[HN Gopher] Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top...
___________________________________________________________________
Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is
forbidden
Author : bopjesvla
Score : 368 points
Date : 2022-12-01 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (humanchess.abcd.party)
(TXT) w3m dump (humanchess.abcd.party)
| twawaaay wrote:
| Naive. I can create an engine which will plan with this
| restriction in mind.
|
| In other words, whatever the rules, you can have an engine that
| will try to do the best according to the rules.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| How would such engine work? Chess engines work by evaluating a
| lot of positions. But in order to evaluate a single Human Chess
| position, you need to run a normal chess engine for a minute to
| determine the top move.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| I think you overestimate how much you would have to defer to
| this external engine that would have to say which move is
| "top".
|
| Every move you advance you chessboard situation by one move
| only and that move is already part of the tree calculated
| previously. You don't need to search through massively more
| new moves because, assuming sane players, the move each
| player makes is one of the very few top moves previously
| considered by the engine.
| ndr wrote:
| How quickly does this converge to anti-chess?
|
| When you have mate-in 1 it's impossible to have anything else
| recommended by the computer. Flip of a coin for which one is on
| top when you have two?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess
| vippy wrote:
| har har.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Is this called "Human" chess because top engine moves would not
| be humanely possible?
|
| I have a low chess rank (900 on chess.com), yet on an okay game
| 25% of my moves will be "top engine moves":
| https://i.imgur.com/TGaDtzr.png
|
| I could even easily find games where I had 50% of top engine
| moves.
|
| It's really not exceptional. Often the top engine move is the
| only good move and that only good move is pretty obvious.
| ht85 wrote:
| It is "Human" chess because you win by forcing your opposition
| to mess up, instead of pursuing perfection yourself.
| 10xDev wrote:
| > you win by forcing your opposition to mess up
|
| You just described all of chess.
| ht85 wrote:
| You mean all of humanity
| sebstefan wrote:
| It's a cool concept but the first naive thought that comes to
| mind for me is that white could just easily dominate by taking
| advantage of the fact that taking a queen is almost always the
| top engine move. So just by maintaining relative king safety on
| white's side, you just open your queen early and make sure that
| every move there onwards hangs your queen in some fashion. It's
| very easy to hang a queen. You just have an invincible juggernaut
| for the first half of the game until you've demolished enough
| pieces to make it hard to find ways to hang your queen, and by
| that point the material advantage is such that the opponent might
| just resign.
| ouid wrote:
| giving checkmate is a loss, the win condition for human chess
| is giving check in such a way that there is only one legal
| move. So hanging your queen might be good offensively, but its
| not good defense.
|
| Moreover if you hang your queen in more than one way, your
| opponent can still take it in whichever way the computer
| evaluates as worse. Which is often easy to guess. The weird
| part of this will come from the fact that accuracy of engines
| diverges very rapidly off of the critical path. Once you're
| down a queen, you're basically free to play however you like.
|
| There are a lot of dynamics here.
| aqme28 wrote:
| As long as you only leave them with one way to take the queen.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Damn that's true
| meandthewallaby wrote:
| The article states that if there are multiple moves the
| engine recommends, that they all count as the "optimal"
| move, even if there's an indication of preference by the
| engine.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I like the idea of not being allowed to use any move the
| engine would recommend. Blunders only.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Lichess has a variant called "Antichess". If you can take
| a piece, you have to. No checks/checkmate rules. First
| person to have zero remaining pieces wins.
|
| You basically want to "blunder" into giving your opponent
| long chains of captures while avoiding any positions that
| allow your opponent to hang a piece.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Like drunk monkey Kung fu.
| biesnecker wrote:
| That is quite similar to how I play now anyway, so I
| might be really good at this version.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm approaching 40 years old, have played chess off and
| on since I was a kid, and I'm not sure I've ever played a
| match that didn't include several blunders. Like, on the
| off chance I'm playing someone who doesn't blunder often,
| I'll certainly pick up their slack.
|
| My game quality is measured in how many times I say
| "fuck!" right after moving a piece. A very good game for
| me is about a two-fuck game.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The fun thing about chess, you don't seem to think you
| are good, but I can't imagine only making two obvious
| mistakes in a game! It grows with you, haha.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| No no, that's a _very good_ game for me :-)
|
| Most of them it's more like four or five "oh my god I
| hope they don't see that thing I spotted the second I
| took my hand off" moments--and that's just the ones I
| notice before they're exploited. I'm sure I make tons of
| moves that anyone half-decent would call blunders but
| that simply go unnoticed by both players at the board.
|
| I'm so very bad at spotting diagonal attacks, especially.
| Anyone who can open up their bishops then play for time
| will eventually see me put my queen in some dumbshit
| situation that lets them take it free or cheap in a
| single move, for instance, not even any multi-move
| planning required.
| abnry wrote:
| If chess is truly a drawn game with perfect play then
| whoever makes the second to last blunder is the winner.
| chrisbaker98 wrote:
| Just because there are multiple ways to take the queen,
| doesn't mean that none of them is clearly better than the
| others.
| mrslave wrote:
| Maybe it could allow for blunders?
|
| While I enjoy the conversation ideas like these create, I'm
| often left wondering why Fischer random isn't more popular.
| Scarblac wrote:
| There will be opening theory soon, and it will be essential in
| many cases.
|
| For instance after 1.e3 e6 2.Qh5, White threatens Qxf7+ which
| would force black to play the top engine move. Then 2...g6
| 3.Qxg6 is one idea -- but there are _two_ recaptures, fxg6 and
| hxg6, and only one of them can be the top engine move (hxg6, I
| 'm guessing). So 3...fxg6 _probably_ refutes this idea. But are
| you sure enough as white to try to claim a win if black goes
| hxg6?
|
| And after say 1.e3 e6 2.Qh5 g6 3.Qxh7 (avoiding that line and
| going for material), not only does black not have to care about
| their rook (white can't take it, it would be the best move),
| black actually has 3...Qh4 winning -- he threatens 4...Qxf2+,
| white can't play 4.Qxh4 as that's the best engine move, and
| white's queen is threatened twice, so black will be able to
| take it -- _provided he checked this line before the game to
| know which piece to take with_.
|
| Edit: it doesn't actually win, white has 4.Qf5 to defend f2...
| what a strange game.
|
| Edit 2: once a piece is _en prise_ somewhere, the game can
| otherwise become somewhat normal as taking it would be the best
| move and so would moving it to a safe spot - so other moves can
| be played as usual. But would they be good?
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| 1.e3 e6 2.Qh5 g6 3.Qxh7 Qh4 4. Qxf7+ Kd8 5. Qe8++
| Scarblac wrote:
| Sigh, tried to do blindfold again, sorry.
| tomesco wrote:
| There must be a threshold above which making an engine move is
| allowed. Because if there's a checkmate move, it will be the
| best engine move and needs to be allowed.
| tromp wrote:
| No; checkmates are not needed. You win the game by almost
| checkmating the opponent: by leaving them only one legal
| move, which is thus necessarily the top engine move.
| [deleted]
| luxuryballs wrote:
| So a costly check wins but checkmate loses.
| Khoth wrote:
| If you deliver checkmate, you lose. You have to instead force
| your opponent into a situation where they only have one legal
| move (which is trivially the best engine move).
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Not necessarily. There could be two ways to checkmate and
| you picked the one that was t the top move
| drdeca wrote:
| I don't see how one way of checkmating could be worse
| than another way of checkmating? Do some engines give
| different scores for different check-mating moves?
| (Different moves from the same position I mean)
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You can force the opponent into a position where the only
| move that saves them is a top engine move. Since they
| cannot play that move, the other option is to surrender.
|
| So essentially this converts most mates in two into mates
| in one, but some become ties by repetition.
| II2II wrote:
| The article had an illustration of this: the player put their
| opponent into check where there was only one move to get out
| of check. The opponent would have to make that move, whether
| they were human or machine, so the player who made the
| original move wins the game.
|
| It is an interesting variation on chess given the current
| state of tournament play, yet it isn't really a solution to
| the cheating problem since it is effectively a new game with
| a new end-state. But you are probably right about there
| needing to be some sort of threshold. While there the rules
| of the variation says that any move with equal scores is
| considered equivalent, I would imagine the players would need
| a very intimate knowledge of how the engine scores moves in
| certain scenarios.
| jerf wrote:
| As others have mentioned, that is accounted for in the rules.
|
| My immediate first reaction was also that it would be
| interesting to have a variant that is the same except you are
| allowed to checkmate, except then I realized the recursive
| nature of how board positions are evaluated makes that
| problematic. For instance, if there's a mate in 2, the first
| move of the mate in two is now certainly the "best move".
| Creeping up on a checkmate without ever making the "best
| move" until the very last one might actually be harder than
| the win condition based on strangling the opponent described
| in the current rules.
| sovnade wrote:
| It just doesn't make sense though for that reason. You
| can't sneak up on an engine. There's not a single engine
| out there that wouldn't recognize a mate in 2 moves. Unless
| the opponent blunders (which actually might be forced if
| the best defensive move is blocked).
|
| It just seems like you're changing the objective of the
| game entirely to the point where it's only slightly related
| to chess.
| remus wrote:
| Could get very meta if you had a chess engine that knows how to
| play human chess!
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That was my thought too. Does the engine know that the other
| player is forbidden to play the top engine move on the next
| turn? Then you can't just do something like c3 Nf6 Qa4 e5
| Qe4!? to hang the queen in the center, knowing that Nxe4 is
| prohibited, because the strongest move for white if Nxe4 is
| prohibited would have been Qe4!
| EricMausler wrote:
| Any move the human chess engine makes would be losing by
| definition if it is also used as the bench mark.
|
| Therefor, such an engine can only hang in computation -
| being unable to produce a top move because if it were to
| make a suggestion then the actual best move changes to
| avoid it. Since the engine is unable to produce a move -
| there is no top engine move which makes every move legal.
|
| A normal game of chess is played while the engine locks up
| on the sideline
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You forgot that the engine user may cheat and even if
| they declare the engine there's no real way to detect if
| they're truthful and not using a certain of the engine
| tuned for Human Chess specifically.
| Khoth wrote:
| My first naive counterthought is that if you try to do that
| then black can ignore your queen and use their queen to take
| your pieces. You're a move ahead but you don't get a
| snowballing advantage.
| [deleted]
| Bootvis wrote:
| e4, Qf3, Qxf7 looks menacing
| Scarblac wrote:
| 1.e4 may well be the best move, 1.e3 is a lot safer.
|
| Edit: I didn't read the fine print. First moves are exempt.
| nojs wrote:
| I guess after 1. e4 e5 2. Qf3 black can safely play Qf6
| Bootvis wrote:
| True, and as long as there are two ways to take (and there
| are) Black must be fine.
| okamiueru wrote:
| The title "Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top
| engine move is forbidden" kinda suggests that the top move just
| isn't available to the player.
|
| However, the thought you had, and similar ones, are very much
| the intentional side-effect of the rules. The only way to win
| the game, as stated, is forcing your opponent to make the top
| engine move. Or, of course, correctly claim that your opponent
| made such a move (even though it wasn't forced). Or, having
| your opponent make the incorrect claim about your move.
|
| So, it isn't necessarily "playing good chess". Though, I must
| say, I'm not qualified to have any good idea of what it would
| mean to be good at this game. It definitely helps to be good at
| chess, and have a good command of what are the correct engine
| moves. Especially since you lose if you incorrectly claim a
| position and opponent move was "the top engine line".
|
| I suppose most would reduce this to leaving the opponent to
| only one legal move. In which case, the problem is is trivial.
| But, after move 2? You need to know most opening lines, and
| probably play intentionally bad in many situations.
|
| Hm, this is cooler the more I think about it.
|
| Imagine intentionally setting up material sacrifice with a
| resulting choice of multiple moves for the opponent to
| capitalize. If you can correctly evaluate the best computer
| move, you have a strong advantage. If it is not obvious, then
| the opponent might not dare to gamble the challenge.
|
| Has Hikaru tried this in one of his streams? I'm certain he
| would have a blast.
|
| The only thing about this that doesn't "spark joy" are the
| ambiguous practical implementations.
|
| - Which engine? This matters a lot.
|
| - How do you define the computational cut-off? CPU-minutes?
| Move depth? Etc. Not necessarily a simple problem.
|
| - The rule "When multiple moves have the top score, they are
| all top moves". Needs a specific score evaluation delta for
| grouping "top moves".
|
| All of these could rather simply be resolved if it isn't very
| important... might even add some uncertainty to it, for fun.
| Like, say: 1. Stockfish 15. 2. Allow the computer whatever
| resources it has available, 1 minute, and play some drum roll
| sample. 3. Pawn-evlauation of 0.05.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder -- at the top end the chess engines clearly compete
| with each other and produce different results, that's how one
| can be said to be better than the other, right? But against
| us puny humans, especially novices, do they produce very
| different outputs? Or is it just like, the moves to crush a
| silly meat-brain are just super obvious, no need for
| creativity.
|
| Especially in this game, the humans will be _trying_ to play
| badly.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Some games from the most recent chess engine tournament
| look whacky as hell. Like if you showed the games to a
| grandmaster they would probably estimate it was 2
| completely new 400 elo players.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Actually no, the top choice would be to force your opponent
| into a position where the series of second best moves
| literally destroys them. You're looking for traps where only
| a particular move can save you.
|
| A minimally modified engine lookup wins here.
|
| There's a whole bunch of openings that ensure it for white,
| this game is rigged even more than playing the best move,
| even if you do enforce a random opening.
| [deleted]
| MereInterest wrote:
| I'd also be interested in a variant where the engine-
| recommended move is displayed to the players. It would take
| out the uncertainty of whether a move is illegal, but would
| allow for different win conditions (e.g. approach checkmate
| without ever using an optimal move).
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Not wasting time with claims would be another very
| practical advantage.
|
| A further variant for fairness purposes: let each player
| bring their preferred chess engine, instead of arguing
| about the choice of only one; and have each player run both
| engines for mutual anti-cheating verification. Then either
| the two engines agree on the best move (likely case if they
| are both strong) or all moves that either engine considers
| better than the other engine's best move (at least 2,
| usually not too many) can be interdicted.
| majikandy wrote:
| This is what I thought it would be from the title. Top
| players say that they don't necessarily see a top engine
| move but can immediately identify one when it is played on
| them.
| Retric wrote:
| It's an exaggeration but with some truth to it. Outside
| of openings and end games the top move for a chess engine
| is often different from the top move for a player. That
| said, grandmasters do of course often play the top engine
| move.
|
| Human players are dealing with both human limitations and
| human limitations which really changes the game. So a
| grandmaster can for example benefit from playing a
| slightly weaker but less well known opening that they
| have recently studied in depth with the assumption that
| their opponent hasn't done the same.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Botez gambit for the win. That's hilarious and I love it.
| pkulak wrote:
| I bet if you hang your queen 5-6 times, for one of those,
| taking the queen won't be the top move. Just think about if
| your queen would _still_ be hanging after a check that maybe
| captures some other piece first. And then that strategy has
| lost you your queen.
| aarreedd wrote:
| You could have two engines: a strong engine and a weak engine.
| If the weak engine suggests a move then it's allowed. But if
| the strong engines suggests a different move than it's
| forbidden.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| But you'd need to fine-tune the stupidity of the weak engine
| to have decent but not too good moves: an extra chore that
| would amply offset any increase of fun.
| EricMausler wrote:
| I had a similar naive thought, but it doesnt resolve easily.
| For starters, Black can do the same thing just a move behind.
|
| Second, if you ever hang your queen two ways at once - one of
| them could be a less optimal take (-5 is not as good as -8)
|
| Third, whoever is a move ahead in a race of taking pieces will
| be the first to run out of weak pieces to take. Their available
| move pool is shrinking faster. Not sure how it would play out,
| black would need to cater to it by removing defenders and
| hanging pieces of their own, etc.
|
| That said, first move advantage does seem strong still due to
| how forcing a queen can be. An example would be 1.e4..e5
| 2.Qh5..d5 3.Qxf7#
| yosefk wrote:
| The best way to find out the best strategy for Human Chess is
| to train AlphaZero to play it, and learn from its example.
| Then we can make a Human Human Chess variant where you lose
| the game by playing the top move suggested by this newly
| trained engine.
|
| It is an interesting theoretical question whether we can have
| Aleph Zero Human Chess where Human(Human(...(Chess))) is
| applied infinitely, approaching Aleph Zero trainings of
| AlphaZero, or we get a redundant variant after some
| application where further application of Human() no longer
| produces a new variant.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| But mating is always the optimal engine move. So I'm not sure a
| huge material advantage is the advantage you think it is.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You will need to find a mate where there are two
| possibilities to win. Unplayable for humans, funny for
| engines.
|
| In fact, the opponent cannot play the best move to escape a
| mate, so a bunch of the games would become forced surrenders.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| If there are two moves that mate, they are both considered
| optimal engine moves.
| gizmore wrote:
| My intuition would be checking every move and disallow those
| (no claiming, transparent comparison on every move)
|
| We can argue if a forced move ends the game, or just allows it.
|
| This would (more) move the game forwards in the basic
| historical rule-set.
|
| - giz
| phonebucket wrote:
| I like this strategy, but I don't think it's necessarily clear
| cut: while taking the queen is forbidden, the opponent also has
| the opportunity of putting their queen en prise.
|
| So you end up in this scenario where both players are taking
| one another's pieces while leaving their queens en prise the
| whole time. Is it a draw, or is there some clever way to break
| this loop?
| Configure0251 wrote:
| Hey, could someone please explain this for my friend? They don't
| get it.
| curiousssnake wrote:
| "" If the chess engine suggests the opponent's move, the claimant
| wins the game. If not, their opponent wins instead. ""
|
| How? Top engine move changes with evaluation time. Longer the
| wait, better the move.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Top engine move changes with evaluation time
|
| I think that's like saying you can't play scrabble because the
| dictionary changes over time. You specify the engine and wait
| time before you start a game.
| danuker wrote:
| You can't. You have to share the best move ahead of each
| move.
|
| Waiting for a specific duraion may yield different results
| depending on CPU usage or other variables.
| scott_s wrote:
| Players only reference the engine to resolve a claim, after
| the move has been played.
| danuker wrote:
| Ah. So part of the fun is not knowing which move is
| forbidden, ahead of time.
| scott_s wrote:
| Yes. You also have to be good enough to be able to guess
| what is most likely to best the best engine move.
| bmacho wrote:
| No, there are no top engine moves in practice, and in theory.
| WJW wrote:
| Only in the general case, for simple (mostly endgame)
| positions it is quite possible to exhaustively search the
| move tree and find the absolute best move. Those can be
| found by current engines and future engine development
| won't change them anymore. Such a move would therefore
| always be the top engine move.
| kadoban wrote:
| You can make the engine choice deterministic just by choosing
| an evaluation time and settings.
| irishsultan wrote:
| not quite deterministic when you consider multithreading and
| monte carlo search.
| kadoban wrote:
| Yeah, deterministic is not actually the concept I want here
| I think. It's fine if it's random, it just needs to be
| unambiguous.
|
| So you just choose in advance what settings to run with and
| the stopping condition. And then it doesn't matter that if
| you had run it with different settings, you may have gotten
| a different answer.
| rocqua wrote:
| It is less fun if the outcome is non-deterministic. It
| means that occasionally the win is determined randomly.
| That takes away a certain element of skill.
| kadoban wrote:
| I guess if you let it run for a long time it should
| converge on a first move?
|
| I don't think there's a real fix for the issue, unless
| someone effectively solves chess someday. Otherwise your
| win/loss is fundamentally based on the imperfect
| evaluation of a particular engine.
|
| If it's really just the nondeterminism that bothers you
| (which is fair enough, preferences vary), there's engines
| that either are deterministic or can be made so with
| settings.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This is not necessarily true. Sometimes there are emultiple
| best moves, and in this case the order might be arbitrary
| depending on all sorts of hard to control things like thread
| interleavings and caching effects which can be affected even
| by other processes on the system. You could run it single
| threaded with no transposition table, but then you have a
| pretty shitty engine because modern engines are fundamentally
| designed around having a transposition table. Then you get
| situations where the top engine move might actually be a bad
| move.
| ht85 wrote:
| That wouldn't work as the speed at which the engine runs is
| not deterministic.
|
| Engines can be configured to limit search to a certain depth,
| which will produce a result after every branch has reached
| the limit or been pruned. That process will vary in time but
| be deterministic.
|
| Recent neural based engines tend to not be deterministic,
| especially if ran multi-threaded.
| rrobukef wrote:
| Where time is measured in the number of positions evaluated.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| So the only way to win in the end-game is to set up for a
| position where the are _two_ possible moves to mate? There would
| never be any practical reason to resign I don 't think.
| ixtenu wrote:
| TFA:
|
| > Checkmating loses the game, as it is always the top engine
| move. Rather than aiming for checkmate, players seek to force
| their opponent to make a top engine move. If a player only has
| one move available, that move will always be the top engine
| move, which loses the game.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Yikes; did not read that carefully enough.
| jll29 wrote:
| An interesting variant of chess; Alan Turing is said to have
| introduced another, outdoors version of chess where you'd move,
| then run around the house, and if the opponent hasn't moved by
| the time you're back, you'd get to move a second time. That
| change of rules ought to push Turing's variant somewhat outside
| the tree of possibilities of traditional chess.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Okay I love where this goes if explored a bit. Imagine "Shitty
| Chess" where you can't play the top 10 moves (or if fewer are
| available, you must pick the worst option).
|
| I feel like this would be a funny novelty for a YouTube video.
| Maybe we can get some YouTube grand-masters like Nakamura to
| tolerate a few games for the schadenfreude.
| manor wrote:
| The instructions should be clearer as to whether the engine is
| visible at all times or only accessed in the case of a challenge.
| Seems like it would be a hassle to do this except in a mode where
| the engine is visible at all times...
| darkstar999 wrote:
| Seems pretty clear to me.
|
| > Starting from move 2, players can claim their opponent's last
| move was a top engine move. This immediately ends the game.
|
| > Claims are settled by asking the chess engine to evaluate the
| position before the contested move. If the chess engine
| suggests the opponent's move, the claimant wins the game. If
| not, their opponent wins instead.
|
| So your suggestion would be a completely different game.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| There is nothing more human than having to imagine the procedures
| and operations of a machine at all times.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I think this would also be fun to try with Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe,
| which also has the advantage of being _much_ faster to resolve
| with AI than taking a minute.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tic-tac-toe
| klyrs wrote:
| Checkmate is forbidden because it's what the engine suggests.
| Check with a single escape is suddenly the goal.
|
| But if you're in check, do the rules say you need to try to
| escape it? Or can you take the opportunity to capture the queen,
| thumbing your nose at the false threat?
| electrotype wrote:
| You can actually checkmate if there are two ways to do it and
| one is uglier.
| rnestler wrote:
| Not really, read the fine print :)
|
| > When multiple moves have the top score, they are all top
| moves, even if visual markers (like move arrows) suggest the
| engine prefers one over the other.
|
| This would be the case for two check mates.
| bena wrote:
| The goal of the game is to capture the opposing player's King.
| Technically, you don't have to escape a check. But the other
| player can take your King and you'd lose. That's why checkmate
| is seen as a win, because on the player's next turn he can take
| the opponent's King and there's nothing the opponent can do
| about it.
|
| In rapid chess, if you overlook check or put your own King in
| check, your opponent can claim the win.
|
| Now, what happens in Human Chess, I don't know. Because I would
| assume that the best move would be to capture the King and win
| the game. Assuming that you can't capture the King because it's
| the recommended move, this does seem like something you could
| exploit to some degree.
| jetnew wrote:
| If we train recursively-restricted reinforcement learning agents,
| could there be interesting differences in the behaviors that
| emerge? Could it even be used as a method for exploration?
|
| Some set-up considerations: 1) Actions must be discrete, or at
| least binned for restriction, 2) The number of times to restrict
| is limited by the size of the action space
|
| I would imagine for CartPole, the balancing would become more
| wobbly, while still somewhat successfully balancing. But in more
| complicated environments, it could result in much more different
| behaviors because the states visited (and trajectories) could be
| different.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Machines would have an even greater advantage here. They know
| exactly the second best move, and would easily calculate it based
| on any set of constraints. Humans are worse at the increased
| complexity
| OJFord wrote:
| But then they'd just always play second best until they at best
| drew, or (more likely) meet with a forced move that's
| inherently the best engine move and lose.
|
| You need a different engine that's focussed on not only
| avoiding conventionally top moves itself, but also forcing its
| opponent into them.
| oehpr wrote:
| The catch here is that the engine doesn't understand the
| objective in its search. To the engine, getting the king in
| check with an obvious response is no issue, in human chess its
| game over.
|
| My bet (uninformed, very novice at chess) is that it's likely
| there's guaranteed setups that would always catch an engine.
| layman51 wrote:
| It seems like it would be fun to watch people play this. What
| would happen if one player cheated by using the same engine that
| was selected at the start and consistently picked the second,
| third, fourth, or fifth engine move? I don't think that would
| work out for them because the game incentivizes you to win by
| forcing your opponent to take a high-level piece like your queen
| to win and then calling them out for being forced to have used
| the top engine move, right?
| Tepix wrote:
| There is a variant of chess where you place a chicken after your
| move to an empty field of your choice and the opponent is not
| allowed to play there.
|
| Once the opponent has made her move, she can place the chicken on
| any other empty field.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _If a player only has one move available, that move will always
| be the top engine move, which loses the game._
|
| It's interesting that this brings another degree of indirection
| to victory conditions.
|
| If you never played chess before, you'd assume the goal is to
| take the opponent's king. But as we know, making a move that
| would allow your opponent to take the king is forbidden, so the
| goal of normal chess is force your opponent into a position where
| you _could_ take the king next turn (checkmate).
|
| This variant takes this another step further: Now any move which
| could result in checkmate (or check with only one exit) is
| forbidden, and the goal is to force the opponent in a position
| where any next move would result in checkmate or check.
| vaidhy wrote:
| So, everyone has to play to lose and who loses first wins? If I
| leave my king open to checkmate, the best move from AI would be
| to take that.. but the opponent cannot do that. So, I get to
| leave my key pieces open and the opponent tries to do the same??
| tromp wrote:
| A simpler variation, that needs no computer to settle disputes,
| is Veto Chess.
|
| In Veto Chess you get one chance per game to veto your opponent's
| last move, and force them to make a different one.
|
| This shares with Human Chess the property that you can win by
| checking the king such that the response is forced.
|
| It may also serve as a handicap system in games between players
| of widely different strength, where only the weaker player gets
| the veto.
| jl6 wrote:
| I expect that if I were offered a veto against a stronger
| player, I would not be skilled enough to spot which move to
| veto, and would probably end up hoarding my veto, like in video
| games where you have a great-but-rare ability that you keep
| perpetually in reserve.
|
| ("Too Awesome to Use" on TV Tropes. Link omitted - you're
| welcome).
|
| But then, I'm a terrible chess player.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm also terrible; I'd use it when I inadvertently gave my
| queen away.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Nah, you'd spot one pretty fast when you blundered and they
| went to take advantage of it. Instead you'd more likely have
| the opposite problem where you'd veto after a blunder but
| still be at such a huge disadvantage that it wouldn't matter
| much.
|
| It would be pretty neat between players of similar skill
| level though, then I could see the hoarding taking place.
| jl6 wrote:
| True, and I can see some fun mind-games where a player
| might try baiting an opponent into wasting their veto on an
| apparently-strong move, or by intentionally playing a
| weaker move that still somehow looks strong but actually
| masks a now-unvetoable killer move...
| tromp wrote:
| But it's better than in the video game, since the mere threat
| of a veto restricts your opponent at every move.
|
| As the saying goes, "the threat is stronger than the
| execution".
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think if this was played at a GM level, games would be
| dreadfully boring, for one simple reason: the first player that
| ever allows a winning threat with only one defence, will lose
| the game.
|
| This will lead to extremely cagey games where no one ever dares
| make the game sharp and imbalanced.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Is it stalemate or a loss if an opponent vetos your only legal
| move?
| tromp wrote:
| A loss if you're in check; a stalemate otherwise. I.e. same
| as if that move was considered illegal.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Ok, I take your protected queen with my queen and veto you
| taking mine on next move.
| taneq wrote:
| <record scratch>
|
| <Zach Braff voice> How did we get here?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I wonder how well this generalizes to other abstract strategy
| games like go or checkers.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Is there a known family of "functors" for games like this,
| e.g. veto or having one opportunity to swap positions with
| your opponent etc.? It would be cool to see what you could
| say about the rule modification in a general sense before
| applying to a particular game.
| spindle wrote:
| There is some literature on this, yes. I don't know quite
| how general it gets.
|
| See for example several books by Elwyn Berlekamp.
|
| One outcome of this work was Berlekamp (IIRC) solving a
| small class of endgame problem that has eluded professional
| (full-time) go players for literally hundreds of years.
| tantalor wrote:
| Next up: Basilisk Chess
|
| Two players compete to win a chess game, where you only win if
| you work tirelessly to play perfect chess moves on every turn (as
| determined by benevolent artificial superintelligence). The loser
| is tortured in a virtual reality simulation.
| 323 wrote:
| But if you are playing Basilisk Chess it means you are aware of
| the Basilisk.
|
| So both players need to stop playing immediately after the
| first move and start working towards making strong AI happen,
| or they will be VR tortured forever.
| taneq wrote:
| What? No, Basilisk Chess is where two players compete to make
| the chess move that optimizes some future AI's utility
| function. If you lose you get tortured forever.
| robervin wrote:
| If I refuse to play am I also tortured
| tantalor wrote:
| Try not to think about it.
| taneq wrote:
| I think that's kinda the default. It sounds really bad until
| you realise it's also the default in Darwinian evolution,
| which, hi.
| nottorp wrote:
| Is it human chess if you have to think like an engine to know
| what not to do?
| pashabitz wrote:
| LOL I read this title as a "Showerthoughts", just stating a funny
| fact about "normal" chess.
| c7b wrote:
| Sounds fun, I guess you'll need to be both a strong chess player
| already _and_ turn everything you know about chess on its head.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| This will definitely have unintended consequences - once you know
| that your opponent cannot make the top move, you would start
| abusing it. It might be fun though - I am recently playing
| Fischer's chess on lichess.org and it is crazy - you beat a 2200+
| player and lose against 945 the very next game. A lot of fun
| though.
| lesiki wrote:
| Now: Human Chess: a variant where you can't play what AI would
| play.
|
| Next: AI that can play Human Chess.
|
| After: Human^2 Chess: you can't play what the AI above would
| play.
|
| etc
|
| I wonder if this creates distinctly new games at each level, or
| if it's just nonsense one level down.
| chronial wrote:
| Wouldn't the perfect AI for Human^2 Chess be just the original
| AI you started with?
| coolness wrote:
| I loved the idea, but on further thought, the AI has a huge
| advantage in knowing what the engine move is, so they can never
| lose to incorrectly calling the last move and engine move.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Unless it was two different engines.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Are we reinventing GANs for chess engines here, or does it
| just happen to sound kinda similar?
| ccozan wrote:
| I'd say let's go straight to SD and let AI _paint_ the
| next move!
| hoosieree wrote:
| Never go in against a Sicillian!
| bad_alloc wrote:
| The lowest level might finally make the Bongcloud opening
| viable:
|
| https://www.chess.com/blog/AcceleratedPog/bongcloud-opening-...
| tda wrote:
| rinse and repeat that a few times, and the only remaining
| winning move will be not to play
| hcrisp wrote:
| Let's call it Human Tic Tac Toe
| kelahcim wrote:
| The masterpiece of the reference ;)
| trsohmers wrote:
| Would you like to play a nice game of Global Thermonuclear
| War?
| xanathar wrote:
| This kind of thinking can either lead to total insanity or to
| the discovery of the halting problem or Cantor's diagonal
| argument.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Wouldn't human^2 chess be similar to regular chess? The human-
| chess AI is guaranteed never to play the regular-chess optimal
| move, so you can get a checkmate by always playing the optimal
| move (according to the engine). And unlike human chess, there's
| nothing preventing you from checkmating your opponent.
|
| (I believe a chess engine could play human^2 chess exactly like
| it plays regular chess. A human couldn't because a human
| doesn't know what moves the chess engine would pick.)
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Presumably human^2 chess would prohibit _both_ the top engine
| move from human^1 chess _and_ the top engine move from
| human^0 chess. That is, it 's human^1 chess with the added
| restriction of not playing top engine moves.
| [deleted]
| hoosieree wrote:
| Each level also has a logarithmically increasing number of
| "fantasy" meta games stacked on top, don't forget to take those
| into account: https://alexshroyer.com/posts/2022-04-30-Fantasy-
| Fantasy-Foo...
| beardyw wrote:
| I would prepare with terrible openings where I have studied the
| engine responses.
| ansible wrote:
| Rather than play something like this, there are many chess
| variants that people could try instead. Like Hexagonal Chess [1].
| No one has written engines for them or otherwise invested huge
| amounts of time and effort in research. So you can be reasonably
| certain that your opponent isn't using an engine to score a cheap
| win against you.
|
| [1] https://greenchess.net/variants.php?cat=6
| iepathos wrote:
| Hilarious satire of the whole magnus/niemann debacle! Thank you
| for this, made my day.
| esparrohack wrote:
| I haven't played chess seriously since I was in high school but I
| do like collecting hardwood chess boards cus they look great as
| room decor.
|
| I give them out as gifts too. Everyone loves a chess set.
| bopjesvla wrote:
| Despite the name, this variant is absolutely mind-bending and
| games look nothing like regular chess. Have fun trying this out!
| tomxor wrote:
| Interesting to think how you would go about defeating this.
|
| Even though you could modify an engine to evaluate each of it's
| moves against the selected "top engine" move to avoid them, there
| is no clear route to success since there's going to be a lot of
| overlap between human and computer for more obvious moves... So
| you'd need some kind of tunable difficulty threshold above which
| it avoids the best solution.
|
| Even then, your difficulty setting is a gamble on whether your
| opponent will call your bluff.
|
| In the opposite case, because of the same overlap, false
| positives are going to be a combination of frustrating and
| flattering.
|
| I find this is the case in most of the online FPS I have played,
| the knowledge that cheating is possible combined with the
| disbelief of the ceiling on human ability makes a huge number of
| people think you are cheating even if your ability is merely
| above average. There are also confusing overlaps between cheating
| behaviour and pros on FPS when trying to evaluate replays e.g
| wallhackers (especially pro wallhackers) and pros sometimes look
| very similar, because the pros are attempting to track through
| the walls in their mind... if they get lucky, a replay makes them
| look super suspicious and hard to distinguish in a single case.
| There are going to be a ton of games like this where the cheating
| behaviour are close or identical to the top pros.
| mabbo wrote:
| I think the 'challenge and win' concept is too strict.
|
| Just make the move disallowed. You'll need the computer to be
| paying attention at all times, but nonetheless it would be more
| enjoyable to play.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| True you could have a ghost piece of the computers move and you
| just can't move there.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I'm not a chess player but wouldn't that give too much
| information away? Not knowing what is the "best" move is part
| of the game, isn't it?
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is a completely different game than regular chess, so
| I don't know if it is part of the game or not.
| jonnybarnes wrote:
| How does the game end?
|
| Anytime you can checkmate is going to be the computer's
| recommended move.
| hacym wrote:
| The game would never end, then. The win condition is
| challenging when a move is the best move. It's similar to games
| of deception. You WANT the person to think you made the best
| move without actually making it, because if they challenge and
| are wrong, you win.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| Why wouldn't the game end?
| OJFord wrote:
| Because you win by your opponent making the top move (and
| you correctly calling it).
|
| But I assume the top-level commenter meant make winning
| exactly like conventional chess - just neither party can
| use the top moves to get there. You could even start from
| move 1 instead of 2 too, take the best openings off the
| table.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| This could be fun for spectators streaming the match at home, who
| could see the top engine move in real time while the players are
| considering their next move
| nraynaud wrote:
| Is there a standard evaluation function in chess engines?
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| I don't think so, but it is deterministic and given equal depth
| all search-based engines should theoritically pop the same one.
| The AI-based (e.g. AlphaZero) ones are obviously different.
| nnoitra wrote:
| Hoover889 wrote:
| How does this work for forced moves? If there is only one
| possible response to a move that move must be the top engine
| move.
| [deleted]
| jonnybarnes wrote:
| Yes, forcing your opponent into a situation where there is only
| one valid move means you win.
|
| When they make the move you claim that's the top engine move,
| and you'd be correct.
| why-el wrote:
| It's covered:
|
| > If a player only has one move available, that move will
| always be the top engine move, which loses the game.
| [deleted]
| aaron695 wrote:
| badcppdev wrote:
| Another chess variant to make you think:
| https://www.chess.com/terms/duck-chess
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| What about positions where there are multiple moves that are
| indistinguishable to the engine? The order in this case is
| somewhat arbitrary and might change randomly each time you run
| the engine depending on which engine it is.
| EGreg wrote:
| Oh great. Now let's make a chess engine to solve this game and
| then we'll be playing the Human Human chess, and so on!
| hateful wrote:
| When I read the title, I assumed it would show you the top move
| and that move would be blocked. But instead it lets you do
| whatever move you want and then you lose if you happen to chose
| the same one. Interesting.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I'd say an interesting variant would be regular chess with Swap2
| rule from gomoku. Which is basically the first player makes the
| first few moves for both sides, and the other player can decide
| to swap black and white.
| WJW wrote:
| That actually looks hilarious, especially the part where
| checkmating is illegal since it would always be the best move.
| The first game highlighted is also fun. I'll have to try this
| next week at the chess club!
| misja111 wrote:
| With this variant you can win without checkmating: just
| checking with leaving only 1 forced move is enough to win the
| game.
| CarVac wrote:
| As long as putting the king in check isn't optimal...
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| Right, so your check should be in a context where another
| move was mate in 1
| thejteam wrote:
| Should that always be the case, though? We could try to force a
| position where 2 separate moves checkmate. Then only 1
| (presumably the one that results from capturing the highest
| valued piece?) would be the engine result.
| underdeserver wrote:
| This is explicitly addressed: When multiple
| moves have the top score, they are all top moves,
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if a move that checkmates is scored lower than a
| move that checkmates and captures.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Checkmate .. with advantage!
| ht85 wrote:
| Forced mates are generally scored with the number of
| moves to mate, e.g. "M2"
| rocqua wrote:
| So you can start down a sequence that gives check-mate,
| but once it is the shortest sequence to check-mate, you
| have to abandon the check-mate.
| Scarblac wrote:
| So you can never actually play a mate in one.
| klodolph wrote:
| If you can check your opponent, giving them only one legal
| move, you win (because it is the top engine move).
| hacym wrote:
| This is a good point. If you can check with your queen but
| hang it, the "best move" would be to take it. Make it so
| they have to take it, for example in a back rank, and you
| win.
| kadoban wrote:
| Aren't there situations where 2+ moves cause checkmate? Only
| one can be the top engine move. Or are all of those effectively
| impossible to reach unless your opponent helps?
| faheel wrote:
| It says at the bottom:
|
| > When multiple moves have the top score, they are all top
| moves, even if visual markers (like move arrows) suggest the
| engine prefers one over the other.
|
| Since all moves that checkmate the opponent will have the
| same score (M1 or -M1) they'll all be illegal.
| rendaw wrote:
| Also despite being named Human chess it's a form of chess where
| a computer is absolutely necessary.
| daniel-s wrote:
| Stockfish variant that always plays the 2nd best move.
| planede wrote:
| That's only the best strategy, if your opponent can make any
| chess move.
| benj111 wrote:
| So what if you make a engine that plays this....
|
| That's making my head hurt.
| jawadch93 wrote:
| bertil wrote:
| There are a lot of examples here of where that would fail
| (openings, checks). Would it make sense to introduce rules like
| letting people pick any move they want for the first three turns,
| or allowing any checking move and counter-checking move? Or is
| that one of those situation where trying to fix an obvious
| problem lead to move issues with defining the problem clearly?
| davidw wrote:
| I immediately thought of Marostica, but I guess this is easier
| than travelling to northern Italy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marostica#History
| eyko wrote:
| The second move is too early.
|
| I've played and lost enough games against engines that I would
| say I've learnt some of the "best moves" (as suggested by the
| engine, when analysing why I lost) in almost every "usual"
| scenario for my "usual" openings all the way to maybe the fourth
| move. There are a lot of variations, but even past the fourth
| move I still remember some engine suggestions based on my own
| errors.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I've been thinking about a possible chess variant to eliminate
| opening preparation drudgery.
|
| The Fisher 960 variant tries to do this, but it can be very
| different from regular chess, and some of the positions are
| unbalanced.
|
| I think we can use the fact that engines _know_ when a position
| is even. There must be millions of even positions in the first 10
| or so moves. Pick one of those randomly, and start the game.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think in the context of top level chess, eliminating opening
| prep is the wrong way to go. And I don't like 960 either for
| that reason. I think the problem with opening prep today is
| that there are so many drawish openings and forced draws,
| constructed repetitions etc. In other words it's just too easy
| for top players to make a low effort draw.
|
| To make top level chess more interesting I have a handful of
| ideas that work in tandem.
|
| 1. Change the scoring and rating systems so that a win is worth
| more than two draws. E.g a win is 3 points for the winner, draw
| is 1 point to each player. Game theoretically this should
| favour players that play for a win and avoid easy draws. But
| also modifying the rating system is crucial, otherwise we'll
| get the same drawmeisters dominating the rating list.
|
| 2. Change the repetition rule to be similar to xiangqi(Chinese
| chess) where repetitions are illegal and don't lead to a draw.
| This eliminates most of the lowest effort draws right out of
| the gate.
|
| 3. Make the game sharper and more complex. The easiest way to
| do this is just to remove the concept of castling altogether.
| Former world champion Kramnik has advocated this, and computer
| analyses of the ruleset is promising. King safety is suddenly a
| hard problem to solve in most openings and the game becomes
| much, much sharper.
|
| 4(optional). add more pieces. The best way is Seirawan-chess, a
| modification of Capablanca chess that adds a knight-
| bishop(hawk) and knight-rook(elephant) without changing the
| board geometry and starting position.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| About point 1, soccer/football did that a few decades ago, it
| was successful and is now uncontroversial:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_points_for_a_win
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Yeah, there are chess tournaments that do this now, like
| Norway Chess. But because a single tournament can't change
| the FIDE rating system, it's sort of a fart in the wind.
|
| Norway chess also has the spectaculary stupid idea that if
| a game is drawn, the players play an armageddon(white gets
| more time, black wins with a draw) blitz game, and the
| winner gets half a point extra, so 1.5 to 1. This just
| ruins it to me. A draw should still be a draw, sometimes
| the players were just equal and not all draws are lazy. And
| this makes drawing more attractive again because if you win
| the armageddon you still get half a victory worth of
| points. And decided by a blitz game in a classical
| tournament.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I would wonder if you need to add an 'ease of play'
| consideration to how even the positions are. Positions may be
| technically even but the play for one side could be more
| complicated to see your way through.
| alexb_ wrote:
| I remember someone on /r/chess actually evaluated every single
| starting position in Fischer Chess. This was the most balanced
| position: https://preview.redd.it/4o4kfv2kfcw91.png
|
| Bishop, Rook, Knight, King, Knight, Rook, Queen, Bishop. Here's
| the post:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/yeregq/fischer_rando...
|
| Maybe this should be used as the starting point? Traditional
| openings would usually give an advantage to White.
| fernandopj wrote:
| This is already how some engines tournaments work. They don't
| start from move zero, they start from some uncommon position
| after a few moves, but one still considered even or at least
| not unbalanced.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| The position doesn't need to be even though, just play twice,
| one with white and one with black
| knubie wrote:
| I dont follow the chess world that closely, but could someone
| explain why chess960 isn't more popular? Its been around for
| awhile and solves the problem of people memorizing opening lines,
| and boring chess games where the first n moves are predetermined.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| It may solve opening lines, but it doesn't really solve the
| general concept of mass memorization. After a few moves more
| than 960 possible configurations of chess exist from a normal
| board anyway.
|
| And you can say, "oh well but the boards are roughly the same"
| and that's sort of true, but it doesn't really solve the
| problem of the people memorizing the tree. It just changes the
| shape of the tree. It goes from looking like a pine to a maple.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| If you make the the 960 times as wide, people will only be
| able to memorize 1/960th as deep.
|
| So not much at all.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| That's not true.
|
| In three plies (one sided moves) of chess, there are over
| eight thousand possible games. By making the game 960 times
| as wide before you start you're not meaningfully changing
| the impact of memorization on the outcome of the game.
| You're just changing how deep you memorize the various
| trees.
|
| You can say, "well then, mission accomplished!" but the
| reality is that most of the tree memorization goes pretty
| deep at the highest levels before a new game is found
| because you're in effect following the games before it or
| you're blundering, or, at best, gambling if you've found
| something kinda unexpected and interesting.
|
| Put another way, any given top rated chess player has a
| finite set of possible game memorizations. Introducing a
| mere 960 new configurations at move 0 is only trading 2 to
| 4 plies worth of depth to the game. It's more complicated
| than that, because board positions can be essentially
| forced and board positions can overlap between pre-
| configurations, etc. But that's the essence of my argument.
|
| You're not meaningfully changing the impact of memorization
| on the outcome of the game, even if one thousandth sounds
| like a lot, it isn't really when dealing with permutations.
| mrandish wrote:
| Obligatory reference post to Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess960).
| A variant designed to "make gaining an advantage through the
| memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely
| more on their skill and creativity over the board." A combination
| of Human Chess and Chess960 might be interesting...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess#Praising_...
| buzzdenver wrote:
| I would assume that this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion; a
| commentary on the state of chess in 2022. Otherwise it makes zero
| sense, because what you're doing is using the rules of one game,
| Real Chess, to determine what moves are allowed in a completely
| different one, Human Chess, in a way that is very complicated and
| awkward. How would the top engine move be defined in an endgame
| where you have few enough pieces to use a table-base? Is any move
| that leads to a win a top-move? Or just the one that does so the
| quickest? Madness :)
| shkkmo wrote:
| This seems like a misnomer of a name. "Human Chess", a variant of
| chess that can only be played if you have a computer...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I think it is a joke on the accusations among professional
| chess players that some players cheat by using a chess engine
| to determine their next move. In other words: claiming the move
| of your opponent is the top engine move is equivalent to
| accusing them of "cheating".
| xeyownt wrote:
| Yes, but this new rule also adds interesting new mechanisms,
| like for instance the kamikaze check move with the queen,
| where the opponent's only move is to take with the king,
| hence losing the game (as it is also engine top move).
|
| Mastering that kind of new threats does not seem easy IMO,
| and in fact could well be mastered by... computers ;-)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| I've heard it said that the best parodies are almost as
| good as the things they parody (and a sign that the
| comedians in question both love and understand the thing
| they are making a parody of). It could be argued that this
| chess variant is a really good "parody" in that sense, but
| encoded in the rules of the game itself.
| 10xDev wrote:
| Chess variants: Chess but worse.
| kstenerud wrote:
| So basically chess with landmines. Every move will be contested
| (because why wouldn't you? there are no downsides and only
| upsides)
|
| So every move you make (I'll be watching you) could end up being
| the top move. Even if you run the chess engine yourself to decide
| what _not_ to play, you 're still at risk of bad luck because you
| happen to run the chess engine on a faster or slower machine than
| the person checking for the top move, and they diverge.
|
| EDIT: Never mind, contesting and getting it wrong causes you to
| lose - that's the downside.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| If you contest a move and you're wrong you lose the game.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Ah I misread that part.
| Khoth wrote:
| There is a downside - if you contest and you're wrong, you
| lose.
|
| The page doesn't say, but it's cheating to use an engine
| yourself to decide what move to make (or to decide whether to
| contest)
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