Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess · HackerPapers discussions

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by eru

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:59:50 GMT

According to the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf) removing the special handling of stalemates did not really change the draw ratio much. So the weaker party can still gun for the draw in most situations. (However, they had really good computers play, who do not get stressed out, albeit they do make worse moves on shorter time controls.)

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by eru

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 11:12:19 GMT

The important thing to mention: in many respects, you can pretend that in chess the objective is to capture the opposing king. But for historical reasons, the game actually tops one move before, and the king is never captured. But they also have weird rules that both (A) forbid putting your king in check, and (B) hand you a draw when you are out of legal moves. A simpler version of chess would actually play until the king is captured, and allow people to move into check. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf reports on some experiments with variants like this. Another interesting thing to try…

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by eru

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 02:04:41 GMT

Yes, you are right that this is only an intellectual exercise. (Btw, it's quite popular in the Go world to reformulate the ancient clunky rules of Go into a more modern, mathematical version that might or might not have small differences in gameplay.) However, I don't actually think that removing check rules make chess worse. But that's subject to experiment. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for exactly such experiments.

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by eru

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 02:00:24 GMT

When people complain about chess being uninteresting, they usually complain about too many draws. Adding more opportunities to turn draws into wins/losses might seem like a good thing? > Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it. Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating). (I mention the zero sum game, because eg real life war is not a zero sum game. So it's perfectly possible for certain actions, like starting to shoot medics, to be bad for both parties. But in chess…

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by eru

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 01:53:54 GMT

Thanks for bringing up the Chinese chess example! Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation. > Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past. I would favour that rule as well, but keep in mind that even in Go that is a very modern formulation / variation of this rule. Past formulations were about as clunky as chess's stalemate rules, and even left some situation (that were extremely rare…

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by spuz

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:25:20 GMT

AlphaZero has been used to more objectively study chess variants in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf I don't think they mention anything about speeding up training. The original training time for AlphaZero was only a few hours anyway so I don't think that was ever a major constraint. I would imagine that each neural network performed best on the variant on which it was trained.

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by fogof

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 20:54:52 GMT

Here is a link https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374 to the paper you are probably talking about. Coming from DeepMind (and with Former world champion Vladimir Kramnik as a coauthor), they studied a bunch of chess variants by training AlphaZero to play on them. In addition to no-castling, they also studied variants where pawns can always move two steps forward, and where it's possible to capture your own pieces.

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — mentioned by Imnimo

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 02:12:07 GMT

DeepMind and Kramnik had an interesting paper a few months back exploring possible chess variants: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374 The basic idea is to train AlphaZero on proposed variants, and look for ones that have fewer draws and a smaller advantage for white.

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Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — HN submission

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 19:27:59 GMT

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — HN submission

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:34:12 GMT

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — HN submission

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 03:03:47 GMT

Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess with AlphaZero

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess — HN submission

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 11:52:35 GMT

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess

5 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.