In the thread: Bet: When Carlsen peaks he will be stronger than the strongest engine, David Sklansky proffers a solution to the what is to be done about computer dominance of chess debate:


We discover that someone else has had this thought earlier and more cogently:

However, the "solution" has its detractors:
But it is defended:

Sklansky is willing to allow Discipline to develop the idea but take all the credit himself (Bold added):

But he does not want just anyone tinkering with his idea (bold added) :

Why is this not Discipline Chess or Discipline-Sklansky Chess?

This reminds me so much of John Scarne, the games/gaming authority who would tinker with something and make it Scarne X (eg Scarney Gin).

Implementing this idea would be ******ed and take away a lot from the beauty and harmony of chess, imo. I see no problem with the dominance of computers anyway. Just don't allow them to play in tournaments.

First of all: I dont think that changing the rules just to try to provide human players an edge against computers is worthwhile even thinking about.

Secondly:
Disciplines posts reak of missunderstanding for modern computers and their power. Your suggested rule changes would trouble humans way more than computers that excel at calculating deeply and not missing those "simple" inbetween opportunities. As someone with a rather broad information technology and algorithmik background I really dont see how your rule could trouble computers significantly more than humans.

Actually I think all of the "we can beat the computer" guys should be pretty happy that Deep Blue won against Kasparov. Today, almost 13 years later Kasparov would most likely take a beating that would make you wanna cry.
Anyone who is involved in high perfomance computing can only laugh about the hardware specs deep blue provided.

Sklansky Chess

It just rolls off your tongue!

I don't think anyone really cares

Some people care so little that they don't even post in the thread.

This is clearly a wacky idea, but David Sklansky is a wonder to behold, in all his crazy manifestations.

Arimaa FTW

Have you ever played a computer in crazyhouse or bughouse? They're horrible. (Well, they're not horrible, but if there were a crazyhouse/bughouse rating system with the best players at 2800, the computers would be like 1900.)

I've dabbled in engine programming myself and I believe that the knight moves being "in the air" would interfere not with the engine's ability to search deeply, but to decently evaluate the node positions in its searches.

the top computers on FICS come within 100 points of the top human players at crazyhouse (admittedly it's almost always played at short time controls which benefits the computers, but it's not causing an 800 point swing). Where are all the human players who are 800 points stronger than this?

They suck at bughouse, and probably will for the foreseeable future. No one has even attempted to make a proper bughouse engine though, they use a crazyhouse engine that is modified by being able to accept the idea of "hey here's a knight", so its calculations aren't worth much.

I recently discovered this game recently, just started to learn the rules but no time to play it right now. For sure I will look more into it very soon, I usually play chess or awale ( basic rules and software here : http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/awale.htm) when I want to take a little break from poker.

I came across Arimaa cause I know a good draw poker coach who talked about it on a French forum : he did even put poker aside few months to play arimaa mostly..and became world champion this year. Here is one of his post on 2+2 if you need more info from him :

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=30

Sorry for the sick bump.

human ive always been able to adapt even in the most precary time/situation.

pretty amazing some blind people can play piano etc..


i beleive, given time, some new hot kid in 20 years will come up, playing and training with chess program troughout his life and be able to find flaws agaisnt them and being able to exploiting those vs computer.

do you also believe a human will eventually be able to outrun a Ferrari, or put the shot further than a cannon?

a human will never be bale to calculate further then a comp obviously.

thats is why IMHHHO ..a karpov at his pic might do better then a kaspy at his pic vs computers

im pretty sure positional concept has more to offer yet in the futur, where human are usually better.

How could adding an unambiguous rule in a game of complete information, possibly hamper a computer’s ability to analyze the game?

It wouldn't shock me if Carlsen, if he made it his primary goal (which he never will), and had a copy of the exact software/hardware configuration to test on, could spend a year or two, find a couple of questionable moves in the opening book, and be a small favorite in a 6-game match. But as far as being an all-around stronger player, like playing a bunch of random positions from (other) GM games, no human will ever have a chance again. I'd really be surprised if any human in my lifetime were as good as Rybka is now, much less as good as engines will become.

For anyone who understands chess, computers and how top players train today its obvious that Carlsen will never become better than the best computer.

It wont of course. It takes a while until the programmer finds the solution to the new challenge, but it will be solved.

I tell you what, David was my hero in the past. Nowadays I only have to laugh when I read his suggestions. The problem with most of them is that he simply blabbers out whatever comes into his mind without giving it a second thought and it 99% of the cases he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about. That usually happens when he makes suggestions about law or medicine or any subject that requires detailed knowledge like in this case, computer science.

He wants to introduce a slight change to the rule and he seems to think that programmers cannot add such a subroutine to their program. He is obviously wrong. The problem has already been solved and the key word is underpromotion. The computer will always check if he should promote a pawn to a queen or a knight or whatever. Computers can solve mate in 10 studies that require underpromotion without any problems. There is absolutely no difficulty in modifying the code to make it fit to such a new rule. In fact such a rule would make computers even stronger in comparison to humans.

Heheh kinda true Shandrax. His blabber is of a higher level than average though and he stirs up conversation. Gotta give him credit for that.

People should just take up Go, IMO.

I like Backgammon as my 2nd board game better.

meh, solved games.

Not, quite sure what games this is meant to refer to.

But Go is still a long way from computer dominance.

As for chess... any game that has a single critical piece to win such as the King, a properly written computer program will always have an edge.

Just think about the artificial chess puzzles, computers can solve them almost instantly whereas a GM will take a noticeable amount of time.

I am sure that a computer against computer, Carlsen could find the rare improved move, but there is no way that he would ever get close.

Even new games where the AI has been programmed propperly and trained against the strongest players are phenominally strong. These games don't have the opening depth that chess computers were provided with.