whether a state is winning. To me, that's being
'given the game rules'.

> before any training it would evaluate a capture no differently than any
> other move.

That's a good way to say it!

~~~
shmageggy
> But it does have some way to determine a list of legal moves from any given
> state

No it doesn't. That's the Zero part.

------
_hao
Kramnik is the one to talk about computer chess alright... I remember when I
was still in school the huge scandal with him going multiple times to the
bathroom in his match against then world champion Veselin Topalov (should be
around 2005-2006). It caused huge outrage and upset in my native Bulgaria.

On a different note I learned Xiangqi (Chinese chess) this past February and I
found it quite interesting and exciting. Rules seem a bit more complicated
than chess and I'm not sure how it compares to Shogi for example. Pretty sure
Go is still more complex though :)

~~~
pedrosorio
Analysis of the 2006 match by a CS professor:

[https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/Elista2006.htm...](https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/Elista2006.html)

------
skc
Fascinating, and genuinely refreshing.

Wonder if we could go one further and have tournaments where the rules changed
to a different ordered variation after a set number of moves.

Now that would be mind bending.

------
FartyMcFarter
How widespread amongst chess experts is the premise that "AI ruined chess" ?

~~~
brmgb
Not very. It is poetic licence on the part of the writer.

AI had a real impact on how the game was played however. After the advent of
computer evaluation, there was a broad consensus that the way to win was to
play solid positions. In a way, professional chess became more about not
losing than winning. Anish Giri who peaked at number 3 in the world a few
years ago is nicknamed the artist because he keeps drawing. Some found that
pretty boring.

Funnily, salvation might actually have come from AI. AlphaZero doesn't play
boring games and reminded everyone that favoring activity and initiative is a
viable strategy.

Still, all things considered, streaming had probably a much bigger impact on
chess than AI in the last few years.

------
shannifin
Played chess in high school and lost interest in actually playing the more I
explored AI... I find it much more fascinating to explore Alpha's games.
(Probably I'm also mentally lazier now.)

------
bananaowl
I can heartily recommend "Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and
Human Creativity Begins" by Kasparov.

It's his story on what happened around Deep Blue.

------
Quarrelsome
I believe its very much the arbitrary numbers we gave to pieces that we coded
into our brute forced chess AIs that has allowed new chess AIs to be better.

As this article hinted, its understanding of piece value fluctuates based on
the rules of the game but also as the game changes. Alpha Zero makes
sacrifices human players wouldn't because they're too wedded to the idea that
a queen is 9, a rook is 5 and a knight/bishop is 3.5. As flexible as a human
mind gets is valuing a rook pair, bishop pair or knights if the position is
closed.

This means that Alpha Go destroys the greedy Stockfish because Stockfish
counts the numbers but Alpha Go counts the position of the entire board which
is much more complicated.

~~~
ndand
Stockfish evaluates the position of the entire board, e.g. mobility of pieces,
how much opposing space they control, etc. But still, the evaluation function
is hardcoded and weaker than AlphaZero.

Recently Stockfish introduced neural network evaluation.

[https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/625828091343896577/intr...](https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/625828091343896577/introducing-
nnue-evaluation)

~~~
Quarrelsome
By that I just mean Alpha Go is assuming less about board state than StockFish
and other conventional chess AIs do. Evidently the two engines have different
assessments which is why Stockfish will greedily lap up a sacrifice by Alpha
Zero onto to then lose because of it.

