Main Date: 02 Apr 2008 09:43:55 From: Subject: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for This is a philosophical piece for the most part meant to give thought to where things can head, and why. I will acknowledge that this is potentially heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider it handed down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is meant to last FOREVER. It is a piece to ponder, refute, consider insane, or thought of value. I am not going to lay out here the exact form, but lay out what I believe is a direction chess could in that would be worth considering. Please DON'T cross-post this to politics, and try to keep it as a philosophical discussion. For those who think this is off, look at the changes that have been made to chess. The clock has been played with and so on. Scoring on the tournament level has been considered also. It goes on and on. Anyhow, onto the core of the document. I believe the framework of chess can be addressed now so that we never turn chess into a solved game. I personally believe there is part of the answer in a game like Seirawan Chess, or a pocket version with reserves, but I don't think they alone have the answer. It also doesn't address the framework issue either that gets chess stuck, and all the classic abstract strategy game (stuck here means set on a path to being "solved", without a way to adjust before it does). My take on Godel's Incompleteness Theorm is that you don't solve the systemic issues with a certain set of rules by creating more rules of the same type. If it is show, for example with chess, that a set configuration of chess pieces on the board eventually produces something that is solved, then changing the configuration of the pieces on the board alone doesn't resolve it either (one time, fixed). You can change the their starting position (aka Chess960/Pick your Army/MetaChess or the V and X versions of IAGO Chess), the layout of the board at start (and also changing it during play, aka Beyond Chess), or when the pieces enter the game (IAGO/Seirawan/Pocket Knight/ Pocket Mutant), and help to push things out further. If you build into the framework by which you can do all of the above, you buy more time. What regular chess has now is not a way to make chess get "unstuck", allowing it to adjust over time. I suggest all of the above be considered and integrated, and the players settled on what works best. Eventually even this mix of everything leads to a "stuck" position as the playing community may figure out what is optimal. By then, some other people will need to come up with another layer of rules to insure things are unstuck. I can't say this for certain, but I do know unsticking chess by doing all of the above should likely buy chess another 1000 years, using all of the above methods described. The key to having it get unstuck is to have it done in a way that it is evolutionary, so the playing community can migrate over time and get used to the changes. Also added to the mix are "mutators" which are meta-changes to how the game works that get added during play. PlunderChess, for example, is built on a mutator that is active from the start, pieces fusing together. Even these added can have an impact, and force people to think more creatively, relying on principles. These changes act as weather, and another key element to getting chess unstuck (and other abstract strategy games for that matter). All these elements help to battle to keep a game from getting stuck, without the use of random element, or hidden information, which is the standard method used to unstick a game. Like, the case of backgammon, luck prevents it from getting stuck for a long time. Stratego uses hidden information, and the bluff element causes players to play other players. In this you need to know your opponent more than the environment. Because of this, a game like poker can be played even 1000 years from now, because you play the players, and luck also offsets (hidden information+luck). Magic: The Gathering, and also Cosmic Encounter also relate to this, which has in its makeup things that continue to change the rules. I believe such mutators can be applied to a game like chess, but not in such a chaotic manner. In other words, you can have a game that is a pure abstract strategy game, but where the rules do change during the course of a game, if the players control when the rules come into effect and the potential rules are fully known by all players in the game. Please feel free to comment here. I ask people to consider finding some merit in this, taking what they will of value and discard the rest. Thank you for your time... - Rich   Date: 12 May 2008 09:35:00 From: Rich Hutnik Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On May 12, 10:02 am, "Chess One" <[email protected] > wrote: > But isn't the [gigantic] fly in the ointment the fact that parrallelism to > increase brute-force solutions is still a very questionable paradigm? > > After all, the comprehension of two 1600 players does not equal that of a > 2200 player. > > While there may be an increase in event horizon by quantitative analysis > which may achieve some result, the 'fly' is that these are typically > quantitative assessments based on materials won/lost, aso where is the > qualitative one? I mentioned what I did in hopes that maybe it can get connected to the original issue. Brute Force only gets you so far. Brute Force isn't judgment, it is evaluating everything. Maybe somebody will come up with something else. I believe Brute Force would fail in a Hericlitian/Calvinball environment against a player trained to be adaptive at strategy. I know a former coworker who ended up trashing Zillions at a bunch of games (maybe the person was blowing smoke here). - Rich   Date: 11 May 2008 14:12:57 From: Rich Hutnik Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On May 8, 12:16 am, Ed Murphy <[email protected] > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > > On May 7, 9:32 am, David Richerby <[email protected]> > > wrote: > >> [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> On Apr 18, 10:18=A0pm, John Bailey <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>> In [Deutsch's] paper, the convenience of thinking that all > >>>> computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is > >>>> considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150"As > >>>> a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First > >>>> Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, > >>>> observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general > >>>> quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an > >>>> efficient way. > >>> That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers > >>> or computations was main frame computers. But since most of today's > >>> computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, > >>> his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not > >>> computers. > >> No. Combining two classical computers together makes a computer twice > >> as big that can do (roughly) twice as much work in a given time. > >> Connecting two quantum computers would make a computer twice as big > >> that can do (roughly) the square of the amount of work in a given time. > > >> Networking classical computers together gives you at best linear > >> growth; adding qubits to your quantum computer gives exponential > >> growth. > > > Networking classical computers gives you microcomputers, > > laserdisks, > > satellites,, HDTV, Holograms, fiber optics, robots, and a > > paycheck, > > rather than idiots like computer scientists, that's why they were > > invented. > > You guys are speaking rather orthogonally. In theory (his topic), > quantum computers could do all this and more. In practice (yours), > adding more qubits is (so far) Really Difficult; it will take a > major technological breakthrough to build a quantum computer with > enough qubits that a network of classical computers can't simulate > it at full speed. The original topic had to do with the future of chess, and where it might head. This then spawned "Hereclitian-Calvinball" as a question of whether or not there is a finite or infinite number of potential chess variants. Maybe Quantum Computing can answer this question. - Rich     Date: 12 May 2008 10:02:03 From: Chess One Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" "Rich Hutnik" <[email protected] > wrote in message news:345ea8f4-e519-4f7b-8f40-abf48358fcf9@k13g2000hse.googlegroups.com... > On May 8, 12:16 am, Ed Murphy <[email protected]> wrote: >> [email protected] wrote: >> > On May 7, 9:32 am, David Richerby <[email protected]> >> > wrote: >> >> [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On Apr 18, 10:18=A0pm, John Bailey <[email protected]> >> >>> wrote: >> >>>> In [Deutsch's] paper, the convenience of thinking that all >> >>>> computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is >> >>>> considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150"As >> >>>> a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First >> >>>> Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, >> >>>> observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general >> >>>> quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an >> >>>> efficient way. >> >>> That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers >> >>> or computations was main frame computers. But since most of today's >> >>> computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, >> >>> his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not >> >>> computers. >> >> No. Combining two classical computers together makes a computer twice >> >> as big that can do (roughly) twice as much work in a given time. >> >> Connecting two quantum computers would make a computer twice as big >> >> that can do (roughly) the square of the amount of work in a given >> >> time. >> >> >> Networking classical computers together gives you at best linear >> >> growth; adding qubits to your quantum computer gives exponential >> >> growth. >> >> > Networking classical computers gives you microcomputers, >> > laserdisks, >> > satellites,, HDTV, Holograms, fiber optics, robots, and a >> > paycheck, >> > rather than idiots like computer scientists, that's why they were >> > invented. >> >> You guys are speaking rather orthogonally. In theory (his topic), >> quantum computers could do all this and more. In practice (yours), >> adding more qubits is (so far) Really Difficult; it will take a >> major technological breakthrough to build a quantum computer with >> enough qubits that a network of classical computers can't simulate >> it at full speed. > > The original topic had to do with the future of chess, and where it > might head. This then spawned "Hereclitian-Calvinball" as a question > of whether or not there is a finite or infinite number of potential > chess variants. Maybe Quantum Computing can answer this question. But isn't the [gigantic] fly in the ointment the fact that parrallelism to increase brute-force solutions is still a very questionable paradigm? After all, the comprehension of two 1600 players does not equal that of a 2200 player. While there may be an increase in event horizon by quantitative analysis which may achieve some result, the 'fly' is that these are typically quantitative assessments based on materials won/lost, aso where is the qualitative one? [[ IE: unless a conclusive result is achieved by brute-forcing, [example; mate] then what does any program do when at ply 12 it sees the win of a pawn, but costing two tempii? Perhaps it will continue for another 12 plies and discover it recovers one tempo, keeps the pawn, but loses the initiative... ]] Therefore what is lacking in brute-force approaches is qualitative evaluation of /specific/ positions. The 'fly' turns out to be a man-made one - since evaluating a tempo or other positional factors such as initiative, are factors that the programmer assesses, not the chess-engine. Furthermore, these assessments must necessarily be abstracted ones, sui generis, since they are /initial/ data programmed in the chess engine, created from mean data, as averaged ennumerated evaluations. As we know, many 'averages' never occur, since data sets can be heavily polarised away from any instance of mean value - the averaged condition that is pre-programmed may in fact, /never/ occur]. Attempts to correct qualitative analysis lie in provision of yet more data evaluation sets, such as for middle-games, or sub-sets where 2 bishops have an open/closed position, etc. But the program itself does not generate the data set! Thereby, no contextual evaluation of the worth of material/positional factors takes place by the act of the chess engine's own calculus - and this is the stalled point in chess computing emulations, [emulation* since the program is merely acting on received data and not conducting its own evaluation] and has been so for 10 years. It is so stalled, that AI researchers gave it up as anything much useful to them. To remove chess computing from emulation, the program needs to not only play its own moves, but successively generate its own evaluation criteria. Phil Innes *Whether qualitative, or quantitative such as using opening books. > - Rich   Date: 08 May 2008 06:57:52 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Fischer Random Chess. You could add not only random starting positions but random NEW pieces that move in new random ways. And then turn it into losing chess half the time. http://i7-dungeon.sourceforge.net/older.html   Date: 07 May 2008 08:41:37 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On May 7, 9:32=A0am, David Richerby <[email protected] > wrote: > [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > >On Apr 18, 10:18=3DA0pm, John Bailey <[email protected]> wrote= : > >> In [Deutsch's] paper, the convenience of thinking that all > >> computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is > >> considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150"As > >> a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First > >> Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, > >> observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general > >> quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an > >> efficient way. > > > That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers > > or computations was main frame computers. =A0But since most of today's > > computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, > > his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not > > computers. > > No. =A0Combining two classical computers together makes a computer twice > as big that can do (roughly) twice as much work in a given time. > Connecting two quantum computers would make a computer twice as big > that can do (roughly) the square of the amount of work in a given time. > > Networking classical computers together gives you at best linear > growth; adding qubits to your quantum computer gives exponential > growth. Networking classical computers gives you microcomputers, laserdisks, satellites,, HDTV, Holograms, fiber optics, robots, and a paycheck, rather than idiots like computer scientists, that's why they were invented. > > So, while parallel computation will let you efficiently simulate > bigger quantum computers than Feynman might have imagined would be > practical, the infeasibility of the general problem isn't impacted by > advances in parallelization or networking of classical computers. > And, if Moore's Law were to hold for quantum computers, too (doubling > of the number of qubits in a system every N years), the power of > quantum computers would run away so quickly that you'd never catch up. > > Dave. > > -- > David Richerby =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Fro= zen Dictator (TM): it's like awww.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/=A0 =A0 =A0= =A0totalitarian leader but it's frozen > =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 = =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0in a block of ice!- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text -     Date: 07 May 2008 21:16:44 From: Ed Murphy Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: > On May 7, 9:32 am, David Richerby <[email protected]> > wrote: >> [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Apr 18, 10:18=A0pm, John Bailey <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> In [Deutsch's] paper, the convenience of thinking that all >>>> computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is >>>> considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150"As >>>> a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First >>>> Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, >>>> observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general >>>> quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an >>>> efficient way. >>> That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers >>> or computations was main frame computers. But since most of today's >>> computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, >>> his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not >>> computers. >> No. Combining two classical computers together makes a computer twice >> as big that can do (roughly) twice as much work in a given time. >> Connecting two quantum computers would make a computer twice as big >> that can do (roughly) the square of the amount of work in a given time. >> >> Networking classical computers together gives you at best linear >> growth; adding qubits to your quantum computer gives exponential >> growth. > > Networking classical computers gives you microcomputers, > laserdisks, > satellites,, HDTV, Holograms, fiber optics, robots, and a > paycheck, > rather than idiots like computer scientists, that's why they were > invented. You guys are speaking rather orthogonally. In theory (his topic), quantum computers could do all this and more. In practice (yours), adding more qubits is (so far) Really Difficult; it will take a major technological breakthrough to build a quantum computer with enough qubits that a network of classical computers can't simulate it at full speed.       Date: 08 May 2008 08:08:21 From: Tim Little Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On 2008-05-08, Ed Murphy <[email protected] > wrote: > it will take a major technological breakthrough to build a quantum > computer with enough qubits that a network of classical computers > can't simulate it at full speed. Is it known that the difficulty of maintaining coherence grows less than exponentially in the number of interacting qubits? - Tim   Date: 06 May 2008 16:04:59 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 18, 10:18=A0pm, John Bailey <[email protected] > wrote: > On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:15:38 +0000, Guy Macon > > > > > > <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > > >John Bailey wrote: > > >>what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyz= e? > > >None, by definition. =A0There is no such thing as a problem that > >needs a quantum computer to analyze. =A0You can do it all with a > >TuringMachine, because aTuringMachinescan simulate all > >possible computers. > > >The reason everyone is so interested in Quantum Computers is the > >potentially speed at which (in theory) they can solve certain > >problems. =A0The reason we aren't all sitting in front ofTuring > >Machinesis the slow speed at which they solve most problems. > >That, and the fact that the local office supply store always seems > >to be out of stock of infinite tapes. > > While there has been progress in practical implementation of Quantum > Computing since it was written (in 1999), the theory of the case > remains about where David Deutsch left it in his classic paper:Machines, L= ogic and Quantum Physics (David Deutsch, Artur Ekert, > Rossella Lupacchini) =A0In that paper, the convenience of thinking that > all computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is > considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150 > "As a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First > Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, observed > that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general quantum > evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an efficient way > [4]. That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers or computations was main frame computers. But since most of today's computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not computers. That is to say, any classical simulation of quantum evolution > involves an exponential slowdown in time compared with the natural > evolution, since the amount of information required to describe the > evolving quantum state in classical terms generally grows > exponentially with time." > > My question was in the spirit of Deutsch's =A0claim: > "Now we are forced to leave that definition behind. Henceforward, a > proof must be regarded as a process =97the computation itself =97 for we > must accept that in future, quantum computers will prove theorems by > methods that neither a human brain nor any other arbiter will ever be > able to check step-by-step, since if the =91sequence of propositions=92 > corresponding to such a proof were printed out, the paper would fill > the observable universe many times over." > > Having said (and quoted) all that--the question is: > Would a set of simple extensions to the rules in the spirit of > Schrodinger's Cat =A0Chess =A0make it impossible for a computer other than= > a Quantum Computer to make 40 moves within 2 hours?- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text -     Date: 07 May 2008 14:32:56 From: David Richerby Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] <[email protected] > wrote: >On Apr 18, 10:18=A0pm, John Bailey <[email protected]> wrote: >> In [Deutsch's] paper, the convenience of thinking that all >> computing can be reduced to an equivalentTuringmachine is >> considered and rejected.http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150 "As >> a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First >> Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, >> observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general >> quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an >> efficient way. > > That is largely because the only thing Feynman knew about computers > or computations was main frame computers. But since most of today's > computations depend on massively parellel networks, not mainframes, > his observation mostly concern 1950s Burroughs history, not > computers. No. Combining two classical computers together makes a computer twice as big that can do (roughly) twice as much work in a given time. Connecting two quantum computers would make a computer twice as big that can do (roughly) the square of the amount of work in a given time. Networking classical computers together gives you at best linear growth; adding qubits to your quantum computer gives exponential growth. So, while parallel computation will let you efficiently simulate bigger quantum computers than Feynman might have imagined would be practical, the infeasibility of the general problem isn't impacted by advances in parallelization or networking of classical computers. And, if Moore's Law were to hold for quantum computers, too (doubling of the number of qubits in a system every N years), the power of quantum computers would run away so quickly that you'd never catch up. Dave. -- David Richerby Frozen Dictator (TM): it's like a www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ totalitarian leader but it's frozen in a block of ice!   Date: 20 Apr 2008 12:14:03 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 20, 12:53 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 4:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru no > > Abstract. > > Which reminds me... > > Given that China's Chang Hao defeated Japan's best players, and then > South Korea's Lee Chang Ho defeated Chang Hao, it may be that some in > Japan felt that bringing about a resurgence in the popularity of Go > there, in order that stronger players might arise from a larger field, > was a matter of national honor. > > Look at the adulation received by Robert J. Fischer, or by Van > Cliburn. What if the Russians, or even another country not perceived > as hostile - such as Japan - had the world's top baseball team? And then there's Taiwan's Chou Chun-Hsun (Zhou1 Jun4 Xun1, as someone noted). I think some of the articles I've found concerning him were garbled, as one claimed he was the world Go champion, and another said that, fresh from winning his first world Go title, he also became the world Chess champion. Anand Viswarathan might find that surprising. It's possible, of course, that the page, being translated from Chinese, was refering to Hsiang Ch'i, or Chinese Chess, but that is not certain. And even the DPRK - North Korea to most of us - participates in international Go competition; they even run a Go server on the Internet! John Savard   Date: 20 Apr 2008 11:53:16 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 4:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru no > Abstract. Which reminds me... Given that China's Chang Hao defeated Japan's best players, and then South Korea's Lee Chang Ho defeated Chang Hao, it may be that some in Japan felt that bringing about a resurgence in the popularity of Go there, in order that stronger players might arise from a larger field, was a matter of national honor. Look at the adulation received by Robert J. Fischer, or by Van Cliburn. What if the Russians, or even another country not perceived as hostile - such as Japan - had the world's top baseball team? John Savard   Date: 20 Apr 2008 12:11:35 From: Christopher Dearlove Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In message <71bc59e5-c9f1-4ca4-9bfd-971cded73d7b@a23g2000hsc.googlegroups.com >, Rich Hutnik <[email protected] > writes >Chess fits under combinatorial game theory. It is part of math. >Therefore, I can conclude that Godel's theorem applies to chess. Invalid deduction. Like all theorems in mathematics, Godel's first and second incompleteness theorems have conditions for them to apply. And those don't apply here. -- Christopher Dearlove   Date: 20 Apr 2008 12:06:48 From: Christopher Dearlove Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In message <a7a5edf4-e50e-4fe5-a62c-2490c2bd1464@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com >, Rich Hutnik <[email protected] > writes >On Apr 17, 10:16 am, David Richerby <[email protected]> >wrote: >> My take on Goedel's incompleteness theorems is that almost all >> invocations of them are made by people who are ignorant of what they >> mean. > >You mean individuals like Steven Hawkings and Freeman John Dyson don't >know a thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? He said almost all. Not all. Though that doesn't automatically mean that Hawking (no s) and Dyson are right, I didn't feel like investigating. But if they are (they are certainly up to it) that wouldn't invalidate the comment. But chess is much too limited for these theorems (plural, there are two) to apply. -- Christopher Dearlove   Date: 19 Apr 2008 20:18:33 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" I think I am off-topic, but it isn't completely clear whether Church's thesis is supposed to apply to analog machines. It is even less clear when you bring in the notion of time complexity. There are some NP- complete problems which can be solved in polynomial time on analog machines, but some other parameter always seems to become exponential. I believe that Stieglitz and Vergos made a separate "thesis" to deal with this issue. I may be a crackpot, but I think that perhaps someday some Einstein will figure out a relation between the time to solve a problem on a digital machine and other parameters, like the force you need to stomp on a lever to solve a problem on an analog machine (there is a polynomial time algorithm to solve CNF-satisfiability on a polynomial size machine built with levers, but you need to stomp on the lever with exponential force!) Weird stuff. Jerry Spinrad On Apr 19, 1:23=A0pm, David Richerby <[email protected] > wrote: > Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > > The above quote doesn't say that a Turing machine cannot simulate > > a Quantum Computer, only that it cannot do so in an efficient way, > > which is what I originally wrote. =A0Do you have a quote supporting > > your claim that a Turing machine cannot simulate all computers? > > Define `computer'. =A0It's pretty hard to avoid implicitly taking the > Church-Turing thesis as being, in effect, the definition of `computer' > or `algorithm'. > > Dave. > > -- > David Richerby =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0Brok= en Generic Drink (TM): it'swww.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/=A0 =A0 =A0 li= ke a refreshing juice beverage but > =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 = =A0 =A0 =A0 it's just like all the others and it > =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 = =A0 =A0 =A0 doesn't work!   Date: 19 Apr 2008 19:07:46 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 19, 3:55 pm, David Bernier <[email protected] > wrote: > David Richerby wrote: > There was an experiment that showed that quantum entanglement > could in some cases evaporate faster than expected: > < http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5824/579> > > As far as I know, that result, if true, wouldn't rule out quantum > computers... It would limit their potential complexity, I would suspect. The limits on how a quantum computer could signal that it has found its answer, though, limiting it to basically turning a problem requiring N steps to one requiring sqrt(N) steps, rather than acting like an infinite parallel computer, already exile the quantum computer from the realm of the miraculous. John Savard   Date: 17 Apr 2008 22:26:46 From: Rich Hutnik Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 17, 10:18 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > Godel's theorem might impinge on chess by making unavailable some > infinite mathematical theorem that would be a simpler way to make a > statement about chess than a calculation applying only to one finite > form of chess. So even if it could not affect our _possible_ knowledge > about a finite game, it could affect the knowledge that is > _conveniently_ available about it. > > (sci.math pulled back in: it will take people from there to comment on > this one!) Chess fits under combinatorial game theory. It is part of math. Therefore, I can conclude that Godel's theorem applies to chess. At least the idea of the number of rules available to a system is relevant to a study of axioms and logic, which is in mathematics, thus chess would be relevant to the discussion, and the Heraclitian/ Calvinball question is appropriate. I will say that people can debate whether or not Godel's work applies or not, which is valid. Anyhow, in regards to me Heraclitian/Calvinball question, I believe an answer would be yes it can be infinite (not playable infinite, but theoretically. I can look to the answer in the game Gipf. Gipf proposes that if players want to enter a new piece into play, players must play a different game to decide this. One could have an infinite number of these playing a game to determine if a rule can enter in. In other words, recursion is another way to do this. But, back to the original question about the future of chess, the idea is to discuss where it may head, and how it can get there. - Rich     Date: 18 Apr 2008 15:24:48 From: David Richerby Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Rich Hutnik <[email protected] > wrote: > Chess fits under combinatorial game theory. It is part of math. > Therefore, I can conclude that Godel's theorem applies to chess. `Chess is part of mathematics. Differential calculus is part of mathematics. Therefore, differential calculus applies to chess.' Oh, wait. Dave. -- David Richerby Generic Vomit (TM): it's like a pile www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ of puke but it's just like all the others!       Date: 18 Apr 2008 16:51:04 From: Denis Feldmann Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" David Richerby a �crit : > Rich Hutnik <[email protected]> wrote: >> Chess fits under combinatorial game theory. It is part of math. >> Therefore, I can conclude that Godel's theorem applies to chess. > > `Chess is part of mathematics. Differential calculus is part of > mathematics. Therefore, differential calculus applies to chess.' > Oh, wait. > > > Dave. > No, you are too harsh : what he means is that Godel theorem applies to any mathematical theory, therefore to chess. Alas ,the former is wrong, and, in particulat, any finite theory (which chess is, or its abstract modelisation) is provably complete, so non-Godel prone.   Date: 17 Apr 2008 19:18:19 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 17, 6:59 pm, [email protected] (Andy Walker) wrote: > Um. Well, many infinite/unbounded games have "issues". > But standard chess, and every reasonably similar game, is finite, > and Goedel's Theorems really do not have anything to say about > such games. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem says that there are true statements in a mathematical system that cannot be proved from within that mathematical system. Since trying to prove mathematical systems from within themselves requires clumsy machinery like Godel-numbering, at first some mathematicians wondered if Godel's theorem was even relevant to mathematics. But now that people use computers to do algebra, and not just arithmetic, its significance becomes clearer. Since physics uses mathematics - mathematics can predict the behavior of physical systems, and physical systems can calculate mathematical functions or otherwise do mathematics - statements about mathematics can impinge on the physical world. Chess, too, can be played mathematically - in a sense, any computer chess program does exactly that. Godel's theorem might impinge on chess by making unavailable some infinite mathematical theorem that would be a simpler way to make a statement about chess than a calculation applying only to one finite form of chess. So even if it could not affect our _possible_ knowledge about a finite game, it could affect the knowledge that is _conveniently_ available about it. (sci.math pulled back in: it will take people from there to comment on this one!) John Savard     Date: 18 Apr 2008 17:09:51 From: Andy Walker Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In article <cba1d838-f975-487c-b796-9e1e20786273@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com >, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: >> Um. Well, many infinite/unbounded games have "issues". >> But standard chess, and every reasonably similar game, is finite, >> and Goedel's Theorems really do not have anything to say about >> such games. >Godel's Incompleteness Theorem says that there are true statements in >a mathematical system that cannot be proved from within that >mathematical system. Yes; but not for *every* mathematical system, only for systems that include sufficiently powerful arithmetic. I know how to construct chess positions that depend on the truth of [eg] 1 + 1 = 2, and an assortment of rather harder sums of numbers-as-games [Noam Elkies has done some interesting work in this area], but you will find it rather harder to construct arbitrarily complicated arithmetic using only the finite set of positions available in chess. It is possible to encode an arbitrarily complicated *statement* as a chess *game*, but that is no more interesting than the fact that we can do the same with sequences of letters -- the game itself, like the letters, has no computational power of interest. [...] >Since physics uses mathematics - mathematics can predict the behavior >of physical systems, and physical systems can calculate mathematical >functions or otherwise do mathematics - statements about mathematics >can impinge on the physical world. Yes, but a Goedel sentence is not a statement *about* maths but a sentence *within* a mathematical system whose logical status is being determined. You have not explained why the statement that *this* logical process will never produce *that* sentence as output is any more interesting physically than the statement that doubling an integer never produces an odd integer as a result. [The interest to pure maths and logic is a different matter.] >Chess, too, can be played mathematically - in a sense, any computer >chess program does exactly that. As David has pointed out, you are very close to a false syllogism somewhere here. >Godel's theorem might impinge on chess by making unavailable some >infinite mathematical theorem that would be a simpler way to make a >statement about chess than a calculation applying only to one finite >form of chess. Goedel's theorem does not make any *particular* theorem "unavailable". Any theorem that was unprovable-but-true in some axiom system could simply be added as a new axiom. > So even if it could not affect our _possible_ knowledge >about a finite game, it could affect the knowledge that is >_conveniently_ available about it. Not, however, because of Goedel. There are indeed much more general results that make [eg] standard chess easier, inc alpha-beta pruning, but also "theorems" about endings such as KQvK, KPvK, and others. [The techniques that we all learned as beginners about how to win KQvK, KQvKP, and so on, all work just as well on a 1000x1234 board as on an 8x8 board, as long as the 50-move rule is extended appropriately. Other endings, such as KQvKR and KBNvK don't generalise so easily.] >(sci.math pulled back in: it will take people from there to comment on >this one!) Well, that's a little unkind. There are regular contributors to the chess groups [and no doubt to the other games groups] who are professional mathematicians .... -- Andy Walker Nottingham     Date: 18 Apr 2008 09:40:51 From: John Bailey Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:18:19 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: >On Apr 17, 6:59 pm, [email protected] (Andy Walker) wrote: > >> Um. Well, many infinite/unbounded games have "issues". >> But standard chess, and every reasonably similar game, is finite, >> and Goedel's Theorems really do not have anything to say about >> such games. http://www.chromecow.com/2007/03/10/dd37-schrodingers-pawn/ is a link which results from a Google search using the key words: quantum chess. The chrome cow approach simply replicates the Schrodinger's cat situation using two boards. A piece can be moved to different locations on the two boards. Rules to account for superpositon, entanglement, and collapse are added. As far as I know, this does not quite capture the essence of quantum mechanics but it does inspire some tantalizing questions: what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyze? What set of rules are a reasonable match to the illogic of quantum mechanics? What simpler game might be extended with quantum rules, thus providing significant insight into the mechanics of the universe?       Date: 18 Apr 2008 17:15:38 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" John Bailey wrote: >what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyze? None, by definition. There is no such thing as a problem that needs a quantum computer to analyze. You can do it all with a Turing Machine, because a Turing Machines can simulate all possible computers. The reason everyone is so interested in Quantum Computers is the potentially speed at which (in theory) they can solve certain problems. The reason we aren't all sitting in front of Turing Machines is the slow speed at which they solve most problems. That, and the fact that the local office supply store always seems to be out of stock of infinite tapes. -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >         Date: 18 Apr 2008 22:18:01 From: John Bailey Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:15:38 +0000, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > > > >John Bailey wrote: > >>what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyze? > >None, by definition. There is no such thing as a problem that >needs a quantum computer to analyze. You can do it all with a >Turing Machine, because a Turing Machines can simulate all >possible computers. > >The reason everyone is so interested in Quantum Computers is the >potentially speed at which (in theory) they can solve certain >problems. The reason we aren't all sitting in front of Turing >Machines is the slow speed at which they solve most problems. >That, and the fact that the local office supply store always seems >to be out of stock of infinite tapes. While there has been progress in practical implementation of Quantum Computing since it was written (in 1999), the theory of the case remains about where David Deutsch left it in his classic paper: Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics (David Deutsch, Artur Ekert, Rossella Lupacchini) In that paper, the convenience of thinking that all computing can be reduced to an equivalent Turing machine is considered and rejected. http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150 "As a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, observed that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general quantum evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an efficient way [4]. That is to say, any classical simulation of quantum evolution involves an exponential slowdown in time compared with the natural evolution, since the amount of information required to describe the evolving quantum state in classical terms generally grows exponentially with time." My question was in the spirit of Deutsch's claim: "Now we are forced to leave that definition behind. Henceforward, a proof must be regarded as a process �the computation itself � for we must accept that in future, quantum computers will prove theorems by methods that neither a human brain nor any other arbiter will ever be able to check step-by-step, since if the �sequence of propositions� corresponding to such a proof were printed out, the paper would fill the observable universe many times over." Having said (and quoted) all that--the question is: Would a set of simple extensions to the rules in the spirit of Schrodinger's Cat Chess make it impossible for a computer other than a Quantum Computer to make 40 moves within 2 hours?           Date: 19 Apr 2008 07:27:50 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" John Bailey wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >>John Bailey wrote: >> >>>what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyze? >> >>None, by definition. There is no such thing as a problem that >>needs a quantum computer to analyze. You can do it all with a >>Turing Machine, because a Turing Machines can simulate all >>possible computers. >> >>The reason everyone is so interested in Quantum Computers is the >>potentially speed at which (in theory) they can solve certain >>problems. The reason we aren't all sitting in front of Turing >>Machines is the slow speed at which they solve most problems. >>That, and the fact that the local office supply store always seems >>to be out of stock of infinite tapes. > >While there has been progress in practical implementation of Quantum >Computing since it was written (in 1999), the theory of the case >remains about where David Deutsch left it in his classic paper: >Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics (David Deutsch, Artur Ekert, >Rossella Lupacchini) In that paper, the convenience of thinking that >all computing can be reduced to an equivalent Turing machine is >considered and rejected. > >http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/math.HO/9911150 > >"As a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First >Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, observed >that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general quantum >evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an efficient way >[4]. That is to say, any classical simulation of quantum evolution >involves an exponential slowdown in time compared with the natural >evolution, since the amount of information required to describe the >evolving quantum state in classical terms generally grows >exponentially with time." The above quote doesn't say that a Turing machine cannot simulate a Quantum Computer, only that it cannot do so in an efficient way, which is what I originally wrote. Do you have a quote supporting your claim that a Turing machine cannot simulate all computers? -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >             Date: 19 Apr 2008 19:23:12 From: David Richerby Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > The above quote doesn't say that a Turing machine cannot simulate > a Quantum Computer, only that it cannot do so in an efficient way, > which is what I originally wrote. Do you have a quote supporting > your claim that a Turing machine cannot simulate all computers? Define `computer'. It's pretty hard to avoid implicitly taking the Church-Turing thesis as being, in effect, the definition of `computer' or `algorithm'. Dave. -- David Richerby Broken Generic Drink (TM): it's www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ like a refreshing juice beverage but it's just like all the others and it doesn't work!               Date: 19 Apr 2008 17:55:51 From: David Bernier Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" David Richerby wrote: > Guy Macon<http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: >> The above quote doesn't say that a Turing machine cannot simulate >> a Quantum Computer, only that it cannot do so in an efficient way, >> which is what I originally wrote. Do you have a quote supporting >> your claim that a Turing machine cannot simulate all computers? > > Define `computer'. It's pretty hard to avoid implicitly taking the > Church-Turing thesis as being, in effect, the definition of `computer' > or `algorithm'. A thing that could solve the halting problem could be called an oracle for the halting problem. So for each non-recursive function, one can talk about an oracle for that function. Can oracles be built? In practice, the input and any output can be bounded by C bits, say with C = 10^(10^100000). This is equivalent to a large look-up table, with some "no answer found" lines. There was an experiment that showed that quantum entanglement could in some cases evaporate faster than expected: < http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5824/579 > As far as I know, that result, if true, wouldn't rule out quantum computers... David Bernier ** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **             Date: 19 Apr 2008 08:15:58 From: John Bailey Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:27:50 +0000, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > > > >John Bailey wrote: >> >>Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: >> >>>John Bailey wrote: >>> >>>>what rules would result in play that needed a quantum computer to analyze? >>> >>>None, by definition. There is no such thing as a problem that >>>needs a quantum computer to analyze. You can do it all with a >>>Turing Machine, because a Turing Machines can simulate all >>>possible computers. (snip) >>"As a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, in his talk during the First >>Conference on the Physics of Computation held at MIT in 1981, observed >>that it appears to be impossible to simulate a general quantum >>evolution on a classical probabilistic computer in an efficient way >>[4] (snip) >The above quote doesn't say that a Turing machine cannot simulate >a Quantum Computer, only that it cannot do so in an efficient way, >which is what I originally wrote. Do you have a quote supporting >your claim that a Turing machine cannot simulate all computers? http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/ "There were apparently 40 �paradoxes of plurality�, attempting to show that ontological pluralism � a belief in the existence of many things rather than only one � leads to absurd conclusions; of these paradoxes only two definitely survive, though a third argument can probably be attributed to Zeno." Mapping entangled computation to a Turing tape seems to be like Zeno's race between the tortoise and the hare--its logical but misses the point. I would (should?) never claim that a Turing machine could not, in theory, simulate all computers. Nor do I doubt that a Cray XT5� or some such monster (the internet, a la the world community grid?) could provide the chess analysis necessary (given enough time.) The focus should be on how would the quantum chess metaphor enrich the game, not what non-human mechanism could handle the play.           Date: 18 Apr 2008 21:34:51 From: Tim Little Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On 2008-04-19, John Bailey <[email protected] > wrote: > That is to say, any classical simulation of quantum evolution > involves an exponential slowdown in time compared with the natural > evolution Which exactly proves the point you're arguing against. It's possible, just slow. > Having said (and quoted) all that--the question is: Would a set of > simple extensions to the rules in the spirit of Schrodinger's Cat > Chess make it impossible for a computer other than a Quantum > Computer to make 40 moves within 2 hours? Theoretically, or practically? This being crossposted to sci.math, I'll answer purely theoretically: no. As a bonus, I'll also answer practically: no. We don't have any quantum computers of complexity sufficient to do anything that ordinary computers can't. Far from it, in fact. And I think there are good reasons (exponential sensitivity of coherence) to expect that we never will. There may be a "yes" somewhere in between - in the realm of science fiction, beyond what the universe permits but short of what mathematics considers. Hence rec.arts.sf.science added to the groups list. - Tim   Date: 17 Apr 2008 15:23:55 From: Rich Hutnik Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 17, 10:16 am, David Richerby <[email protected] > wrote: > <[email protected]> wrote: > > My take on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that you don't solve the > > systemic issues with a certain set of rules by creating more rules > > of the same type. > > My take on Goedel's incompleteness theorems is that almost all > invocations of them are made by people who are ignorant of what they > mean. For the record, they refer to the use of systems of deduction > to reason about themselves. Since chess is not a system of deduction, > incompleteness is totally irrelevant. > > Dave. You mean individuals like Steven Hawkings and Freeman John Dyson don't know a thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#With_reference_to_G.C3.B6d= el.27s_incompleteness_theorem Freeman Dyson: =93 G=F6del=92s theorem implies that pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter how many problems we solve, there will always be other problems that cannot be solved within the existing rules. [...] Because of G=F6del's theorem, physics is inexhaustible too. The laws of physics are a finite set of rules, and include the rules for doing mathematics, so that G=F6del's theorem applies to them." Stephen Hawking was originally a believer in the Theory of Everything but, after considering G=F6del's Theorem, concluded that one was not obtainable: =93 Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind." If one considers math to be the "language of everything" and rules relate to math in this regard, and is the means by which a game functions as a contained system, to say that, "No Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has NOTHING to do with game rules in any way", is to totally deny that math has anything to do with games, game rules, etc... It is a shallow conclusion used to shut up conversation, rather than consider that maybe there is some overlap. And to conclude on this is to totally ignore the issues involved with chess itself, and whether or it can hit an ultimate state of being solved or not. - Rich     Date: 18 Apr 2008 15:09:17 From: David Richerby Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Rich Hutnik <[email protected] > wrote: > David Richerby <[email protected]> wrote: >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> My take on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that you don't solve >>> the systemic issues with a certain set of rules by creating more >>> rules of the same type. >> >> My take on Goedel's incompleteness theorems is that almost all >> invocations of them are made by people who are ignorant of what >> they mean. For the record, they refer to the use of systems of >> deduction to reason about themselves. Since chess is not a system >> of deduction, incompleteness is totally irrelevant. > > You mean individuals like Steven Hawkings and Freeman John Dyson > don't know a thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? No. (By the way, it's `Stephen Hawking'.) > If one considers math to be the "language of everything" and rules > relate to math in this regard, and is the means by which a game > functions as a contained system, to say that, "No Godel's > Incompleteness Theorem has NOTHING to do with game rules in any > way", is to totally deny that math has anything to do with games, > game rules, etc... It is a shallow conclusion used to shut up > conversation, rather than consider that maybe there is some overlap. The argument `Goedel incompleteness is relevant to mathematics; mathematics is relavant to chess; therefore, Goedel incompleteness is relevant to chess' is flawed because relevance is not transitive. Consider the equivalent argument obtained by replacing `Goedel incompleteness' with, say, `differential calculus' or `quantum mechanics'. Goedel incompleteness applies to systems of reasoning that are powerful enough to encode Peano arithmetic and chess is fundamentally not such a system. First and foremost, it is not a system of reasoning. That kills it right there. Even if you can demonstrate that it is a system of reasoning (for example, that logical propositions can be coded as positions and the truth or falsity of those propositions can be derived from the game-theoretic outcome of the corresponding positions), there are only finitely many positions so only finitely many propositions can be encoded and the system is not powerful enough to code arithmetic. Even if you try to use games, rather than positions, the laws of chess can't count beyond fifty, so you can't use back-and-forth movements of knights, for example, to code numbers because any move that is valid after fifty wiggles is valid after fifty-one. > And to conclude on this is to totally ignore the issues involved > with chess itself, and whether or it can hit an ultimate state of > being solved or not. If I say `The manufacturing of yoghurt has nothing to do with chess', does that also totally ignore the issues involved with chess itself and whether or not it can hit an ultimate state of being solved? Is this better or worse than totally ignoring the issues involved with the applicability of Goedel's incompleteness theorems to areas outside mathematical logic (of which there are almost none)? Dave. -- David Richerby Incredible Pants (TM): it's like a www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ well-tailored pair of trousers but it'll blow your mind!     Date: 18 Apr 2008 08:34:13 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Rich Hutnik wrote: >You mean individuals like Steven Hawkings and Freeman John >Dyson don't know a thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? Of course they don't. Show me our own help bot verifying what they say (or Phil Innes saying that they are wrong) and then I will believe them. What's the point of having one poster who knows everything and another who is always wrong if you don't take advantage of those skills?     Date: 18 Apr 2008 00:59:45 From: Andy Walker Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In article <a7a5edf4-e50e-4fe5-a62c-2490c2bd1464@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com >, Rich Hutnik <[email protected] > wrote: >On Apr 17, 10:16 am, David Richerby <[email protected]> >wrote: >> My take on Goedel's incompleteness theorems is that almost all >> invocations of them are made by people who are ignorant of what they >> mean. [I think this is at least slightly unfair! But no matter.] >> For the record, they refer to the use of systems of deduction >> to reason about themselves. Since chess is not a system of deduction, >> incompleteness is totally irrelevant. >You mean individuals like Steven Hawkings and Freeman John Dyson don't >know a thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? I doubt whether David did mean that, tho' he will no doubt answer for himself. "Almost all" is different from "all". SH and FJD are, in your quotes, talking about TOEs of physics. In that context, it is largely a matter of philosophy and convention whether we should regard typical theorems/conjectures of pure maths to be part of physics or not. If you do, then a TOE is manifestly not possible; if you don't, then Goedel's Theorems are irrelevant to physics, except as a warning that logical deduction is not as obvious a process as was thought a century or so ago. [...] >If one considers math to be the "language of everything" and rules >relate to math in this regard, and is the means by which a game >functions as a contained system, to say that, "No Godel's >Incompleteness Theorem has NOTHING to do with game rules in any way", Luckily, that is not what David said, nor what he implied, nor what he could reasonably be deduced to have intended. >is to totally deny that math has anything to do with games, game >rules, etc... It is a shallow conclusion used to shut up >conversation, rather than consider that maybe there is some overlap. Of course there is some overlap. For example, Conway's "Game of Life" includes initial configurations that can be set up to emulate a universal Turing machine together with an arbitrary initial tape. So every interesting result of computability and complexity [and hence lots of theorems relating to logic] has an immediate relation to a result in "Life". Many other games have similar properties, including generalised [unbounded] variants of chess and go. >And to conclude on this is to totally ignore the issues involved with >chess itself, and whether or it can hit an ultimate state of being >solved or not. Um. Well, many infinite/unbounded games have "issues". But standard chess, and every reasonably similar game, is finite, and Goedel's Theorems really do not have anything to say about such games. Everything you may plausibly want to know about a chess position can be answered by a quite simple search process consisting of a few hundred lines of code, a few kilobytes of storage, and a bog-standard PC which runs without error for a sufficiency of time. The limitations of that are physical, not mathematical. Whether those limitations can be overcome is an interesting question, but nothing at all to do with Goedel. [There are arbitrarily long games of chess -- if neither player exercises the right to claim a draw -- and indeed an uncountable infinity of different games, but only finitely many different positions, so only a finite amount of analysis is needed to determine the game-theoretic value of any given position.] -- Andy Walker Nottingham   Date: 17 Apr 2008 15:16:49 From: David Richerby Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" <[email protected] > wrote: > My take on Godel's Incompleteness Theorm is that you don't solve the > systemic issues with a certain set of rules by creating more rules > of the same type. My take on Goedel's incompleteness theorems is that almost all invocations of them are made by people who are ignorant of what they mean. For the record, they refer to the use of systems of deduction to reason about themselves. Since chess is not a system of deduction, incompleteness is totally irrelevant. Dave. -- David Richerby Moistened Erotic Apple (TM): it's www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ like a tasty fruit but it's genuinely erotic and moist!   Date: 15 Apr 2008 12:06:22 From: Nick Wedd Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In message <0bb60a5d-eee4-4195-a7fa-dc6ccadcc280@c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com >, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > writes >On Apr 14, 8:15 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > >> In comparison, one seldom sees _komidashi_ cited as an advantage that >> Go has over Chess. But from what I've just learned, it ought to be >> cited as one, and a big one. > >Oh? I see it cited all the time. But it was very interesting to learn >that the common way of giving handicaps in Hex (fixed first moves) has >also been used to balance Go. It has? Where can I read about this? Nick -- Nick Wedd [email protected]     Date: 15 Apr 2008 11:44:12 From: John Savard Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:06:22 +0100, Nick Wedd <[email protected] > wrote, in part: >In message ><0bb60a5d-eee4-4195-a7fa-dc6ccadcc280@c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com>, >Harald Korneliussen <[email protected]> writes >>On Apr 14, 8:15 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> In comparison, one seldom sees _komidashi_ cited as an advantage that >>> Go has over Chess. But from what I've just learned, it ought to be >>> cited as one, and a big one. >> >>Oh? I see it cited all the time. But it was very interesting to learn >>that the common way of giving handicaps in Hex (fixed first moves) has >>also been used to balance Go. > >It has? Where can I read about this? If you are asking about Go, and not Hex, even my web site: http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo0101.htm John Savard http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html   Date: 15 Apr 2008 03:19:58 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 14, 8:15 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > In comparison, one seldom sees _komidashi_ cited as an advantage that > Go has over Chess. But from what I've just learned, it ought to be > cited as one, and a big one. Oh? I see it cited all the time. But it was very interesting to learn that the common way of giving handicaps in Hex (fixed first moves) has also been used to balance Go.     Date: 15 Apr 2008 11:43:19 From: John Savard Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:19:58 -0700 (PDT), Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote, in part: >On Apr 14, 8:15 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: >> In comparison, one seldom sees _komidashi_ cited as an advantage that >> Go has over Chess. But from what I've just learned, it ought to be >> cited as one, and a big one. >Oh? I see it cited all the time. But it was very interesting to learn >that the common way of giving handicaps in Hex (fixed first moves) has >also been used to balance Go. Perhaps it is just that my reading about Go has mostly been in older books, whereas _komidashi_, a recent innovation, is discussed in newer books and articles about Go. I have been thinking further about this matter, and have come up with something I call "Temporary Marsellais Chess", or simply "Balanced Chess", described at the end of the page on my site at http://www.quadibloc.com/chess/ch0101.htm Begin by playing Balanced Marsellais Chess, with the additional rule that a piece may not be moved twice in a turn, but switch to normal Chess at the first check. (There is also an additional rule for captures; perhaps the switch to normal Chess might be made at the first check or capture instead.) Partial credit is given for bare King and stalemate. By precisely equalizing Black and White, and making the margin of insufficient material to force a win as narrow as possible, I illustrate a way in which it might be attempted to obtain the results for Chess that the use of _komidashi_ has obtained for Go. Of course, with two moves per turn for part of the game, this is still a new game, not a minor tweak to Chess. John Savard http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html   Date: 13 Apr 2008 23:15:58 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 2:25 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > Quadibloc wrote: > >(And cleaning up Go scoring to handle bent four in the corner > >better is another example.) > > *Another* fascinating sub-topic! I was vaguely aware of this, so > I just did a web search. What I find most interesting is that, > despite a lot of disagreement about this, the writing is much > clearer and the points made with far better logic that what I > just saw searching on checkers rules. I suspect that Go attracts > people with more analytical temperaments. I just learned something about Go that is very relevant to the subject of this thread. A while back, in rec.games.go, I noted that the old Korean version of Go required that the first player put the first stone in the center of the board. I suggested that imposing or removing this restriction might be a way to provide a half-stone handicap. Someone replied that since _komidashi_ is used in Go, one could simply vary those points to have handicaps in units of 1/6th of a stone. Many books referring to Go have noted that unlike the occasionally- used practice of giving Pawn odds or Knight odds, Go allows a finely- graded system of handicaps between players. In comparison, one seldom sees _komidashi_ cited as an advantage that Go has over Chess. But from what I've just learned, it ought to be cited as one, and a big one. When komi were first introduced, the advantage that Black had by placing the first stone in a game without odds was large enough that the Black player could, through defensive play, almost always ensure himself of a win by 2 or 3 stones at the end of the game. Adding a certain amount to White's score - at first as little as 2 1/2 points, today, as much as 7 1/2 points - meant that the player with the first move could no longer simply coast with defensive play, but instead both players, if they wanted to win, would have to play aggressively and take risks. If the starting conditions for Chess make a finely-graded system of handicaps at the beginning difficult, the victory condition, checkmate, makes something like _komidashi_ impossible. It would seem unlikely that the changes that _could_ be made to Chess to balance out White's first move advantage would have the clear-cut positive results that _komidashi_ have had for Go. For example, White could be denied pawn-two for his first move, or Black could be allowed to win by forcing stalemate. But I doubt that either measure would have the desired effect. The pawn-one openings are too viable for White, and stalemate comes up as an issue too rarely. If one allowed only Black to win by *bare King*, however, this might be a large enough change to force White to play aggressively. But to win by bare King requires a small advantage, whereas komi actually turns a slight loss into a win. John Savard   Date: 13 Apr 2008 22:52:01 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 5, 10:58 am, [email protected] wrote: > On Apr 5, 5:48 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Apr 4, 4:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru > > > no Abstract. > > > Having encountered a mention of Hikaru no Go in my searches for > > information on Go, I then heard a friend who was learning Japanese > > note that he had seen that anime in Shonen Jump. I saw a few issues at > > a local secondhand bookstore, but glancing through them, I was not > > impressed; too many of the plots depended on people actually cheating > > at Go, which I suspect is just as rare as cheating at Chess in direct > > over-the-board play - that is, virtually nonexistent. (Cheating by > > computer consultation, on the other hand, is a big problem, but that's > > quite different from moving stones or knocking down one's opponent's > > hand...) > > So, you are saying if it is shown that a player is channeling the > spirit of Bobby Fischer, they should be banned from a chess > tournament? :-) Or, were you saying that the main character went > against cheaters? The plot too often seemed to depend on the main character going against cheaters, which was what I disliked. John Savard   Date: 07 Apr 2008 18:05:32 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Quadibloc wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> Quadibloc wrote: >> >>>Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> That's an interesting thought. Had I been interested in FIDE rules >> at the time I suspect that I would not have liked the change, and >> as it turns out, FIDE ended up not liking it either. > >I'm surprised to hear that. I would tend to have thought that, if it >was theoretically possible to win in a certain position, and only the >50-move rule was standing between you and the win, then, since the >*intent* of the 50-move rule was, presumably, only to force a draw >where players would otherwise be endlessly moving aimlessly... this is >a change most Chess players would have *demanded* if FIDE had shown no >interest in making it. I like the general idea of addressing that, but not the change they choose. If I were to make any change at all I would have simply made the 50-move rule a 75-move rule, choosing simplicity of the ruleset over convenience of the players. That being said, I would still favor keeping an existing imperfect rule unless the problem being addressed was a lot larger that this one was. I once played a game where I got into a weird position where neither side could win, and the 50-move rule would normally end it, but my opponent had a pawn in the rook file that he was able to push every 49 moves without changing the chances of winning. It was 3 or 4 moves away from being blocked by one of my pawns. He pushed it once, but by the time he wanted to push it again I had walked my pawn forward and blocked it. This was a game at work, so we had no arbiter or TD to decide that he wasn't trying to win. The hundred moves went by pretty quickly once I had the pattern figured out -- faster for me than for him, because I was trying to get him to draw by repetition of position and he was trying to avoid it, which is more work. >> For those who don't know what we are talking about, a recap: >> >> In the FIDE Laws of Chess, published in 1984 and 1988, the 50-move >> rule was extended to 75 moves for the following positions: >> >> King + Rook + Bishop against King + Rook; >> King + 2 Knights against King + pawn; >> King + Queen + pawn one square from promotion against King + Queen; >> King + Queen against King + 2 Knights; >> King + Queen against King + 2 Bishops; >> King + 2 Bishops against King + Knight >> >> In 1992 during the FIDE Congress in Manila the Rules Committee >> suggested establishing one rule for all endings: 50 moves, and >> the General Assembly of FIDE approved the change. In 1996 the >> Congress in Yerevan revisited the decision and kept the 1992 >> rules. There are currently no exceptions to the 50-move rule. > >Ah, I haven't been keeping up. But then, human chess players are not >computers, so perhaps the need for the extensions wasn't real. My >inclination would have been to make it a 75-move rule if simplicity >and uniformity were desired. Just what I wrote above before reading this part of your reply! Great minds think alike? <grin > How about this? At the 50th move, allow either player to claim that he can win if given another X number of moves. If X is 50 moves or more longer than the fastest win in the tablebases, he loses at once. If he reaches move X without winning, he loses. Could this work? It might be especially advantageous in correspondence chess where tablebases are reference material that are available for consultation by either player. >I had thought that the computer studies had led to a need for >up to about 250 moves in some positions, not merely 75, however. Look at entry 316 at [ http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary_16.htm ] They found a a position where it takes White 517 moves to win (get into a winning position) with white always aiming for the fastest win and black always stalling as much as he can. In semifinals of the 2007 World Cup, Sergey Karjakin and Alexey Shirov were tied and played two rapid games as a tiebreaker. One of these games ended up in an endgame where, with best play, Shirov had a position that was a win in 208 moves. Needless to say, it was a computer doing post-analysis that figured this out. See [ http://paulhoffman.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/mate-in-208-moves/ ] -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 07 Apr 2008 08:19:13 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 2:25=A0pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > You always bring up such interesting points! =A0I was about to write > something along the line of "Unless I am mistaken, it also didn't > change the basic rules that you and I would be playing by if we > decided to sit down and play a game of checkers", so I did a quick > search for the official checkers rules. =A0Even after narrowing down > the search to "Standard American Checkers" (look at all the regional > variations at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts], most of > which appear to be recognized at [http://www.fmjd.org/site.php]! ), > I can't seem to find the random opening rule. Since this information is hard to find, I've put it on my web site now, adding a page about checkers: http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo03.htm I've also added this page http://www.quadibloc.com/chess/ch0502.htm so that more people will know about the predecessors of Capablanca Chess. John Savard   Date: 07 Apr 2008 00:23:14 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 7, 6:20 am, [email protected] wrote: > Will need to see how a Mega Zillions program would do, or how an AI > does a game like Magic: The Gathering. Now take Magic, and mix it > with chess. > Where is the community of players who want to play Magic: The Chess? My impression of Chess variants is that like artificial languages: there are vastly more people who want to make them than actually learn them or use them. Those who do want the rug perpetually pulled out from under them are also not very likely to take it seriously enough to compete in it. Do they really need a legal protocol? Are you even in this group yourself?   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:58:15 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 7:32 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > > The rule I would include is what I understood, from comments on the > Tromp-Taylor rules, to be their rule of counting: count each > intersection with a stone of your color, and each vacant intersection > completely surrounded by stones only of your color, as your score. > Period. > I know. I understand that. I'm just quoting the original Tromp- Taylor rules document. It clearly states that only using the core rules, as you suggest, will cause "inconvenience" and "[im]patience" among real life players - the people who will be reading your rule sheet.   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:28:24 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 5:13 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > Adapting the rules for CalvinBall should make everyone happy... > > http://www.bartel.org/calvinball/http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm That's it! I AM going to come up with Calvinball chess rules (aka, Calvin Chess) that theoretically makes it possible for someone to never play chess twice with the exact same set of rules. COOL! Thanks for the links :-) Anyhow, in a more general note, I think it would be interesting to see how exactly a functioning version of Calvinball chess could work, provided it kept with the needed framework of being a deterministic abstract strategy game, with no luck and perfect information. Imagine Fischer's Random Chess, but it isn't just the board that is mixed up, but also the game rules. This would be the extreme end of the variant community as far as things happen. - Rich   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:21:58 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 2:35 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 6, 10:41 am, [email protected] wrote: > > > On Apr 6, 5:14 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > If > > > you want equipment, you would have to draw your own 10 by 10 board on > > > a piece of cardboard - that sort of unknown. > > > And this here is another reason why any changes have a hard time > > getting adopted, particularly the likes of Capablanca chess. You > > don't have the expanded board available, so few can actually play it > > and try it. Thus it doesn't catch on. > > After I posted it, though, I remembered that a Snakes and Ladders > board is a 10 by 10 grid board commonly available. > > John Savard Now THAT might make for an interesting variant. The snakes and ladders allow for some interesting lateral moves and so on :-) - Rich   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:20:39 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 5, 2:25 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 5, 7:14 am, [email protected] wrote: > > > What will be interesting is if you start doing games where players can > > fundamentally alter the game rules to hinder their opponent, and then > > challenge the AI to do that. > > Do you mean inside the game? If so, that's just another rule for the > game. You can define the movement of the chess pieces in terms of rule > changes, if you really want to. I don't understand why you care about > this. I was thinking something along the lines of "Magic: The Gathering" but chess related. The idea of in-game mutators, working a bit like Nightmare Chess works, but working in a deterministic manner. > Or do you mean outside the game? Then it's politics, and using > politics to redefine the game as to "hinder your opponent" is just an > ugly metagame I'm not interested in playing - or writing an AI for. All games are played in the metagame, particularly on the higher level. Players do things within the rules to get the edge. This is part of the game. Even gaming the scoring system to win. Because a scoring system is a game, it gets gamed. Might as well acknowledge this, and allow players the freedom to experiment in the metagame. One thing this would do, is force AI research to consider new things, beyond trees and min-max. > But for AI for a game with "rules that change" (or more properly, > there is one position in the game which has an infinite number of > possible moves), that can be done. MC programs in principle need only > a description of the game in order to play it, these descriptions can > be arbitrarily large. But you want it set up so players are gaming each other, not just maximizing the environment for their advantage alone. > I recently learned that Cameron Browne (game designer and author of > "Hex Strategy" and "Connection Games") has already done this, > developed a language to describe games and and MC/UCT player that can > play them well. He used it to evolve the game of Yavalath. Nomic ties into this, as does the random Fluxx, and there are others. Not saying that this is meant to be mainstream, but I say it could tie into the greater whole of the chess experience. You play around this area and allow the best forms to bubble up, and people play to see what combination of rules in game break it. > There are games which are hard for MC prgrams. There are games which > are easy for MC programs, but which are even easier for humans, like > Go. But this proves nothing. I'm sure it would be easy to evolve an > anti-human game with Browne's system. Indeed, I suspect the computer > will play better on most large randomly designed rulesets. Will need to see how a Mega Zillions program would do, or how an AI does a game like Magic: The Gathering. Now take Magic, and mix it with chess. - Rich   Date: 06 Apr 2008 19:45:44 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 3:25 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > Quadibloc wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > That's an interesting thought. Had I been interested in FIDE rules > at the time I suspect that I would not have liked the change, and > as it turns out, FIDE ended up not liking it either. I'm surprised to hear that. I would tend to have thought that, if it was theoretically possible to win in a certain position, and only the 50-move rule was standing between you and the win, then, since the *intent* of the 50-move rule was, presumably, only to force a draw where players would otherwise be endlessly moving aimlessly... this is a change most Chess players would have *demanded* if FIDE had shown no interest in making it. > For those who don't know what we are talking about, a recap: > > In the FIDE Laws of Chess, published in 1984 and 1988, the 50-move > rule was extended to 75 moves for the following positions: > > King + Rook + Bishop against King + Rook; > King + 2 Knights against King + pawn; > King + Queen + pawn one square from promotion against King + Queen; > King + Queen against King + 2 Knights; > King + Queen against King + 2 Bishops; > King + 2 Bishops against King + Knight > > In 1992 during the FIDE Congress in Manila the Rules Committee > suggested establishing one rule for all endings: 50 moves, and > the General Assembly of FIDE approved the change. In 1996 the > Congress in Yerevan revisited the decision and kept the 1992 > rules. There are currently no exceptions to the 50-move rule. Ah, I haven't been keeping up. But then, human chess players are not computers, so perhaps the need for the extensions wasn't real. My inclination would have been to make it a 75-move rule if simplicity and uniformity were desired. I had thought that the computer studies had led to a need for up to about 250 moves in some positions, not merely 75, however. > Even after narrowing down > the search to "Standard American Checkers" (look at all the regional > variations at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts], most of > which appear to be recognized at [http://www.fmjd.org/site.php]! ), > I can't seem to find the random opening rule. It isn't described in full in too many places on the web, no. > A few interesting URLs on Checkers rules: > http://www.usacheckers.com/rulesofcheckers.php Elsewhere on this site - look under Openings - is the only listing of the current three-move restriction on the web, and elsewhere, under the history of the game, the previous two-move restriction and the older version of the three-move restriction with 137, rather than 144 or 156, possibilities is given. You have to *dig*, though, to get that information. > >If Chess players worldwide recognize that Chess has problems similar > >in magnitude, then for the existing Chess federations to get directly > >involved with experimentation with Chess variants in an attempt to > >find a solution to the problems would be a legitimate activity. I'm > >dubious that the problems are, yet, that serious, and that a Chess > >variant would be effective in addressing them, but in principle this > >can be as legitimate in the Chess world as it was in the Checkers > >world. > > That makes sense. Let us hope that the FIDE and USCF are run by > same people when that day comes... Incidentally, the fact that the 137 possibilities in Checkers were increased to 144 - and then, on August 2003, increased to 156, with the description on the page implying that these three-move sequences, formerly thought to be dead losses for one player, were now shown to be drawable (but not winnable) with really good play... and this was why they were added to the list... leads me to the conclusion that Checkers must still be in deep trouble, since they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. (Perhaps they'll be going to a *four*-move restriction soon, and maybe that will allow them to stick with more balanced move sequences...) However, the history of Checkers on that site gives reason for optimism about Chess. The two-move restriction was originally adopted because of a 40-game match in 1863... in which, in 21 of the 40 games played, *the same entire game of Checkers was played from beginning to end*. Chess is nowhere near being analyzed to the extent that would lead to embarassing phenomena like that. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 19:32:25 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 4:40 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote: > If you include a rule sheet in a game box, you're obviously targeting > the "real live players" that Bill mentions. And so logically, the > incomprehensible (at least to me) "Comments and Interpretations" > section would be indicated for inclusion in an in-box rule sheet. The rule I would include is what I understood, from comments on the Tromp-Taylor rules, to be their rule of counting: count each intersection with a stone of your color, and each vacant intersection completely surrounded by stones only of your color, as your score. Period. That sounded like the simplest possible rule for scoring a Go game. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 14:40:35 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 9:05 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 6, 10:21 am, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > And they say Go is a "minute to learn" game. lol > > If people are going to sell > Go boards with a sheet of rules in the package next to Chess, > Checkers, and Backgammon in the stores... they just need to include > the Tromp-Taylor counting rules on the instruction sheet. Those are > simple, unambiguous, and easy to understand. > After reading Tromp-Taylor rules as written by co-author and notable designer Bill Taylor, it doesn't seem to be quite as simple as you suggest. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/tmp/rules/TrompTaylor.html The "Tromp-Taylor Concise Rules of Go" section is divided into two subsections: "The Logical Rules" and "Comments and Interpretations". The "Logical Rules" section seems to be fairly straightforward, but the "Comments and Interpretations" section gets a little hairy. The de facto FAQ that follows only adds to the hairiness. I sure didn't understand it. Prefacing the rules specification is Bill's admonishment "The ['Comments and Interpretations' section is] merely about those matters that real live players have to worry about for reasons of convenience, impatience, and a desire (usually) to play with physical equipment." If you include a rule sheet in a game box, you're obviously targeting the "real live players" that Bill mentions. And so logically, the incomprehensible (at least to me) "Comments and Interpretations" section would be indicated for inclusion in an in-box rule sheet.   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:13:31 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Adapting the rules for CalvinBall should make everyone happy... http://www.bartel.org/calvinball/ http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm   Date: 06 Apr 2008 21:04:23 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Quadibloc wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> I happen to like Fischer Random Chess (I don't like to call it >> "Chess960", because I think Bobby Fischer deserves credit for >> his invention) but it is not chess, and thus there is no need >> to "integrate it into the chess community." > >I've checked into this a bit more, and I see that indeed Chess960 >isn't the original Shuffle Chess, but is instead indeed an alternate >name for Fischer's precise version. > >I agree that anyone who invents something should be given credit, but >given some of R. J. Fischer's unfortunate actions and statements >during the latter part of his career, I'm afraid that anything with >his name on it will be anathema to many people. Such as, to give one >example, Kosovars, and to give another example, New Yorkers. I think I understand how they feel, but it still reminds me of Freedom Fries and Victory Cabbage. If racism and anti-Semitiism is reason to deny a person credit for his inventions, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford both outdid Bobby Fischer in racism and hate. Edison made many racist and racist and anti-Semitic comments (and they were spread far more widely because of his fame), and Henry Ford wrote a hate-filled book called _The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem_, with the usual brain-dead garbage about Jews causing all of the problems of the world. Yet I don't see anyone refusing to call a Ford a Ford. -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 06 Apr 2008 20:25:58 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Quadibloc wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> I have no problem >> with different kinds of clocks, tournament scoring systems, rating >> schemes, or anything else other than the rules that two players >> need to know to play a game against each other. I also have no >> problem with chess variants, or with one of the variants becoming >> more popular than chess. What I object to is someone trying to >> change the rules that determine how the game is played. > >Taking that statement literally, one might have expected you to >complain when the 50-move rule was modified to allow more moves in >some endgame positions proven by computer studies to require more than >50 moves to achieve mate. That's an interesting thought. Had I been interested in FIDE rules at the time I suspect that I would not have liked the change, and as it turns out, FIDE ended up not liking it either. For those who don't know what we are talking about, a recap: In the FIDE Laws of Chess, published in 1984 and 1988, the 50-move rule was extended to 75 moves for the following positions: King + Rook + Bishop against King + Rook; King + 2 Knights against King + pawn; King + Queen + pawn one square from promotion against King + Queen; King + Queen against King + 2 Knights; King + Queen against King + 2 Bishops; King + 2 Bishops against King + Knight In 1992 during the FIDE Congress in Manila the Rules Committee suggested establishing one rule for all endings: 50 moves, and the General Assembly of FIDE approved the change. In 1996 the Congress in Yerevan revisited the decision and kept the 1992 rules. There are currently no exceptions to the 50-move rule. Source: _An Arbiter's Notebook_, by International Arbiter Geurt Gijssen >But I presume you mean that if someone wants his chess variant to >become more popular than chess, you want it to happen honestly, by >popular demand - not by bribing someone at the USCF, as it were, to >hijack the existing infrastructure built up by people who joined it in >order to play Chess the way it is. > >I have no problems with that position; I admire honesty and detest >sneakiness in general. Exactly what I was thinking. Thanks! >But there is another side to that argument. When they brought in the >rule about drawing for the first two, and then three, moves of >Checkers, it wasn't because someone wanted to egotistically put his >stamp on the game. It was because there was a problem generally >recognized as existing by the Checkers community. You always bring up such interesting points! I was about to write something along the line of "Unless I am mistaken, it also didn't change the basic rules that you and I would be playing by if we decided to sit down and play a game of checkers", so I did a quick search for the official checkers rules. Even after narrowing down the search to "Standard American Checkers" (look at all the regional variations at [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts ], most of which appear to be recognized at [ http://www.fmjd.org/site.php ]! ), I can't seem to find the random opening rule. A few interesting URLs on Checkers rules: http://www.usacheckers.com/rulesofcheckers.php http://www.jimloy.com/checkers/rules.htm http://www.jimloy.com/checkers/rules2.htm http://www.darkfish.com/checkers/rules.html http://home.clara.net/davey/newpage5.htm http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.games.board/2005-10/msg00132.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_draughts >If Chess players worldwide recognize that Chess has problems similar >in magnitude, then for the existing Chess federations to get directly >involved with experimentation with Chess variants in an attempt to >find a solution to the problems would be a legitimate activity. I'm >dubious that the problems are, yet, that serious, and that a Chess >variant would be effective in addressing them, but in principle this >can be as legitimate in the Chess world as it was in the Checkers >world. That makes sense. Let us hope that the FIDE and USCF are run by same people when that day comes... >(And cleaning up Go scoring to handle bent four in the corner >better is another example.) *Another* fascinating sub-topic! I was vaguely aware of this, so I just did a web search. What I find most interesting is that, despite a lot of disagreement about this, the writing is much clearer and the points made with far better logic that what I just saw searching on checkers rules. I suspect that Go attracts people with more analytical temperaments. A few interesting URLs on Go and Go rules: http://warp.povusers.org/go/GoMisconceptions/ http://www.gogod.co.uk/NewInGo/C&IP.htm http://warp.povusers.org/go/UndeadBentFours/ http://warp.povusers.org/go/UndeadBentFours/analysis.html http://www.springerlink.com/content/dp88x26l31421703/ http://www.usgo.org/resources/SST.html http://www.gogod.co.uk/NewInGo/FrenchRules/FrenchRules.htm http://www.gogod.co.uk/NewInGo/NewInGo.htm http://www.gogod.co.uk/NewInGo/Fukui_1.htm http://senseis.xmp.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Go -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 06 Apr 2008 11:35:08 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 10:41 am, [email protected] wrote: > On Apr 6, 5:14 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > If > > you want equipment, you would have to draw your own 10 by 10 board on > > a piece of cardboard - that sort of unknown. > > And this here is another reason why any changes have a hard time > getting adopted, particularly the likes of Capablanca chess. You > don't have the expanded board available, so few can actually play it > and try it. Thus it doesn't catch on. After I posted it, though, I remembered that a Snakes and Ladders board is a 10 by 10 grid board commonly available. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 11:07:11 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 12:44 am, Nick Wedd <[email protected] > wrote: > > In Japanese rules, it used to be that there was a rule specifically > saying that a bent four rule was always dead. Occasionally, someone > would find an obscure position having similar properties to "bent four", > and bring it to the attention of the authorities; who would consider > it, and eventually make a special ruling on it. Japanese players seemed > happy enough with this state of affairs, but western players (who > generally used Japanese rules) did not like a rule book that included a > lengthening list of special cases. In 1982 the Japanese authorities > produced a new rule book, which instead included an algorithm for > establishing whether such special positions were alive or dead. > And they say Go is a "minute to learn" game. lol   Date: 06 Apr 2008 09:05:21 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 10:21 am, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 6, 12:44 am, Nick Wedd <[email protected]> wrote: > > > In Japanese rules [for Go], it used to be that there was a rule specifically > > saying that a bent four rule was always dead. Occasionally, someone > > would find an obscure position having similar properties to "bent four", > > and bring it to the attention of the authorities; who would consider > > it, and eventually make a special ruling on it. Japanese players seemed > > happy enough with this state of affairs, but western players (who > > generally used Japanese rules) did not like a rule book that included a > > lengthening list of special cases. In 1982 the Japanese authorities > > produced a new rule book, which instead included an algorithm for > > establishing whether such special positions were alive or dead. > > And they say Go is a "minute to learn" game. lol Well, it does take only a minute to learn how to play - the only part of the _basic_ rules, as opposed to how to play well, left out is figuring out who won after the game is over. I express the same sentiment you did on my page about Go at http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo01.htm but, in fairness, there _is_ a solution. If people are going to sell Go boards with a sheet of rules in the package next to Chess, Checkers, and Backgammon in the stores... they just need to include the Tromp-Taylor counting rules on the instruction sheet. Those are simple, unambiguous, and easy to understand. Then, an additional paragraph could note there are other counting rules in more common use that are more subtle. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 08:41:49 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 5:14 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > I don't see the _en passant_ rule as a problem, but I do see it as the > _solution_ to a problem. The perceived problem would be that giving a > Pawn a double-step first move should only have the effect of letting > it advance more quickly, but not the ability to bypass a threat of > capture presented by the opponent's Pawn structure. Most of what you see in Chess as what seems to be odd rules (En Passant, Castling, etc...) all stem from solutions to problems that arise when other changes were made to the game. Like the added mobility of pieces resulted in these changes coming about. What I personally believe now is that chess is locked into by the way things are that changes can't get into chess at all, due to the way the current political, and mental framework of chess is set up. It no longer has much ability to come up with En Passant and Castling to add new changes, as it is framed now, and the political climate. I doubt there is even the potential to do it. > In general, what is percieved as a "problem" with a board game _is_ a > matter of taste. The rule in Checkers that capturing is compulsory can > be viewed as a problem. Why should one have to make a move that is > disadvantageous, doesn't that go directly against the point of a game > of strategy? That's one of the reasons some people go on to Chess, and > why a draw for the opening moves was considered an acceptable way of > dealing with stereotyped games in Checkers, while it would be unlikely > to be acceptable to the Chess community for their game. "Problem" here is seen in quotes regarding en passant. It is seen as inelegant. It is designed by necessity. What is seen, as you discuss, is that the approaches that checkers take, are seen as unacceptable. They don't flow out of the nature of the game at all. One could say the same with attempts to handicap. There isn't a handicapping system in chess at all, because of the way it is now. People suggest messing around with time control, giving the more experienced player less time. But is this seriously used in any way? > I also remember, back in the 8-bit computer era, a computer checkers > game advertised which, for some bizarre reason, played Continental or > Polish draughts. Had it been advertised in a European magazine, that > wouldn't have been odd, but only natural, but this was advertised by > an American firm to American customers in an American magazine, and in > the English-speaking United States, that game is virtually unknown. If > you want equipment, you would have to draw your own 10 by 10 board on > a piece of cardboard - that sort of unknown. And this here is another reason why any changes have a hard time getting adopted, particularly the likes of Capablanca chess. You don't have the expanded board available, so few can actually play it and try it. Thus it doesn't catch on. - Rich   Date: 06 Apr 2008 08:21:09 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 12:44 am, Nick Wedd <[email protected] > wrote: > > In Japanese rules [for Go], it used to be that there was a rule specifically > saying that a bent four rule was always dead. Occasionally, someone > would find an obscure position having similar properties to "bent four", > and bring it to the attention of the authorities; who would consider > it, and eventually make a special ruling on it. Japanese players seemed > happy enough with this state of affairs, but western players (who > generally used Japanese rules) did not like a rule book that included a > lengthening list of special cases. In 1982 the Japanese authorities > produced a new rule book, which instead included an algorithm for > establishing whether such special positions were alive or dead. > And they say Go is a "minute to learn" game. lol   Date: 06 Apr 2008 02:14:56 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 6, 1:44 am, Nick Wedd <[email protected] > wrote: > I > see bent four as no more of a "problem" than the en passant rule. Interesting you should phrase it that way. I don't see the _en passant_ rule as a problem, but I do see it as the _solution_ to a problem. The perceived problem would be that giving a Pawn a double-step first move should only have the effect of letting it advance more quickly, but not the ability to bypass a threat of capture presented by the opponent's Pawn structure. Given the restriction on the King's move in Castling - it cannot cross a square where it would be in check - however, it would also seem that the "problem" wasn't really perceived in quite those terms at the time the _en passant_ rule was adopted. Instead, it was apparently just felt that, in principle, a "special" move shouldn't allow bypassing a possibility of capture, without detailed consideration of the impact on the game in terms of such things as Pawn structures. In general, what is percieved as a "problem" with a board game _is_ a matter of taste. The rule in Checkers that capturing is compulsory can be viewed as a problem. Why should one have to make a move that is disadvantageous, doesn't that go directly against the point of a game of strategy? That's one of the reasons some people go on to Chess, and why a draw for the opening moves was considered an acceptable way of dealing with stereotyped games in Checkers, while it would be unlikely to be acceptable to the Chess community for their game. If, in Go, one's tastes lead one to believe that playing out a position shouldn't have an impact on a player's score, then one will tend to prefer area scoring to territory scoring - except that one might also want to retain the additional (perceived?) sharpness of territory scoring, which is what has led to a number of systems being proposed in addition to the traditional Chinese one. I also remember, back in the 8-bit computer era, a computer checkers game advertised which, for some bizarre reason, played Continental or Polish draughts. Had it been advertised in a European magazine, that wouldn't have been odd, but only natural, but this was advertised by an American firm to American customers in an American magazine, and in the English-speaking United States, that game is virtually unknown. If you want equipment, you would have to draw your own 10 by 10 board on a piece of cardboard - that sort of unknown. Perhaps the company was reselling a game they licensed from a company in Germany or somewhere. But the ad copy did say that this was the "real" and "official" international form of Checkers, which it might very well be. There's even a Canadian checkers. I once saw a book, in the French language, about the game in the library of my local University, so I know it's not mythical, but it is peculiar to Quebec, the rest of Canada being firmly in the English-speaking world of Checkers on the 8 by 8 board. This Quebecois Checkers is played on a 12 by 12 board, and is played by the rules of Polish/Continental Checkers otherwise, IIRC. The idea of a 12 by 12 board for Checkers though makes me think that when the _Jeu Plaisant_ was found unsatisfactory, and the transition took place to the _Jeu Forc=E9_, that is, when capturing became compulsory, an alternate route to enrich the game might have been to go to a bigger board. Perhaps on a 12 by 12 board, the _Jeu Plaisant_ would no longer be inadequate, and even a draw for openings would not be needed, making Checkers more appealing to those who now often go on to Chess. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 01:46:24 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 11:17 pm, [email protected] wrote: > I would recommend, if anyone was looking to do 4 player chess to do it > on a double sized Byzantine Chessboard. 32 Spaces round, 4 wide. > Every player has exactly two fronts to deal with. What surprised me is that in the book "Chess Eccentricities", is that not only was this version showed, but they also had *three* player chess on one that was 24 spaces round. Of course, the Byzantine chessboard generalizes to any number of players, although once you go to more than three, some players are not in contact. John Savard   Date: 06 Apr 2008 08:44:46 From: Nick Wedd Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In message <e892ab06-133f-4b60-b45d-3d0e46650e98@s33g2000pri.googlegroups.com >, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > writes >On Apr 5, 10:46 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: >> When they brought in the >> rule about drawing for the first two, and then three, moves of >> Checkers, it wasn't because someone wanted to egotistically put his >> stamp on the game. It was because there was a problem generally >> recognized as existing by the Checkers community. > >I agree 100%. There really are no short-cuts here: even if Richard >Hutnik's evolutionary chess programme is perfect, and even if he would >have proposed the same even if it didn't have his or his >organization's name on it... this is something Chess players will have >to deal with on their own, without outside intervention. > >> (And cleaning up Go scoring to handle bent four in the corner >> better is another example.) > >Interesting that you touch on this problem, because bent four in the >corner is only a problem in Japanese scoring (and maybe Korean?). It >is already cleared up in many rulesets, Area scoring rulesets never >had it as I understand. As a Go player, I am struck by your words "problem", and "cleared up". I see bent four as no more of a "problem" than the en passant rule. Here is a brief history of bent four. In Chinese rules, a "bent four" group dies if the opponent can kill it, and not if he can't. Weak amateur Chinese players often believe that it can always be killed; they are mistaken, it takes a little skill to kill it, and in certain rare circumstances it cannot be killed. In Japanese rules, it used to be that there was a rule specifically saying that a bent four rule was always dead. Occasionally, someone would find an obscure position having similar properties to "bent four", and bring it to the attention of the authorities; who would consider it, and eventually make a special ruling on it. Japanese players seemed happy enough with this state of affairs, but western players (who generally used Japanese rules) did not like a rule book that included a lengthening list of special cases. In 1982 the Japanese authorities produced a new rule book, which instead included an algorithm for establishing whether such special positions were alive or dead. >American checkers players accepted a radical change to their game, but >the Japanese Go players apparently don't feel their game is broken >enough to warrant it. That's their call to make. Japanese Go players didn't feel their game was broken. They did change their rule book, in a way that did not affect the game but did happen to bring the rule book itself more in line with western tastes. Nick >If you don't know it, take a look at Robert Jasiek's comparison of Go >rulesets: >http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/rules.html -- Nick Wedd [email protected]   Date: 05 Apr 2008 22:31:50 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 6:45 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 5, 10:46 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > When they brought in the > > rule about drawing for the first two, and then three, moves of > > Checkers, it wasn't because someone wanted to egotistically put his > > stamp on the game. It was because there was a problem generally > > recognized as existing by the Checkers community. > > I agree 100%. There really are no short-cuts here: even if Richard > Hutnik's evolutionary chess programme is perfect, and even if he would > have proposed the same even if it didn't have his or his > organization's name on it... this is something Chess players will have > to deal with on their own, without outside intervention. Only reason why IAGO is attached to it, is that it has stemmed from an issue of wanting to have a variant of chess using Capablanca pieces being played, but not able to find any acceptable version. The end result was a larger framework to think on, that is my interest to have IAGO cover. Think of it a bit like FIDE chess, but open to variants. And no, it isn't perfect, but the approach is to have consensus reached to what works best, and frame chess in such that it can have a version operating that is being tested on the tournament level before the slow adapting version changes. Of course, to this part, the proposal is getting Capablanca pieces on an 8x8 board, but even this would be up for change. The fact IAGO is involved here, is merely just to stimulate things. If no one picks it up and runs with it, so be it. It isn't going anywhere. The approach is to acknowledge chess as an evolutionary design and allow for it to keep evolving over time, rather than get codified. It is also meant as a way to integrate variants into the mix as a valid form of chess, and a way to get ideas to revitalize chess. The ideas would work in a lot of areas. And in way is this supposed to be one person, myself or anyone else trying to ramrod anything down the chess community. Mostly, it acknowledges what will happen anyhow, but just makes it more conscious. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 22:24:56 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 1:50 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > For the record, when I say that chess is fine the way it is or > that chess isn't broken and does not need fixing, I am referring > to Articles 1 through 14 of the FIDE Laws of Chess as documented > athttp://www.fide.com/official/handbook.asp?level=EE101, except > where those articles assume that every game has an arbiter; two > players need to be able to play a game without outside assistance > and yet still have a defined set of rules. I have no problem > with different kinds of clocks, tournament scoring systems, rating > schemes, or anything else other than the rules that two players > need to know to play a game against each other. I also have no > problem with chess variants, or with one of the variants becoming > more popular than chess. What I object to is someone trying to > change the rules that determine how the game is played. What team is the world Bughouse Champion and who holds the official title to World Speed Chess Champion? Is there any governing body now that officially has that? If it isn't FIDE, then there are versions of chess that aren't being represented, thus the FIDE rules are not perfect, not even those. As for how the game is played, Chess has evolved over time, in different forms. It adjusted. When there was seen a lack of mobility, the Bishop took flight and the Queen became mad. And chess adjusted, by adding castling. What I was saying it isn't a case of one person trying to propose some variant, but perhaps the chess community as a whole evaluating everything and having a migration path that won't stiffle any potential needed changes from happening. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 22:20:03 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 7:34 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 5, 3:03 pm, [email protected] wrote: > > > Now, would you rather I NOT call you a FIDE purist, and state > > that you do believe that considering changes in the way chess is, is > > NOT heresy? > > He has clearly stated his position on these matters in other posts in > this thread. He is interested in Chess variants - as witness his > comments on Gess - and games other than Chess, and has no objections > to their becoming popular, but a game different from FIDE Chess will > just have to make it on its own, rather than being somehow centrally > dictated as the official replacement for Chess. > > On that latter point, I replied to him with some minor caveats. > > John Savard Ok, well I will revise what I said a bit. To a hardcore FIDE purist, they would consider any variants heresies. I don't consider people who view variants as heretics at all. I do know from experience with a local speed chess club, that they do though. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 22:17:15 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 12:51 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 5, 10:17 am, [email protected] wrote: > > > Too bad I can't find any info on it. Anyone have any URL links to > > Intense Chess. I don't even see it up on the chessvariants site. > > Intense Chess is not that much different from standard four-player > chess in its normal form, but they also have two-player and three- > player rules. > > The article on Intense Chess in D. B. Pritchard's _Encyclopedia of > Chess Variants_ has a photo of the three Polgar sisters sitting down > to play a game. > > My own page, at > > http://www.quadibloc.com/chess/ch0206.htm > > mentions the main unique feature of Intense Chess: once one player's > King is checkmated, that King, and the other pieces of that player, > are immediately removed from the board. This is unlike traditional > four-player Chess, where both Kings in a partnership must become > simultaneously checkmated for a victory for the other side to take > place. > > John Savard So, this is 4 player chess, without teams? I happened to play that in the past, in several versions. I recall one where I thought it would be best to have it that the first person to knock someone out wins. But that tended to cause the game to drag on forever. I would recommend, if anyone was looking to do 4 player chess to do it on a double sized Byzantine Chessboard. 32 Spaces round, 4 wide. Every player has exactly two fronts to deal with. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 22:13:07 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 5:43 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 11:49 pm, [email protected] wrote: > > > But not to be able to cut > > through, and not to the place where the masses even know there is > > something like the Olympics involving chess, going on in China. > > Given the current unpleasantness in Tibet, it's probably just as well > nobody knows about this choice of venue. > > John Savard If the games attending had greater mindshare, and were generating better revenues, this wouldn't be an issue. As of now, chess and bridge muscle their way in. Go has the Asian contingent going. As for checkers, well it is fend for yourself. Same with Chinese Chess in North America, as far as I can tell. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 16:59:52 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 5:16 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > I happen to like Fischer Random Chess (I don't like to call it > "Chess960", because I think Bobby Fischer deserves credit for > his invention) but it is not chess, and thus there is no need > to "integrate it into the chess community." I've checked into this a bit more, and I see that indeed Chess960 isn't the original Shuffle Chess, but is instead indeed an alternate name for Fischer's precise version. I agree that anyone who invents something should be given credit, but given some of R. J. Fischer's unfortunate actions and statements during the latter part of his career, I'm afraid that anything with his name on it will be anathema to many people. Such as, to give one example, Kosovars, and to give another example, New Yorkers. Castling elsewhere than to the edge of the board seems pointless, so I would be inclined to recommend either constraining Shuffle Chess only to the extent of keeping the Bishops on opposite colors, or shuffling only the middle six pieces... leading to Chess 108. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 16:34:37 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 3:03 pm, [email protected] wrote: > Now, would you rather I NOT call you a FIDE purist, and state > that you do believe that considering changes in the way chess is, is > NOT heresy? He has clearly stated his position on these matters in other posts in this thread. He is interested in Chess variants - as witness his comments on Gess - and games other than Chess, and has no objections to their becoming popular, but a game different from FIDE Chess will just have to make it on its own, rather than being somehow centrally dictated as the official replacement for Chess. On that latter point, I replied to him with some minor caveats. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 16:31:11 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 4:45 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > Interesting that you touch on this problem, because bent four in the > corner is only a problem in Japanese scoring (and maybe Korean?). It > is already cleared up in many rulesets, Area scoring rulesets never > had it as I understand. It just happened that I was familiar with this example because, although not a Go player, I encountered it as I was researching information on Go to add a page to my web site: http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo01.htm in which I describe the starting arrangements for various national forms of Go, the Tibetan/Mongolian game, the old Korean game (Sunjang Baduk), and the pre-war Chinese game. I briefly make a note on area versus territory scoring also, but other sources would be required for full explanations. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 15:45:25 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 10:46 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > When they brought in the > rule about drawing for the first two, and then three, moves of > Checkers, it wasn't because someone wanted to egotistically put his > stamp on the game. It was because there was a problem generally > recognized as existing by the Checkers community. I agree 100%. There really are no short-cuts here: even if Richard Hutnik's evolutionary chess programme is perfect, and even if he would have proposed the same even if it didn't have his or his organization's name on it... this is something Chess players will have to deal with on their own, without outside intervention. > (And cleaning up Go scoring to handle bent four in the corner > better is another example.) Interesting that you touch on this problem, because bent four in the corner is only a problem in Japanese scoring (and maybe Korean?). It is already cleared up in many rulesets, Area scoring rulesets never had it as I understand. American checkers players accepted a radical change to their game, but the Japanese Go players apparently don't feel their game is broken enough to warrant it. That's their call to make. If you don't know it, take a look at Robert Jasiek's comparison of Go rulesets: http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/rules.html   Date: 05 Apr 2008 14:03:08 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 1:28 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > Is it OK if I accuse you of all sorts of things that are not true > and dismiss it as a "slight nose tweak"? Or is being an asshole > reserved for you alone? The only thing I MAY of accused you of is being a FIDE purist, who considers any changes to FIDE chess rules wrong, not needed, or more strongly, "heresy" (ok, someone isn't going to use the actual word "heresy", but by all practical terms, that is what they consider it). > >I am curious though, did I call ANYONE on here a FIDE chess purist? > > You called me a heretic to my face. "And my comments about considering > a change in the chess rules is considered heresy by you." You might > want to make a note when you insult someone so you will know why they > are so pissed off at you. If anything I called you a FIDE purist, who considers the contemplation of any changes heresy. I would be the heretic for considering this, not you. I am the one who will get burned at the stake for contemplating and suggesting such be given thought, not you. I don't see where I ever called you a heretic. If I had, I am sorry. Now, would you rather I NOT call you a FIDE purist, and state that you do believe that considering changes in the way chess is, is NOT heresy? If that is what you want, that is fine then. Then the FIDE purist who considers chess as it is now immutable perfection, wouldn't be a shoe for yourself. After all this, if you are still offended here, then may I suggest you ARE a FIDE purist who does consider changes to FIDE rules heresy. Now, if you aren't that, then the shoe described doesn't fit you. I will say, in no way, shape or form do I consider you a heretic. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 13:55:53 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 1:16 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >Ok, what it sounds like what you are raising here is, how can chess > >have a scoring system that can enable people who don't follow it to > >quickly tell who is ahead. > > Do it like they do in televised poker: A computer evaluation of > who is ahead is put on screen for the viewers, but cannot be seen > by the players. That is part of it. If Chess were shown on TV, then it would be done reality TV editing stype, complete with compression of time, and scoring. The issue is exactly what kind of scoring should be used? Should it be a mix of computer analysis and art that puts up percentages like they do with poker and backgammon, based on analysis after the fact? Or should something else be used? Can there be less time to play, and the clock be shown on how many seconds are left, so that the clock will fall instead of a draw? This is the issue regarding the scoring system that needs to be resolved. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 13:46:51 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 11:50 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > I have no problem > with different kinds of clocks, tournament scoring systems, rating > schemes, or anything else other than the rules that two players > need to know to play a game against each other. I also have no > problem with chess variants, or with one of the variants becoming > more popular than chess. What I object to is someone trying to > change the rules that determine how the game is played. Taking that statement literally, one might have expected you to complain when the 50-move rule was modified to allow more moves in some endgame positions proven by computer studies to require more than 50 moves to achieve mate. But I presume you mean that if someone wants his chess variant to become more popular than chess, you want it to happen honestly, by popular demand - not by bribing someone at the USCF, as it were, to hijack the existing infrastructure built up by people who joined it in order to play Chess the way it is. I have no problems with that position; I admire honesty and detest sneakiness in general. But there is another side to that argument. When they brought in the rule about drawing for the first two, and then three, moves of Checkers, it wasn't because someone wanted to egotistically put his stamp on the game. It was because there was a problem generally recognized as existing by the Checkers community. If Chess players worldwide recognize that Chess has problems similar in magnitude, then for the existing Chess federations to get directly involved with experimentation with Chess variants in an attempt to find a solution to the problems would be a legitimate activity. I'm dubious that the problems are, yet, that serious, and that a Chess variant would be effective in addressing them, but in principle this can be as legitimate in the Chess world as it was in the Checkers world. (And cleaning up Go scoring to handle bent four in the corner better is another example.) John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 11:25:48 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 5, 7:14 am, [email protected] wrote: > What will be interesting is if you start doing games where players can > fundamentally alter the game rules to hinder their opponent, and then > challenge the AI to do that. Do you mean inside the game? If so, that's just another rule for the game. You can define the movement of the chess pieces in terms of rule changes, if you really want to. I don't understand why you care about this. Or do you mean outside the game? Then it's politics, and using politics to redefine the game as to "hinder your opponent" is just an ugly metagame I'm not interested in playing - or writing an AI for. But for AI for a game with "rules that change" (or more properly, there is one position in the game which has an infinite number of possible moves), that can be done. MC programs in principle need only a description of the game in order to play it, these descriptions can be arbitrarily large. I recently learned that Cameron Browne (game designer and author of "Hex Strategy" and "Connection Games") has already done this, developed a language to describe games and and MC/UCT player that can play them well. He used it to evolve the game of Yavalath. There are games which are hard for MC prgrams. There are games which are easy for MC programs, but which are even easier for humans, like Go. But this proves nothing. I'm sure it would be easy to evolve an anti-human game with Browne's system. Indeed, I suspect the computer will play better on most large randomly designed rulesets.   Date: 05 Apr 2008 17:50:58 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" For the record, when I say that chess is fine the way it is or that chess isn't broken and does not need fixing, I am referring to Articles 1 through 14 of the FIDE Laws of Chess as documented at http://www.fide.com/official/handbook.asp?level=EE101, except where those articles assume that every game has an arbiter; two players need to be able to play a game without outside assistance and yet still have a defined set of rules. I have no problem with different kinds of clocks, tournament scoring systems, rating schemes, or anything else other than the rules that two players need to know to play a game against each other. I also have no problem with chess variants, or with one of the variants becoming more popular than chess. What I object to is someone trying to change the rules that determine how the game is played.   Date: 05 Apr 2008 11:03:45 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 10:55 am, [email protected] wrote: > It wasn't my intention to provide evidence of that. I guess my > stating that does show, if someone objects to what I am saying, they > are only proving my point that such individuals do exist, and believe > that the current way FIDE Chess is played is perfect. > > People have actually written they want to play the EXACT SAME GAME > that the likes of Kasparov, and other great chess masters in in the > past played. If this is what people want, then if you take out all > references to religion in my post, the same idea stands that chess is > seen as a perfect game with imperfect people in it. And that talk, > sounds like what I hear religious people talk about their religion. Chess is a game. If you don't like it, there are plenty of other choices. Checkers, Go, Backgammon, Monopoly... and even Chancellor Chess, Capablanca Chess, Hexagonal Chess, and on and on and on. Some people are indeed very happy with Chess as it is. They have gotten good at recognizing patterns on the chessboard, and have learned a lot of openings, and so on. So, if another variant of Chess came along, they wouldn't be that interested. Many professional chessplayers *do* have some interest in chess variants. They see them as a useful way to develop their general tactical and positional skills, especially for the opening phase, because most of the time, these skills will not be exercised then, due to book openings, but they're still needed in case the opponent goes out of book. They wouldn't want a variant to become *the* dominant game of Chess, though, as it would impair the value of their investment in learning. Could Chess change? A new version could supplant it if that game was much more fun. The new moves of the Queen and Bishop certainly juiced up Chess hundreds of years ago, but since then attempts at enlarging the board or adding a couple of new pieces have pretty much fallen flat. On the other hand, Checkers changed to a limited extent because it was seen as getting played out, and so in tournament play, first the first two moves, and then the first three moves, ended up being picked by a draw. There are rumblings of discontent in this area with respect to Chess as well, but the idea of being required to make opening moves at random is strongly rejected by most chessplayers. It goes against the spirit of the type of game they want to play when playing Chess, one ruled by skill alone. Fischerrandom is considered as an alternative by more chessplayers, but since not everyone was happy with that, I came up with my notion of another way to address that issue, should it be desired to do so. And now there is Seirawan Chess. So people looking for an alternative have plenty of choices. And if not enough people feel there is a problem to make any one of those choices prominent, I don't see a point in complaining about that. If I were convinced there was a serious problem in Chess at this time, of course, it would make sense to raise awareness about the problem. But it would have to be done tactfully, and raising awareness about a problem in connection with pitching a particular solution only makes people suspicious. Not being a famous Grandmaster, I don't expect people to have any particular inclination to honor me as the savior of Chess by playing Savard Chess forever more. It's easy enough to solve the problem of too much opening book with just about any variant, and Seirawan Chess, Fischerrandom, or my little notion will all do that on a longer-term basis. Giving partial credit for forcing stalemate, or even bare king, might help with too many draws, but it could as easily give White an advantage big enough to show consistently on the board, which could lead to very defensive play, making matters in general worse. But making chess more exciting, in the sense of putting more tactical fireworks into master games again - that would draw the crowds, but I do not, at this time, have an idea of how one could achieve that by means of a chess variant. The advance from the Romantic era to the Modern era of Chess wasn't due to more opening theory, but due to a change to a scientific and objective temperament, an emphasis on winning in the most efficient way one can as opposed to winning in style. So I think this would apply to variants of Chess as well as to orthodox Chess. Changing how people think, and encouraging masters engaged in competitive play to take unnecessary risks and make suboptimal moves, seem to me to be *very* difficult tasks, so making the change _without_ somehow changing the rules of Chess to make the desired behavior the winning behavior. Combining a way to introduce variety into Chess with something to change its balance as well, to push players to take risks to win, seems like what is needed. Of course, good defensive play by an opponent means that one can only win by taking risks - but if those risks usually mean losses, it won't happen. Another problem is that computers excel at analyzing variations, while they are not as good at positional play, so improving Chess in this way might make it more vulnerable to cheating, as if there weren't enough worries already. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 17:16:43 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: >Ok, what it sounds like what you are raising here is, how can chess >have a scoring system that can enable people who don't follow it to >quickly tell who is ahead. Do it like they do in televised poker: A computer evaluation of who is ahead is put on screen for the viewers, but cannot be seen by the players.   Date: 05 Apr 2008 10:01:55 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 5, 5:52 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 2:25 pm, Christopher Dearlove <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Back when I used to see the English Bridge Union's magazine, the > > bridge players had exactly the same concern (falling membership) > > and an analogous "silver bullet" solution (simplified conventions). > > > Me, I don't believe in silver bullets (that's why I picked that term). > > Did the Lone Ranger ever meet the Wolfman? > > But I agree with you that there is not going to be a way to increase > the popularity of Chess massively through a simple rules change. > > And, furthermore, a major rules change that creates a new game isn't > something that is likely to be imposed from the top. Instead, any new > version of Chess would have to gain popularity gradually, and there's > really no reason to expect any such version to get very far. > > John Savard I am of the belief that one of the issues variants and any changes that are run into with chess adapting, is that people think changing a single set of rules is the answer. Change the pawn, change the clock, change this, change that. This is thinking at the same level. I had suggested one possible approach. But I will stand by that the framework about thinking about chess will need to change some in order to have chess adapt. There will then be a distinct risk, if not done, chess does deadend, and some other game replaces it. Maybe Go ends up becoming the top game in the world, or XiangQi. You just don't know. I do believe thinking about change and an evolutionary approach would provide hope here. But then, this is is up for debate and discussion, like in the case of this thread. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 09:58:39 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 5, 5:48 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 4:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru > > no Abstract. > > Having encountered a mention of Hikaru no Go in my searches for > information on Go, I then heard a friend who was learning Japanese > note that he had seen that anime in Shonen Jump. I saw a few issues at > a local secondhand bookstore, but glancing through them, I was not > impressed; too many of the plots depended on people actually cheating > at Go, which I suspect is just as rare as cheating at Chess in direct > over-the-board play - that is, virtually nonexistent. (Cheating by > computer consultation, on the other hand, is a big problem, but that's > quite different from moving stones or knocking down one's opponent's > hand...) > > John Savard So, you are saying if it is shown that a player is channeling the spirit of Bobby Fischer, they should be banned from a chess tournament? :-) Or, were you saying that the main character went against cheaters? By the way, when I was running a game tournament at a local convention, someone in a wheel chair who depended on his brother's help, to actually play. He told his brother the moves, and his brother played. Would this be acceptable? As for Hikaru No Go, it has resulted in a worldwide interest in Go. It has done what Fischer did with Chess, but doesn't rest on the stability of a single person to be able to sustain it. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 09:55:25 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 1:38 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 8:00 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > > > [email protected] wrote: > > >And my comments about considering a change in the chess rules is > > >considered heresy by you. > He may be making an untrue statement, but he is not making _that_ > untrue statement. I will state I did engage in a bit of hyperbole, but I have found that when a game ends up getting very serious dedication to it, it does take on religious overtones. Any suggestions to any change are seen as heresy of a sort. So, while I end up overstating from a point of absurdity, out of the intent for people to disagree and say, "Now now, we aren't THAT intolerant, are we?" it is done in order to then discuss the possible future and changes. I do recall a quote (I forget whom or where) that said something like chess is too serious of a game to be seen as play, and too unconnected to the rest of life to be taken seriously. Someone else can find the right stating of that quote. That does remind me of a Steve Wright quote that he doesn't play boardgames because he doesn't like to buy problems that come in a box (said as part of an interview, not part of his comedy routine, but you do see where his humor comes from). > His remark does not mean "you consider changing the rules of Chess to > be contrary to the essentials of Christian belief, hence heretical", > it means "you are among those chess players who have an intense > emotional reaction to the idea of changing the rules of Chess, based > on a rigid, irrational attachment to the rules as they are, such that > your view of changing the rules of Chess is akin to the reaction of > certain types of religious people to what they view as heresy". And while no one will actually admit they hold such views, I would say that everyone who plays chess knows of someone who is more rigid in their views than they are. > Given what his statement actually means, and would be understood to > mean by the average reader, it may still be an unfair characterization > of your views in this matter. But by playing the confrontational game > with him, you're *providing* evidence that the latter statement might > be true. I have posted multiple messages on chess.misc regarding variants to chess, and so on. I have found some people have displayed a dogmatism in response, that my writing this (and I was even thinking of not posting this on chess.misc) would end up generating the exact "HERESY" type comments that were made in the past, so I end up with a slight nose tweak, stick that (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists). If one is a FIDE chess purists, what I said would be considered to be heresy. I am curious though, did I call ANYONE on here a FIDE chess purist? I said this: "I will acknowledge that this is potentially heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider it handed down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is meant to last FOREVER". Does this fit anyone here? Do you know of anyone who can fit that? You know, you want to do Bughouse, and they look at you funny. You want to play speed chess, and the consider it wrong. For someone who considers that chess it is now, is perfect (but the only problems are greedy people doing power plays), then the end result would be heresy to discuss whether or not something can change over time. > Even though you would still be providing absolutely no evidence of an > objection to changes in the rules of chess that is of a theological > nature. It wasn't my intention to provide evidence of that. I guess my stating that does show, if someone objects to what I am saying, they are only proving my point that such individuals do exist, and believe that the current way FIDE Chess is played is perfect. People have actually written they want to play the EXACT SAME GAME that the likes of Kasparov, and other great chess masters in in the past played. If this is what people want, then if you take out all references to religion in my post, the same idea stands that chess is seen as a perfect game with imperfect people in it. And that talk, sounds like what I hear religious people talk about their religion. - Rich     Date: 05 Apr 2008 17:28:28 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: > >Quadibloc wrote: > >> He may be making an untrue statement, but he is not making _that_ >> untrue statement. > >I will state I did engage in a bit of hyperbole, but I have found that >when a game ends up getting very serious dedication to it, it does >take on religious overtones. Any suggestions to any change are seen >as heresy of a sort. So, while I end up overstating from a point of >absurdity, out of the intent for people to disagree and say, "Now now, >we aren't THAT intolerant, are we?" it is done in order to then >discuss the possible future and changes [...] so I end up with a slight >nose tweak Is it OK if I accuse you of all sorts of things that are not true and dismiss it as a "slight nose tweak"? Or is being an asshole reserved for you alone? >I am curious though, did I call ANYONE on here a FIDE chess purist? You called me a heretic to my face. "And my comments about considering a change in the chess rules is considered heresy by you." You might want to make a note when you insult someone so you will know why they are so pissed off at you.     Date: 05 Apr 2008 13:13:18 From: Chess One Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" I see a long way back along the thread that a proposal was put forth on 'philosophical' basis. In fact it was the type of philosophic argument which is also termed 'metaphysical'. That means that no one owned the opinion put forth, thus it was argumentation. The thesis states that chess is stuck - but does not say for whom. Part from an individual becoming 'stuck' at a certain level its stuckness is not so evident at all, nevermind changing the nature of the game to fix what is, after all, common to almost all chess players - reaching a temporary or permanent plateau where further improvement is elusive. In that sense what is stuck is often the will to be self-critical and examine weaknesses, and a concommitant lack of will to study deeper in order to become unstuck. I am not saying this lack of will is a bad thing, but other things in life also require will, time, commitment, and rewards from chess perhaps do not compete, neither 'should' they. Some people become stuck because of rote learning, and need to recognise that 'cramming' material of others can only provide a limited amount of progression, and the amount retained cannot usefully be increased because it cannot be deployed during actual play. The route to 'unstick' this plateau effect is to attend more to looking than to remembering. Visual factors are the greatest stimulus to memory - and deep chess memory is not any sequence of moves, but pattern recognitions. and the important thing that every chess player should know is that these perceived patterns are learned without conscious effort by the act of playing chess itself, or by employing the will to solve game-diagrams. In terms of performance time - the pattern recognitions cannot be recognised if the frontal lobes are busy straining to remember what to do from material learned elsewhere. This situation is true for almost all players of complex strategy games, and to be 'stuck' in this is only to understand that one must get stuck-into it more for clarity to appear. Phil Innes   Date: 05 Apr 2008 09:51:01 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 10:17 am, [email protected] wrote: > Too bad I can't find any info on it. Anyone have any URL links to > Intense Chess. I don't even see it up on the chessvariants site. Intense Chess is not that much different from standard four-player chess in its normal form, but they also have two-player and three- player rules. The article on Intense Chess in D. B. Pritchard's _Encyclopedia of Chess Variants_ has a photo of the three Polgar sisters sitting down to play a game. My own page, at http://www.quadibloc.com/chess/ch0206.htm mentions the main unique feature of Intense Chess: once one player's King is checkmated, that King, and the other pieces of that player, are immediately removed from the board. This is unlike traditional four-player Chess, where both Kings in a partnership must become simultaneously checkmated for a victory for the other side to take place. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 09:17:47 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 10:33 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 5, 5:53 am, Ed Murphy <[email protected]> wrote: > > > [email protected] wrote: > > > On Apr 3, 10:30 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to > > >> address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, > > >> and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're > > >> not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the > > >> issue of the popularity of Chess. > > > > I googled Polgar sisters variants in google and your post here comes > > > up in the top 10. Go figure. Anyone know what variants the Polgars > > > play? > > > Googling (Polgar chess variant) produces some more viable-looking > > results. IOW, the answer may be different for each sister (actually > > the first hit explains some variants suggested by their father). > > When I posted, I was thinking of the commercial variant Intense Chess > which featured at least one of the Polgar sisters in advertisements. > > John Savard Too bad I can't find any info on it. Anyone have any URL links to Intense Chess. I don't even see it up on the chessvariants site. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 09:12:09 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 7:53 am, Ed Murphy <[email protected] > wrote: > Speaking as an amateur follower of both games, football is easier to > partially understand, because more aspects of it follow simple linear > scales that routinely vary widely: > > 1) Which team is behind on points? By how many? How much time do > they have left to try to catch up? > > 2) Which team has possession, i.e. is in a short-term position to > score more points? How close are they to a scoring position, > i.e. where is the line of scrimmage, what down is it, and how > far must they advance the ball to reset to first down? > > 3) What are each team's specific strengths and weaknesses? What > strategies do these dictate? (This is where it gets complex.) > > The closest obvious analogy in chess is "which player is behind on > captured pieces?". Beyond that, what would a similar breakdown of > positional analysis look like? Ok, what it sounds like what you are raising here is, how can chess have a scoring system that can enable people who don't follow it to quickly tell who is ahead. The issue then is finding the right sport to equate it to, in order to come up with the right way to do a scoring system for the people who are not able to follow. To this end, I would suggest looking at boxing. The number of conditions boxers are in exceeds what happens with chess. There is a lot more angles moves can take, and so on. If you go mixed martial arts, even more. Both chess and boxing have the equivalent of a knockout also (in chess, that is checkmate). But the subtleties might get missed. In the event there isn't a knockout (aka checkmate in chess), the judges decide who should come out on top. While I am not suggesting that subjective judges need to be done for chess, what I am saying is that there may be a potential way to quickly show people who don't play chess, who is ahead. People who don't follow chess then could perhaps latch onto a player and root for them, and then learn the game. Just my take on it, figure out some way to communicate quickly who is leading in a chess match to people who don't play chess. Chess has gravitated this way with the use of the clock, and less time (speed game), so it is happening anyhow now. Would need to perhaps improve the graphics, analysis and pacing of the moves to show people. - Rich   Date: 05 Apr 2008 07:36:25 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 7:49 am, SBD <[email protected] > wrote: > Wasn't it Spielmann who > said that Alekhine's combinative play was not difficult, he could have > made the same combinations easily *if only* he could get those same > positions on the board? It was the getting there that was hard, and I > think that is why opening play is increasingly emphasized - And not just opening play - *positional* play. One doesn't have to look hard for this - Fred Reinfeld's books of Chess instruction emphasize positional play on the basis that it is the small accumulation of positional superiorities that allow a player to win with a sound Queen sacrifice or some such thing. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 07:33:21 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 5:53 am, Ed Murphy <[email protected] > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > > On Apr 3, 10:30 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to > >> address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, > >> and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're > >> not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the > >> issue of the popularity of Chess. > > > I googled Polgar sisters variants in google and your post here comes > > up in the top 10. Go figure. Anyone know what variants the Polgars > > play? > > Googling (Polgar chess variant) produces some more viable-looking > results. IOW, the answer may be different for each sister (actually > the first hit explains some variants suggested by their father). When I posted, I was thinking of the commercial variant Intense Chess which featured at least one of the Polgar sisters in advertisements. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 06:49:42 From: SBD Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 5, 7:49 am, Nick Wedd <[email protected] > wrote: > > It seems to me there's a relevant and obvious difference between chess > and football. When I watch a football game, I can think "I could have > done that myself, if I were fitter". Ok, it's not true, I couldn't > really have done it, but I can understand what the guy did, and I can > imagine my doing it. But in chess, I don't find myself thinking "I > could have done that myself, if I were cleverer". I would think you are in the minority then. Wasn't it Spielmann who said that Alekhine's combinative play was not difficult, he could have made the same combinations easily *if only* he could get those same positions on the board? It was the getting there that was hard, and I think that is why opening play is increasingly emphasized - the thinking being, if I can get to a (superior, equal) position at move x in a certain position type against a (GM, IM, master), I could win/ draw the game!   Date: 05 Apr 2008 13:49:58 From: Nick Wedd Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" In message <[email protected] >, Ed Murphy <[email protected] > writes >[email protected] wrote: > >> On Apr 3, 10:30 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: >>> I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to >>> address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, >>> and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're >>> not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the >>> issue of the popularity of Chess. >> >> I googled Polgar sisters variants in google and your post here comes >> up in the top 10. Go figure. Anyone know what variants the Polgars >> play? > >Googling (Polgar chess variant) produces some more viable-looking >results. IOW, the answer may be different for each sister (actually >the first hit explains some variants suggested by their father). > >>> You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you >>> do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. > >> Football, the game itself, is >> FAR more complicated than chess. It is compared to chess, because >> chess is a simplistic analogy to have people relate to it. It has >> multiple ways you can score in it, a bunch of rules governing how the >> pieces on the board can move, more than chess. It also has multiple >> phases, unlike chess. Yes, football is on TV. It is because the NFL >> made it TV friendly back then. Had it not done that, it wouldn't be >> where it is today. It would be even less than hockey is. I believe >> that it wouldn't even be necessary to change the basic time controls >> either. Sure, change the scoring a bit, so you get closure, but for >> TV, you can do time compression. > >Speaking as an amateur follower of both games, football is easier to >partially understand, because more aspects of it follow simple linear >scales that routinely vary widely: > > 1) Which team is behind on points? By how many? How much time do > they have left to try to catch up? > > 2) Which team has possession, i.e. is in a short-term position to > score more points? How close are they to a scoring position, > i.e. where is the line of scrimmage, what down is it, and how > far must they advance the ball to reset to first down? > > 3) What are each team's specific strengths and weaknesses? What > strategies do these dictate? (This is where it gets complex.) > >The closest obvious analogy in chess is "which player is behind on >captured pieces?". Beyond that, what would a similar breakdown of >positional analysis look like? It seems to me there's a relevant and obvious difference between chess and football. When I watch a football game, I can think "I could have done that myself, if I were fitter". Ok, it's not true, I couldn't really have done it, but I can understand what the guy did, and I can imagine my doing it. But in chess, I don't find myself thinking "I could have done that myself, if I were cleverer". Nick -- Nick Wedd [email protected]   Date: 05 Apr 2008 02:52:58 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 2:25 pm, Christopher Dearlove <[email protected] > wrote: > Back when I used to see the English Bridge Union's magazine, the > bridge players had exactly the same concern (falling membership) > and an analogous "silver bullet" solution (simplified conventions). > > Me, I don't believe in silver bullets (that's why I picked that term). Did the Lone Ranger ever meet the Wolfman? But I agree with you that there is not going to be a way to increase the popularity of Chess massively through a simple rules change. And, furthermore, a major rules change that creates a new game isn't something that is likely to be imposed from the top. Instead, any new version of Chess would have to gain popularity gradually, and there's really no reason to expect any such version to get very far. John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 02:48:10 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 4:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru > no Abstract. Having encountered a mention of Hikaru no Go in my searches for information on Go, I then heard a friend who was learning Japanese note that he had seen that anime in Shonen Jump. I saw a few issues at a local secondhand bookstore, but glancing through them, I was not impressed; too many of the plots depended on people actually cheating at Go, which I suspect is just as rare as cheating at Chess in direct over-the-board play - that is, virtually nonexistent. (Cheating by computer consultation, on the other hand, is a big problem, but that's quite different from moving stones or knocking down one's opponent's hand...) John Savard   Date: 05 Apr 2008 02:43:28 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 11:49 pm, [email protected] wrote: > But not to be able to cut > through, and not to the place where the masses even know there is > something like the Olympics involving chess, going on in China. Given the current unpleasantness in Tibet, it's probably just as well nobody knows about this choice of venue. John Savard   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:49:17 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 7:44 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > People certainly do play a lot of Checkers and Monopoly at home > without elevating competitive play of either of those games to > anything above insignificance. > > Public interest in playing Chess will sell chess sets - and increase > the pool of chess talent. Public interest in competitive Chess will > increase the prizes paid to the winners of competitions. That interest > will presumably increase if more people play Chess. > > More to the point, the fact that the following of high level Chess is > weak is what is perceived as the problem. And this is why public awareness of chess, competing for mindshare, is important. You end up with the pie shrinking and pettiness growing, and cranks proposing lawsuits that would be nothing if you were growing, but actually are potentially fatal when you are not. In other words, what you see today. > High level Chess today indeed has serious problems, many of which > result from fighting over a share of a much smaller pie. > > If FIDE hadn't been hauled off to Turkmenistan, if all was sweetness > and light in the USCF, however, I doubt that it would really make much > difference to decisions of individuals at home to play Chess rather > than, oh, say, Mortal Kombat II or whatever. And when you are in a place where the masses have an obscene number of choices with their time, if you are fighting for that attention, you end up losing their attention. With chess, there isn't even anything really new that can be done with a chess program. The AI defeats most people, and the feature list doesn't grow. It isn't like you can turn it into a Madden franchise either, which you can sell people a new version every year. Well, not the way it is now. Therefore, there isn't a lot of apparent money floating about, so the media isn't interested. Again, it fails to cut through the noise. The game can still survive, as people don't get to fully master it. It also had name recognition, so people acquire it. But not to be able to cut through, and not to the place where the masses even know there is something like the Olympics involving chess, going on in China. You get less coverage than the Goodwill Games had. Of course, individuals in the chess community will rationalize this by saying the masses are too stupid to get it, and use the lack of media attention as a badge of honor. - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:38:43 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 10:30 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to > address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, > and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're > not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the > issue of the popularity of Chess. I googled Polgar sisters variants in google and your post here comes up in the top 10. Go figure. Anyone know what variants the Polgars play? > You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you > do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. That is where > the limit to the popularity of Chess comes from, and a change to the > rules to fix that would only destroy Chess! (Smess, anyone?) > > I would love for our society to become more intellectually-oriented. > Perhaps someday DNA therapy will raise the average level of > intelligence to that of a genius. But that is in the far future. Are you saying chess is too complicated for most people? This line will be said by some people as a rationalization for it not being able to be followed, or recruiting new people into it. It is like chess is for brains, and not idiots (implying the mass of people, who if chess actually got decent ratings, would be able to generate enough money to make it more viable professionally). Football, the game itself, is FAR more complicated than chess. It is compared to chess, because chess is a simplistic analogy to have people relate to it. It has multiple ways you can score in it, a bunch of rules governing how the pieces on the board can move, more than chess. It also has multiple phases, unlike chess. Yes, football is on TV. It is because the NFL made it TV friendly back then. Had it not done that, it wouldn't be where it is today. It would be even less than hockey is. I believe that it wouldn't even be necessary to change the basic time controls either. Sure, change the scoring a bit, so you get closure, but for TV, you can do time compression. This issue of getting on TV and working is important. The World Mind Sports Games, which is like the olympics, but covers chess, etc... will be in China this year. The TV rights aren't being picked up in North American. The reason? Because no one has found a way to get chess to work on TV. If one feels this is impossible, then one is going to look at NO chance of chess ever getting recognized by the IOC as a genuine olympic event. In addition, without the TV, the other games going, such as Chinese Chess, Checkers, etc... aren't going to get the funds needed to get their players to there. In Checkers, America is sending TWO players. This issue is too important to say it is impossible, or doesn't matter, or everything is fine. It does matter. It actually matters enough that is why I am involved with this. > But I have no illusions, unlike our original poster, that this will > save the world or even boost the popularity of Chess. I just wish to > offer an alternative that might be less uncomfortable than some of the > others proposed, as a way to have a kind of Chess without a large body > of opening theory, should that be desired. Did you mention this alternative? I lost it in the flood of posts if you have. > Making sure to steer clear of Gothic Chess, I have provided an > alternate version for the mere 10 x 8 board now, but with only 216 > variants, if it ever did become really popular, I suppose that > extensive opening theory for each one of those variants would not be > beyond human ingenuity over time. As far as I know, Gothic has only ONE set up, which they patented, and you are locked into. There is Capablanca Random Chess, with 40,000 openings. But all this merely adds more the same, like Sammy's "Grand Chess". Oh there are plenty of other reasons besides what you said regarding Gothic Chess. A lot have to do with being sued for looking the wrong way. I am not going to go into details, but the nature matches the chess.politics newsgroup in its nature. That is all I will say. I may have to deal with the Gothic Chess people sometime down the road actually, so I could be wrong here in my understanding of things with them. I just heard a lot of bad stories about it. > As to making Chess more of a fighting game and less defensive... Pawns > are the soul of Chess, as Phildor noted. But I have no idea how to > change the move of the Pawn to change Chess in that fashion! Partial > credit for stalemate and bare King might help - or hurt. The pawns do establish the lines of play and protect. They are the foundation of every game. What I will say is when I have played around with Zillions and IAGO Chess, the pawn structure gets blow away. This results in almost no draws actually. The trend tends also to be for black to win more, when you have reserves. Haven't played with Seirawan Chess, which forces the Capablanca pieces in early though, as the Seirawan group didn't want a Zillions adaptation done. As for the baring the king, that was a victory condition prior to the mad queen, I believe. It was considered a minor victory, as opposed to a checkmate. What had happened along the way was the mad queen changed everything and the minor victory was removed, because it was felt it wasn't necessary. - Rich     Date: 05 Apr 2008 04:53:33 From: Ed Murphy Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: > On Apr 3, 10:30 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: >> I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to >> address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, >> and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're >> not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the >> issue of the popularity of Chess. > > I googled Polgar sisters variants in google and your post here comes > up in the top 10. Go figure. Anyone know what variants the Polgars > play? Googling (Polgar chess variant) produces some more viable-looking results. IOW, the answer may be different for each sister (actually the first hit explains some variants suggested by their father). >> You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you >> do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. > Football, the game itself, is > FAR more complicated than chess. It is compared to chess, because > chess is a simplistic analogy to have people relate to it. It has > multiple ways you can score in it, a bunch of rules governing how the > pieces on the board can move, more than chess. It also has multiple > phases, unlike chess. Yes, football is on TV. It is because the NFL > made it TV friendly back then. Had it not done that, it wouldn't be > where it is today. It would be even less than hockey is. I believe > that it wouldn't even be necessary to change the basic time controls > either. Sure, change the scoring a bit, so you get closure, but for > TV, you can do time compression. Speaking as an amateur follower of both games, football is easier to partially understand, because more aspects of it follow simple linear scales that routinely vary widely: 1) Which team is behind on points? By how many? How much time do they have left to try to catch up? 2) Which team has possession, i.e. is in a short-term position to score more points? How close are they to a scoring position, i.e. where is the line of scrimmage, what down is it, and how far must they advance the ball to reset to first down? 3) What are each team's specific strengths and weaknesses? What strategies do these dictate? (This is where it gets complex.) The closest obvious analogy in chess is "which player is behind on captured pieces?". Beyond that, what would a similar breakdown of positional analysis look like?   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:17:03 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 10:43 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > It was a surprise to me as well. Don't know how I missed it for so long. > I thought that GESS stood for Gene Expression Statistical System... :) > > Looks REALLY interesting! It is an interesting game. I saw it in Scientific American years ago, and saw a Zillions adaptation of it. If you haven't gotten Zillions, then get ahold of it, so you can try GESS and other games for it. I am using it now to playtest stuff. Zillions provides a way to see how a new chess variant can play. - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:14:44 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 4:26 am, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 3, 3:07 am, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, since it has a bigger game > > tree. Of course, computers are improving there too, but at least it > > has a little time left. > > > Then there's the game of Gess, which seems to have been deliberately > > devised to be a game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily difficult > > for computers. > > And I'm suprised you mention Gess here, since I've never heard of > it :-) I have heard of Arimaa and Havannah, though, and my impression > is that the only reason these "designed for humans" games haven't been > beaten by computers yet is that so few are working on it. No game > deserves the label computer resistant unless academic programmers have > been working on it for at least ten years, IMO. Let's see if the prize for Arimaa gets over $100,000. That might do things. Anyhow, a game like Go faces issues regarding the AI being able to beat it. What will be interesting is if you start doing games where players can fundamentally alter the game rules to hinder their opponent, and then challenge the AI to do that. The rule changes are set up to strengthen or weaken what the players do go at. In other words, it is more playing the player than the board. To this end, will an AI be able to keep up with humans, and can such a game be a true abstract strategy game? - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:12:03 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 3:27 am, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > You are ambitious on the behalf of abstract games, I respect that. But > I just don't agree that we need to change chess to "buy it another > 1000 years" or even a hundred. For one thing, Chess will live on even > if it doesn't become mainstream (or mainstream enough for you). For > the other, Chess has not stopped evolving, although it may look > superficially like it. > > It's just that today, the benefit of playing with well-established > rules we've spent decades exploring outweighs the benefits that can be > had from tweaking them. The chess players say so, by continuing to > prefer it. It's their call to make - sorry if I'm wrong, but I don't > think either of us (or Sanny) are good enough Chess players to decide > the future of that game. We're just not the main stakeholders in this. > > If Chess really was in danger of being "solved" or turned into a less > satisfying game, steps would be taken, like they were in competition > Checkers. Chess players would then start to switch over more > permanently to these conservative variants that various grandmasters > have proposed. The thing is that there is momentum in place with chess that keeps it as is. The rules also favor the current champion to push draws. Players on the lower levels, which doesn't matter to the media, don't see this at all. And then there is the whole political mess that is causing the game to not consider new options, but to rally around the rules, as they are, because it is the rare island of stability. Put all these things together, and you aren't going to have any change going on at all. This goes all way from Reformed Chess with the new pawn, to the use of a Bronstein clock, or even something as simple as a change in the scoring system to change ties. Things on the whole are set up that the momentum of tradition squashes anything else, eventhough people may keep to themselves they would want this change or that. If you don't think this momentum is an issue, consider checkers. The tournament checkers sets are red and white checkers on a green and pale board. Why aren't these sets available, yet checkers is still sold? It is the momentum of tradition, which has had an impact on professional checkers, by the way. It is red and black checkers on a red and black board. This is because this is how it always has been done, over 100 years now. People buy them because they are the only thing available. What I was considering and proposing is something that not a single person would do. But, proposing a possible framework for people to experiment in and develop a consensus over, that would integrate the fullness of chess into it. It would also allow for an experiential base by which the chess community could then be able to try out new options, be accepted, and be able to adjust how chess is played the way the NFL makes needed changes to football, in order to facilitate its growth. All sports do this, by the way, well at least the ones that want to keep growing. Please state what similar changes chess has made over the past 100 years to facilitate growth? Has it done any? And for those who think that ties are the norm, they use tie-breaker methods in soccer even, and also NHL hockey uses a shootout. But chess isn't a sport, right? So if someone is going to argue that, then why argue in defense of ties by bringing up soccer (football)? - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 22:01:48 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 3, 6:13 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 3, 2:10 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > > Changing the rules of chess won't change that. > > Certainly it is possible to change that by changing the rules of > chess, and I can prove it. > > 1) Football is presented on TV in the United States, and is highly > popular. > > 2) Football has rules by which it is played. > > 3) Therefore, if you change the rules of Chess to the rules of > football, it could attract public interest. Actually, back in the early days of NFL football, they did change the rules of the game, to make it work better over television. And they keep tweaking the rules every year. Sometimes, they even fundamentally changed the scoring. They added a 2-point conversion, for example. That fundamentally changed the game. To say that no changes can be made in ANY manner to generate interest, and get spectators, is to give up before even thinking it through. It is an immensely lazy way out to justify things as they are now. > Of course, if one adds certain conditions to your statement, to make > it: > > Changing the rules of Chess, subject to the constraint that the new > rules still describe a game that would be recognizable as Chess, would > not significantly affect the popularity of Chess in the United States. > > then, that statement may very well be true. Changing TOURNAMENT scoring, how time-control is done, and reducing the number of ties, so that a tournament produces a clear winner could do that. My question originally had to do with more to do with where a game like chess can end up, as it keeps getting played. As it is now, innovation gets pushed further and futher out. These other questions also relate to the subject. > After all, major Go tournaments and major Checkers tournaments and > major Reversi tournaments are not televised in the United States > either. > > Thus, one might well consider it to be a reasonable conclusion that > even with a serious marketing effort, sufficiently large audiences > would not be attracted to, say, a Tsiu Shogi tournament *either*. Even > if Tsiu Shogi were modified to have drops just like modern Shogi (they > could always remove the Drunk Elephant from the board to balance it > out, if it was felt it was necessary). They do all face the same fundamental issues, which is why none of them are on TV. Poker is, because it resolved these issues. Backgammon is close, but hasn't broken through. Straight up pure abstract strategy games haven't yet. > Live telecasts of games of Jetan with living pieces from Barsoom, even > assuming capture is by replacement and not a fight to the death, might > well attract interest... but the real Mars is uninhabited, so we don't > have that opportunity. And again, you see the same issue brought up again here. How do you get people quickly up to speed on a game enough they can follow it actually being played? And beyond this, have enough drama around the board that they can follow it. Those are key issues. How does it have sufficient drama to interest people who don't play? > Still, the Cold War caused Americans to pay close attention to first > Van Cliburn and then R. J. Fischer. So, I would think that if the next > President thinks it is vital to get more American children interested > in science and engineering, because America needs some weapon more > horrible than the hydrogen bomb to survive, perhaps we could have a > cultural change towards an environment more congenial to the > popularity of Chess. Or, the effort might be directed to beginning the > colonization of outer space, which would be more congenial to the long- > term survival of Chess, among other things. What I will say that there are trends going on today that should make things more condusive to chess, and other abstract strategy games being able to break through. There is the whole Sudoku and paper puzzle craze going on now. There is Nintendo pushing the whole Brain Development bit. There is poker out there also, and the media is seeking the next thing. If someone can get the actually play of the games to be interest to people, then the World Mind Sports Games might actually lead to a breakthrough here. It is happening. It is just a few things are hindering it from breaking through. - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 21:50:19 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 6:32 pm, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 4, 10:25 pm, Christopher Dearlove <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Back when I used to see the English Bridge Union's magazine, the > > bridge players had exactly the same concern (falling membership) > > and an analogous "silver bullet" solution (simplified conventions). > > > Me, I don't believe in silver bullets (that's why I picked that term). > > This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru > no Abstract. Well, there IS Hikaru No Go, which has causes a surge in Go. XiangQi is attempting its own. Next up, let's see if Chess can get its own anime. And yes, I will be looking to see if I can get an "Hikaru no Abstract" anime done. Plotline would have the characters playing a different abstract strategy game each episode/issue. - Rich   Date: 04 Apr 2008 15:32:39 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 10:25 pm, Christopher Dearlove <[email protected] > wrote: > Back when I used to see the English Bridge Union's magazine, the > bridge players had exactly the same concern (falling membership) > and an analogous "silver bullet" solution (simplified conventions). > > Me, I don't believe in silver bullets (that's why I picked that term). This thread has about come to the point where someone calls for Hikaru no Abstract.   Date: 04 Apr 2008 21:25:24 From: Christopher Dearlove Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) Back when I used to see the English Bridge Union's magazine, the bridge players had exactly the same concern (falling membership) and an analogous "silver bullet" solution (simplified conventions). Me, I don't believe in silver bullets (that's why I picked that term). -- Christopher Dearlove   Date: 04 Apr 2008 12:33:54 From: Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod) Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 3:03 am, "Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod)" <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 2, 6:07 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote: > > Then there's the game of Gess, which seems > > to have been deliberately devised to be a > > game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily > > difficult for computers. > > > John Savard > > Sounds like Arimaa. Thank you for mentioning > Gess, I'll google on "Gess". I did. Gess is a wonderful idea. It was featured in Scientific American years ago, I think. For Arimaa, to emphasize it's logic, I would use cylinders of different heights for pieces, say in the 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 6 : 8 proportion, instead of the chess pieces or of elephant, giraffe, horse, dog, cat, rabbit. The cilinders can be gfently marked for a pleasant, aesthetic impression. Or they can be obtained by piling up checkers. The top checker must be of the rpoper color, but underneath one may use checkers of a different color to make it easier on the eyes. Best regards, Wlod   Date: 04 Apr 2008 10:43:20 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 11:38=A0am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > Given what his statement actually means, and would be understood to > mean by the average reader, it may still be an unfair characterization > of your views in this matter. In fact, given your post about Gess, it definitely is. John Savard   Date: 04 Apr 2008 10:38:07 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 8:00=A0am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >And my comments about considering a change in the chess rules is > >considered heresy by you. > Liar. =A0Either produce evidence that my opinions about chess are > based on religious beliefs or shut your trap. =A0I will not stand > by while you repeat the above lie again and again, always refusing > to back up your words with evidence. He may be making an untrue statement, but he is not making _that_ untrue statement. His remark does not mean "you consider changing the rules of Chess to be contrary to the essentials of Christian belief, hence heretical", it means "you are among those chess players who have an intense emotional reaction to the idea of changing the rules of Chess, based on a rigid, irrational attachment to the rules as they are, such that your view of changing the rules of Chess is akin to the reaction of certain types of religious people to what they view as heresy". Given what his statement actually means, and would be understood to mean by the average reader, it may still be an unfair characterization of your views in this matter. But by playing the confrontational game with him, you're *providing* evidence that the latter statement might be true. Even though you would still be providing absolutely no evidence of an objection to changes in the rules of chess that is of a theological nature. John Savard   Date: 04 Apr 2008 14:43:06 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Harald Korneliussen wrote: > >Quadibloc wrote: > >> I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, since it has a bigger game >> tree. Of course, computers are improving there too, but at least it >> has a little time left. >> >> Then there's the game of Gess, which seems to have been deliberately >> devised to be a game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily difficult >> for computers. > >And I'm suprised you mention Gess here, since I've never heard of >it :-) It was a surprise to me as well. Don't know how I missed it for so long. I thought that GESS stood for Gene Expression Statistical System... :) Looks REALLY interesting! References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gess http://users.bigpond.net.au/gazzar/links.html http://users.bigpond.net.au/gazzar/rules.html http://www.chessvariants.org/crossover.dir/gess.html http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/washington/Gess/ http://www.archim.org.uk/eureka/53/gess.html http://www.chessvariants.com/crossover.dir/gess.html http://www.chessvariants.com/link2.dir/gessapplet.html   Date: 04 Apr 2008 14:09:38 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Quadibloc wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> I happen to like Fischer Random Chess (I don't like to call it >> "Chess960", because I think Bobby Fischer deserves credit for >> his invention) but it is not chess, and thus there is no need >> to "integrate it into the chess community." > >There was random chess before Fischer, but Fischer did develop a >particular version with certain reasonable limitations of how the >pieces should be placed. Yes. And, in my opinion, his was the better invention. The idea of randomizing the first and last ranks is snmething that anybody could have come up with. Doing so in such a way that the resulting game plays a lot more like chess was a big leap. The way he preserved symmetry and castling was, to my way of thinking, brilliant. -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 04 Apr 2008 04:47:03 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 4, 2:26 am, Harald Korneliussen <[email protected] > wrote: > And I'm suprised you mention Gess here, since I've never heard of > it :-) I heard of it some years ago because of a mention in one of the successor columns to Martin Gardner's beloved "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American. John Savard   Date: 04 Apr 2008 04:44:57 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 9:22 pm, "David Kane" <[email protected] > wrote: > "Quadibloc" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:3d837770-e043-4733-89af-875519c17cab@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com... > > > You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you > > do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. That is where > > the limit to the popularity of Chess comes from, and a change to the > > rules to fix that would only destroy Chess! (Smess, anyone?) > > This argument gets repeated enough that it's worth refuting. > First, following high level chess is not even popular among > those who play chess. People certainly do play a lot of Checkers and Monopoly at home without elevating competitive play of either of those games to anything above insignificance. Public interest in playing Chess will sell chess sets - and increase the pool of chess talent. Public interest in competitive Chess will increase the prizes paid to the winners of competitions. That interest will presumably increase if more people play Chess. More to the point, the fact that the following of high level Chess is weak is what is perceived as the problem. > Second, games that are even harder > to understand than chess, e.g. Go, manage to get more of > a following than chess does. There were times and places where Chess had a much larger following than it does today, proportionately. > I have never seen anyone provide a single bit of data in > support of the theory that chess' popularity is near some > inherent limit. Holding that belief, given that high level > chess has a number of obvious defects, is nothing more > than a mindless defense of the status quo. High level Chess today indeed has serious problems, many of which result from fighting over a share of a much smaller pie. If FIDE hadn't been hauled off to Turkmenistan, if all was sweetness and light in the USCF, however, I doubt that it would really make much difference to decisions of individuals at home to play Chess rather than, oh, say, Mortal Kombat II or whatever. It is an obvious reality that today competing distractions abound in a way they did not in past eras when Chess was much more popular. Since Chess _was_ more popular, it's not a question of an "inherent limit", but it is obvious that Chess is more intellectually demanding, and less immediately gratifying, than some other competing amusements. One reads articles, recently, noting that people in the Western world are not getting as much sleep as they used to. Urban expansion, plus certain changes to the housing market, plus conditions in the labor market, mean people have to spend longer driving or riding to work. This could well incline working people towards different types of amusement. But thoroughgoing social reform is something one would pursue for its own sake; it is out of the scope of an effort to promote Chess specifically. John Savard   Date: 04 Apr 2008 03:03:20 From: Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod) Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 6:07 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > > I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, > since it has a bigger game tree. Of course, > computers are improving there too, but at > least it has a little time left. At what level do they play today? Weiqi (Go) can always switch to 21x21 board. > Then there's the game of Gess, which seems > to have been deliberately devised to be a > game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily > difficult for computers. > > John Savard Sounds like Arimaa. Thank you for mentioning Gess, I'll google on "Gess". Over years I have read about several interesting chess variants. One of them allows to promote white (resp. black) pawns also on the 7th (resp. 2nd) row but not to a queen. Otherwise it is just chess :-) A very nice idea! Regards, Wlod   Date: 04 Apr 2008 02:39:52 From: Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod) Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 1:49 pm, [email protected] tells Sanny: > > > Christian Freeling had a game called "Grand Chess" > before you [Sanny] did. and requests: > Please [Sanny] change the name, [...] Sanny could call his game Sanchess (if this name is still available). Regards, Wlod   Date: 04 Apr 2008 02:33:46 From: Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod) Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 2:50 pm, [email protected] wrote: > On Apr 2, 1:27 pm, Sanny <[email protected]> wrote: > > [...] it would take me until next week to > get my pawns across the board, or my knight. > My personal preferences would have myself > falling asleep about a third of the way > through playing your game. Perhaps Sanny should test not 16x16 board but 16x12. Wlod   Date: 04 Apr 2008 01:40:34 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 4, 5:22 am, "David Kane" <[email protected] > wrote: > This argument gets repeated enough that it's worth refuting. > First, following high level chess is not even popular among > those who play chess. I am no chess player, but I logged on to look at Carlsen vs. Anand on Linares. So did a lot of other people. I see chess columns, I see several chess sites dedicated to commenting and analyzing these games, and I wonder why you say that?     Date: 04 Apr 2008 09:58:09 From: David Kane Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" "Harald Korneliussen" <[email protected] > wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On Apr 4, 5:22 am, "David Kane" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> This argument gets repeated enough that it's worth refuting. >> First, following high level chess is not even popular among >> those who play chess. > > I am no chess player, but I logged on to look at Carlsen vs. Anand on > Linares. So did a lot of other people. I see chess columns, I see > several chess sites dedicated to commenting and analyzing these games, > and I wonder why you say that? In the US, not a traditional chess country, I've seen estimates along the lines of 5 million players and 10's of million who know the rules. I'd be surprised if the sites you mention have more than a miniscule draw from that base.   Date: 04 Apr 2008 01:26:44 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 3, 3:07 am, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, since it has a bigger game > tree. Of course, computers are improving there too, but at least it > has a little time left. > > Then there's the game of Gess, which seems to have been deliberately > devised to be a game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily difficult > for computers. And I'm suprised you mention Gess here, since I've never heard of it :-) I have heard of Arimaa and Havannah, though, and my impression is that the only reason these "designed for humans" games haven't been beaten by computers yet is that so few are working on it. No game deserves the label computer resistant unless academic programmers have been working on it for at least ten years, IMO.   Date: 04 Apr 2008 00:27:46 From: Harald Korneliussen Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy You are ambitious on the behalf of abstract games, I respect that. But I just don't agree that we need to change chess to "buy it another 1000 years" or even a hundred. For one thing, Chess will live on even if it doesn't become mainstream (or mainstream enough for you). For the other, Chess has not stopped evolving, although it may look superficially like it. It's just that today, the benefit of playing with well-established rules we've spent decades exploring outweighs the benefits that can be had from tweaking them. The chess players say so, by continuing to prefer it. It's their call to make - sorry if I'm wrong, but I don't think either of us (or Sanny) are good enough Chess players to decide the future of that game. We're just not the main stakeholders in this. If Chess really was in danger of being "solved" or turned into a less satisfying game, steps would be taken, like they were in competition Checkers. Chess players would then start to switch over more permanently to these conservative variants that various grandmasters have proposed.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 23:57:38 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 8:22 pm, "David Kane" <[email protected] > wrote: > > I have never seen anyone provide a single bit of data in > support of the theory that chess' popularity is near some > inherent limit. Holding that belief, given that high level > chess has a number of obvious defects, is nothing more > than a mindless defense of the status quo. I believe, after reading various accounts, that Chess' popularity had been declining for decades before there was a boost inspired by the famous international competitions, which was then followed by further decline. Then the appearance of Chess on the Internet caused a surge in popularity. There's the added complication of an ever increasing number of other quality abstract games to choose from. But there should be some limit to Chess' peak popularity. For example, the percentage of people who play Chess ten times a year or more, in real life or online, will never exceed x percent. I'll hazard a timid guess that x is less than 20. I don't know how near Chess' popularity is to its limit now, or even if the peak has already passed, but yes, there should be some limit. And there should be a lower limit too. Chess' popularity, measured as described, shouldn't drop below y percent over the next millennium.     Date: 04 Apr 2008 09:42:55 From: David Kane Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" <[email protected] > wrote in message news:67261f68-becf-4e7e-8dfd-e4d784b0f67b@s19g2000prg.googlegroups.com... > On Apr 3, 8:22 pm, "David Kane" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I have never seen anyone provide a single bit of data in >> support of the theory that chess' popularity is near some >> inherent limit. Holding that belief, given that high level >> chess has a number of obvious defects, is nothing more >> than a mindless defense of the status quo. > > I believe, after reading various accounts, that Chess' popularity had > been declining for decades before there was a boost inspired by the > famous international competitions, which was then followed by further > decline. Then the appearance of Chess on the Internet caused a surge > in popularity. > > There's the added complication of an ever increasing number of other > quality abstract games to choose from. But there should be some limit > to Chess' peak popularity. For example, the percentage of people who > play Chess ten times a year or more, in real life or online, will > never exceed x percent. I'll hazard a timid guess that x is less than > 20. I don't know how near Chess' popularity is to its limit now, or > even if the peak has already passed, but yes, there should be some > limit. And there should be a lower limit too. Chess' popularity, > measured as described, shouldn't drop below y percent over the next > millennium. My claim wasn't that there is no limit, but that there is no evidence that we are near the limit. The usual "chess will never be as popular as [football, food, sex etc.]" is an irrelevancy.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 19:30:11 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 5:19 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > Quadibloc wrote: > >Regular chess is not all things to all people. It doesn't provide > >cheerleaders! > > You want me to put on a cheerleader outfit and fix that deficiency? :) > > Move to the left! Move to the Right! Castle, Castle, Fight Fight Fight! I know that the original poster is a little bit confrontational, but not, I think to an extreme degree; in other newsgroups, I've encountered much more contentious people with various strange theories of mathematics or cryptography or astronomy. I don't mind the thought of adding a new variant of Chess to help to address certain perceived problems; if Capablanca, Fischer, Seirawan, and the Polgar sisters have all been involved with variants, they're not entirely a bad idea. But they're no panacea - especially for the issue of the popularity of Chess. You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. That is where the limit to the popularity of Chess comes from, and a change to the rules to fix that would only destroy Chess! (Smess, anyone?) I would love for our society to become more intellectually-oriented. Perhaps someday DNA therapy will raise the average level of intelligence to that of a genius. But that is in the far future. Even Fischerrandom chess makes a mess of the opening layout, and prescribed openings, as they use in checkers, would seem antithetical to the spirit of Chess. This is why I thought that I would propose a different kind of randomized variant - add extra pieces with new powers to the layout, but choose them at random from a list! I thought that this was at least a somewhat novel idea - and it would be the least uncomfortable for people used to conventional Chess as a way to shake up the opening. But I have no illusions, unlike our original poster, that this will save the world or even boost the popularity of Chess. I just wish to offer an alternative that might be less uncomfortable than some of the others proposed, as a way to have a kind of Chess without a large body of opening theory, should that be desired. Making sure to steer clear of Gothic Chess, I have provided an alternate version for the mere 10 x 8 board now, but with only 216 variants, if it ever did become really popular, I suppose that extensive opening theory for each one of those variants would not be beyond human ingenuity over time. As to making Chess more of a fighting game and less defensive... Pawns are the soul of Chess, as Phildor noted. But I have no idea how to change the move of the Pawn to change Chess in that fashion! Partial credit for stalemate and bare King might help - or hurt. John Savard     Date: 03 Apr 2008 20:22:51 From: David Kane Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" "Quadibloc" <[email protected] > wrote in message news:3d837770-e043-4733-89af-875519c17cab@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com... > > You don't need to be an athlete to watch a game of football, but you > do need to be intelligent to understand a game of Chess. That is where > the limit to the popularity of Chess comes from, and a change to the > rules to fix that would only destroy Chess! (Smess, anyone?) This argument gets repeated enough that it's worth refuting. First, following high level chess is not even popular among those who play chess. Second, games that are even harder to understand than chess, e.g. Go, manage to get more of a following than chess does. I have never seen anyone provide a single bit of data in support of the theory that chess' popularity is near some inherent limit. Holding that belief, given that high level chess has a number of obvious defects, is nothing more than a mindless defense of the status quo.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 19:13:14 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 5:16 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > I happen to like Fischer Random Chess (I don't like to call it > "Chess960", because I think Bobby Fischer deserves credit for > his invention) but it is not chess, and thus there is no need > to "integrate it into the chess community." There was random chess before Fischer, but Fischer did develop a particular version with certain reasonable limitations of how the pieces should be placed. John Savard   Date: 03 Apr 2008 18:22:28 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 6:52 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > I think you need to focus. You are all over the map, first talking > about changing the rules of chess, then the rules for organizing > tournaments, now about chess federations. Pick one topic and discuss > that. Then, later, pick another and discuss that. And my comments about considering a change in the chess rules is considered heresy by you. "There is nothing wrong with the rules" is what you argue back. A large list can be mentioned pointing to this, and then the words come back there is nothing wrong. This is a statement which calls any changes to the rules as heresy. When I list a bunch of examples, they get ignored. Even your comment about Chess960 points to comments by you that anything not FIDE Chess isn't chess. Chess960 isn't chess, it is some other game, as if it it is Go or Checkers. Not that it is a VARIANT on chess, but another game. In other words, only FIDE Chess is chess. Anything else is entirely different game. And it is this mentality that will kill what is thought of as chess being able to adapt over time, crystalized in a perceived perfection (complete from time control down to the tournament scoring). By the way, good luck dealing with the draw issue. Oh, it isn't really any issue, only at the highest levels? Well, the highest levels are what the media cares about and what gets interest in a game. So, shoot, let's have 80%+ draws there, because that is what tradition says. Let's have the greatest argument be over Nigel Short demanding his opponent lose a game, because he refused to shake Mr. Short's hand. - Rich     Date: 04 Apr 2008 14:00:57 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: >And my comments about considering a change in the chess rules is >considered heresy by you. Liar. Either produce evidence that my opinions about chess are based on religious beliefs or shut your trap. I will not stand by while you repeat the above lie again and again, always refusing to back up your words with evidence.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 18:12:52 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 6:28 pm, Chris Mattern <[email protected] > wrote: > On 2008-04-03, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Apr 3, 4:24 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> [email protected] wrote: > >> >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. > > >> Evidence, please. > > > Read rec.games.chess.politics . If this isn't a sign of discontent, I > > don't know what is. Chess Federations in North America are at risk of > > Political usenet group is swamped by flamewars. Surely the end times are > upon us. What other games on Usenet have a group ending in politics? Does poker have this? > > You can go, "Oh that is just politics". If Chess were functioning > > correctly as a community at this point, do you think it would nearly > > have the issues it has? > > You haven't yet shown it *has* any issues, other than pointing at Usenet > flamewars, which are about as inevitable as sun coming up in the morning. > You seem to think that Chess in the past was free of cheating, controversy > and bitter denounciation. That's an illusion created by distance. The lawsuits aren't now part of usenet. They operate out of here. The past had these also, but it seemed to transcend those. The likes of the chess federations have less than 1% of the total number of people who play the game, as members. Chess was a game, in the past, that was able to adopt and evolve. Now all changes are locked into a political system, where people who want certain changes are told to leave the room, because what they have isn't chess. Actually what Chess is isn't what chess was when it migrated from the East into Europe. It actually had less mobility in the pieces. If the mentality of chess locked in its political climate where around today, the Mad Queen wouldn't be anywhere, the bulk would argue it wrecked the balance of the game, and those who liked it would of been told to get lost. Such a change would of labeled the person as mad as the queen they were proposing. > How much of a following? Who? What's the growth rate? *Facts*, not > vague pronouncements! Do YOU have numbers on the growth rates? How much do you see chess growing worldwide. Care to explain the state of the U.S Chess Federation today? Do you know the numbers on members joining? The only guaranteed known numbers of players are how many are joining a chess federation. Do you know if these numbers have increased or decreased? I do know that U.S Chess Federation relocated from several hours north of NYC, a major media capital to Tenn. for cost reasons. Do you have any idea why? - Rich   Date: 03 Apr 2008 23:19:10 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" Quadibloc wrote: >Regular chess is not all things to all people. It doesn't provide >cheerleaders! You want me to put on a cheerleader outfit and fix that deficiency? :) Move to the left! Move to the Right! Castle, Castle, Fight Fight Fight! -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 03 Apr 2008 22:52:38 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: >> [email protected] wrote: >> >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. >> >> Evidence, please. > >Read rec.games.chess.politics . If this isn't a sign of discontent, I >don't know what is. I agree. You don't know what a sign of discontent is. It sure as heck isn't the statistical sample of perhaps 1 out of every 100,000 players who post to a newsgroup. >Chess Federations in North America are at risk of >going under for one thing. When I said discontent with chess is >growing, I am referring to the whole of chess, not just the particular >FIDE rules. > >You can go, "Oh that is just politics". If Chess were functioning >correctly as a community at this point, do you think it would nearly >have the issues it has? I think you need to focus. You are all over the map, first talking about changing the rules of chess, then the rules for organizing tournaments, now about chess federations. Pick one topic and discuss that. Then, later, pick another and discuss that.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 15:29:44 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 3:02=A0pm, [email protected] wrote: > Chess960 is building a following, but as far as I know, it isn't > integrated into the chess community. =A0Why would Chess960 pick up a > following if there wasn't something there that regular chess isn't > providing? Glinski's hexagonal Chess has a following. For that matter, so does Go, and Checkers, and Monopoly, and even football! Regular chess is not all things to all people. It doesn't provide cheerleaders! So there may be many things that regular chess doesn't provide. The right question to ask, therefore, has two parts: Is Chess today failing to provide things that people who like Chess expect from it that it formerly provided, and Are other factors diminishing the number of people who are interested in Chess? If people are spending more time watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the Web, and this is the major factor, then changes to the rules of Chess won't help enough. Chess players will play to win, so one can't expect them to forego safe, defensive play if that is what is advantageous. The changes from the Romantic era to the Modern and Hypermodern eras resulted not from rules-specific advances in opening theory, but from a more general improvement in understanding of the game. John Savard   Date: 03 Apr 2008 15:15:57 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 3, 11:49=A0am, Erich Schneider <[email protected] > wrote: > "[email protected]" <[email protected]> writes: > > Making these occasional changes to Chess that you suggest doesn't > > really make sense. =A0Not everyone is going to agree on what the changes= > > should be, how often they should occur, etc. =A0The notion of keeping > > Chess "off balance" like this, to prevent anyone from ever becoming > > truly expert at the game is ill fated. > > Doesn't the US governing body for Mah Jongg do this every year? Or so > I've heard. There is indeed a U.S. Mah Jongg association that publishes a different set of bonus hands for each year, but because Mah Jongg is a game of chance to begin with, with each deal of the tiles making a new game, it probably is not done for the same purpose as changes to Chess would be made. So the benefit is simply a bit of change and excitement, not the breakup of a logjam of opening theory, nor any fundamental changes to the strategy of the game. John Savard   Date: 03 Apr 2008 15:13:30 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 3, 2:10=A0pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >Besides this, you don't even have Chess on TV. =A0It fails to > > draw at all. > Changing the rules of chess won't change that. Certainly it is possible to change that by changing the rules of chess, and I can prove it. 1) Football is presented on TV in the United States, and is highly popular. 2) Football has rules by which it is played. 3) Therefore, if you change the rules of Chess to the rules of football, it could attract public interest. Of course, if one adds certain conditions to your statement, to make it: Changing the rules of Chess, subject to the constraint that the new rules still describe a game that would be recognizable as Chess, would not significantly affect the popularity of Chess in the United States. then, that statement may very well be true. After all, major Go tournaments and major Checkers tournaments and major Reversi tournaments are not televised in the United States either. Thus, one might well consider it to be a reasonable conclusion that even with a serious marketing effort, sufficiently large audiences would not be attracted to, say, a Tsiu Shogi tournament *either*. Even if Tsiu Shogi were modified to have drops just like modern Shogi (they could always remove the Drunk Elephant from the board to balance it out, if it was felt it was necessary). Live telecasts of games of Jetan with living pieces from Barsoom, even assuming capture is by replacement and not a fight to the death, might well attract interest... but the real Mars is uninhabited, so we don't have that opportunity. Still, the Cold War caused Americans to pay close attention to first Van Cliburn and then R. J. Fischer. So, I would think that if the next President thinks it is vital to get more American children interested in science and engineering, because America needs some weapon more horrible than the hydrogen bomb to survive, perhaps we could have a cultural change towards an environment more congenial to the popularity of Chess. Or, the effort might be directed to beginning the colonization of outer space, which would be more congenial to the long- term survival of Chess, among other things. John Savard   Date: 03 Apr 2008 14:02:09 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On Apr 3, 4:24 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. > > Evidence, please. Read rec.games.chess.politics . If this isn't a sign of discontent, I don't know what is. Chess Federations in North America are at risk of going under for one thing. When I said discontent with chess is growing, I am referring to the whole of chess, not just the particular FIDE rules. You can go, "Oh that is just politics". If Chess were functioning correctly as a community at this point, do you think it would nearly have the issues it has? And let's take a look at Chess960. When they did a tournament for it, did anyone pick it up? Did FIDE have it as an official game? Chess960 is building a following, but as far as I know, it isn't integrated into the chess community. Why would Chess960 pick up a following if there wasn't something there that regular chess isn't providing? - Rich     Date: 04 Apr 2008 11:04:27 From: Phil Carmody Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] writes: > On Apr 3, 4:24 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > > [email protected] wrote: > > >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. > > > > Evidence, please. > > Read rec.games.chess.politics . If this isn't a sign of discontent, I > don't know what is. Has anyone ever questioned the existence of discontent? I think you were being asked for evidence that said discontent is growing, which was your claim. As one of the people most vociferously discontent with chess has just popped his clogs, one might say that recently the discontent has actually decreased. Phil -- Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all. -- Microsoft voice recognition live demonstration     Date: 03 Apr 2008 17:28:43 From: Chris Mattern Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" On 2008-04-03, [email protected] <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 3, 4:24 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: >> [email protected] wrote: >> >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. >> >> Evidence, please. > > Read rec.games.chess.politics . If this isn't a sign of discontent, I > don't know what is. Chess Federations in North America are at risk of Political usenet group is swamped by flamewars. Surely the end times are upon us. > going under for one thing. When I said discontent with chess is > growing, I am referring to the whole of chess, not just the particular > FIDE rules. > > You can go, "Oh that is just politics". If Chess were functioning > correctly as a community at this point, do you think it would nearly > have the issues it has? You haven't yet shown it *has* any issues, other than pointing at Usenet flamewars, which are about as inevitable as sun coming up in the morning. You seem to think that Chess in the past was free of cheating, controversy and bitter denounciation. That's an illusion created by distance. > > And let's take a look at Chess960. When they did a tournament for it, > did anyone pick it up? Did FIDE have it as an official game? > Chess960 is building a following, but as far as I know, it isn't > integrated into the chess community. Why would Chess960 pick up a > following if there wasn't something there that regular chess isn't > providing? > How much of a following? Who? What's the growth rate? *Facts*, not vague pronouncements! -- Christopher Mattern NOTICE Thank you for noticing this new notice Your noticing it has been noted And will be reported to the authorities       Date: 03 Apr 2008 23:16:47 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: > And let's take a look at Chess960. When they did a tournament for it, > did anyone pick it up? Did FIDE have it as an official game? > Chess960 is building a following, but as far as I know, it isn't > integrated into the chess community. Why would Chess960 pick up a > following if there wasn't something there that regular chess isn't > providing? I happen to like Fischer Random Chess (I don't like to call it "Chess960", because I think Bobby Fischer deserves credit for his invention) but it is not chess, and thus there is no need to "integrate it into the chess community." If it becomes popular, it becomes popular, and if there is a demand for a FRC federation and a rating system, that will follow from it becoming popular. I have an engineer buddy who I play FRC with, because he has never studied any openings. FRC puts us on an equal footing from the start. We use the method where we take turns placing QBBNN in white's back row, then put KRR in the remaining three squares with K in the middle. This adds another level of strategy that the dice/coin methods lack. -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 03 Apr 2008 13:56:23 From: Subject: Re: Arimaa / Re: The Future of Chess ... On Apr 3, 3:41 am, "Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod)" <[email protected] > wrote: > On Apr 2, 9:43 am, [email protected] wrote: > > > This is a philosophical piece [...] > > Yawn. > > Let mi cite: > > http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ I agree fully about Arimaa being a great game. It is not chess though. The Arimaa World Championship is actually on the 2008 IAGO World Tour: http://www.IAGOWorldTour.com - Rich   Date: 03 Apr 2008 20:24:06 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: >As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. Evidence, please.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 20:19:46 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" [email protected] wrote: > >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote: > >> Chess is just fine the way it is. It doesn't need fixing. > >I assume you believe that Chess960 is fundamentally broken then? Why would you assume that? >And what are your thoughts on Bughouse and Dark Chess/Kriegspiel? I love all sorts of variants, some more than others. That doesn't mean that chess needs fixing. Chess is just fine the way it is. I don't think that liking the 50-yard dash implies that marathons are broken, I don't think that likeing deep-sea fishing means that fly fishing is broken, and I don't think that liking chess variations means that chess is broken. >Do you see that variants are useful Useful for what purpose? I see that some of them are fun to play, and that's enough for me. >but not chess, or that variants are heresy? Either produce actual evidence showing that those who disagree with you do so for religious reasons, or drop the constant accusations that they do. The above is simply a cheap shot debating trick. More light, less heat, please.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 20:10:28 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) [email protected] wrote: >Capablanca adds two new pieces (not a new idea, as it has >been proposed before). Fischer promotes shuffling of the board (and >Chess960 is catching on). People even have done Bughouse. You need to difdferentiate between someone preoposing a new game that is a vatriant of Chess with someone proposing to change the way chess is played. >You have Kasparov recommending a computer-human tandom approach. That isn't a change in the rules of chess. It is a change in tournament rules, which are already fluid and changable. You don't need to propose anything to improve tournament rules. Just have a tournament with whatever rules you like and be sure to announce the new tournament rules in advance. >Besides this, you don't even have Chess on TV. It fails to draw at all. Changing the rules of chess won't change that. >You run a tournament for $1.5 million in Mexico last year, and >no one in the world cares. Changing the rules of chess won't change that. >It rides on its laurels and tells people to make suggestions >about this and that, "There is NOTHING wrong with chess that >merely having some mature people can't fix". Whoever told you that got it wrong. There is nothing wrong with chess. Period. There is nothing that needs fixing about the way chess is played. The rules are just fine. Nothing needs fixing. >Beyond this, do I need to go and explain about the draw issue that >happens on the highest level? The scoring system is codified for >draws. These are the tournament rules. People make excuses and >rationalize this and that. Again, if you want to change the tournament rules, you should talk about that, and if you wish to change the rules of the game, you should talk about *that*. Mixing the two kinds of suggestions makes it hard to analyse your proposals. >What I was trying to do is recognize that a bulk of players are FIDE >purist out there, and suggestions about the direction chess could head >in, complete with possible changes to the rules, is considered >heresy. This crowd would be a number of people you find at chess >clubs. I know a club where I am local that it is FIDE Chess and that >is it (ok, Speed version, due to their time limits). For them, what I >discuss here IS heresy. I acknowledge what I write as possible heresy >and leave it at that. I know this from personal experience actually. You are wrong. You seem to be unable to understand that someone might disagee with you because your ideas suck, rather than doing so for religious reasons.   Date: 03 Apr 2008 03:22:44 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 9:51 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote: > I can't imagine a more cumbersome game. Game equipment should be used > (I believe) in the manner for which it was originally intended. So > for example, stones should be added, not moved, one at a time, and > occasionally a stone placement is accompanied by the removal of a > group of stones. It's certainly true that moving nine stones as a unit is awkwards. However, Ming Mang and Hnefatafl, which involve moving individual pieces, are not unreasonable. As for Gess, one can always use a computer as the "board", and some kind of plastic frame for picking up pieces (no longer stones, but pieces that stand up) is also possible. John Savard   Date: 03 Apr 2008 00:41:05 From: Wlodzimierz Holsztynski (Wlod) Subject: Arimaa / Re: The Future of Chess ... On Apr 2, 9:43 am, [email protected] wrote: > This is a philosophical piece [...] Yawn. Let mi cite: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ Here is a thoughtful idea: ************ quote ********** Arimaa is a highly competitive strategy game. It was designed to be: * Difficult for computers. * Playable with a standard chess set. * Fun and interesting for humans. Some features which make Arimaa highly competitive and interesting for human players include: * Rules that are simple, consistent and easy to learn. * Lots of strategic concepts to explore and discover. * Extremely low chance of draws even among experienced players. * Equal winning chances for both players. Neither side has a clearly distinguishable advantage. Some features which make Arimaa difficult for computers and challenging for AI programmers include: * Extremely high branching factor significantly limits the search depth. * Less tactics and more strategy. * Opening books are not very useful. * End game databases are practically useless. Some features which make Arimaa interesting for fans and spectators include: * Knowing that one player or the other will prevail, since mutually agreed draws are forbidden and natural draws are rare. ************ end of quote ******* One may learn the rules (very nice) here: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/learn/ Regards, Wlod   Date: 02 Apr 2008 22:57:50 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 9:03 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > > For one thing, most chess players are not worried about Chess getting > stuck. Yes, there is more and more opening theory to study, but that > means we are learning more and more about the implications of this one > set of rules, and obtaining better and better play. As time is going on, the discontent with chess is growing. The discontent is in a lot of different areas. > To speak on the philosophical plane, to make a Chess that always moves > out of being unstuck in the way you seek means that it has to grow, > and grow, and get more complicated without limit. So after a Chess on > a 12 by 8 board with thousands of variations - one idea I proposed - > eventually gets solved, we have to switch to a 16 by 8 board or > something bigger, and then something bigger still. Until the > chessboard, even though the chessmen are so small we need tweezers to > pick them up, is to wide for the chessplayers' arms to reach, so they > have to walk to Kingside or Queenside to make their moves. Who says the board has to get bigger? Why not, besides doing the 960 Shuffle, consider adding reserve pieces that are gated or dropped into play, whose mix can change in the reserve? How about also adding mutators to the game? If need be, play with larger board. How about also figuring out a way to integrate variants into the full chess experience, rather than considering them freaks who have flawed designs and want to break things? In the initial email, is there anything in there that forcefully demands a larger board? The whole "we need a larger board" is a byproduct of thinking of chess in the same framework, and deciding you want to change it somehow. There are other ways that keep the core the same at start, but add another dimension. Ideas like the reserve for example, and ideas like mutators. What you touch on here is EXACTLY the same thinking with the same framework as has always been done in the past. Why not go differently? > To get more practical, then, the problem isn't really Chess getting > 'stuck' in the abstract mathematical Godel sense. That could not be > solved. The Godel sense has to refer to the nature of the rules. Adding more of the same rules, or mixing things up, isn't going to resolve the issue of a game getting solved from a game theory level. Also it doesn't resolve the issues chess is going through now. > Part of the real perceived problem is that what is wanted is a contest > of tactical and strategic skill, not of memorizing opening variations. > This relates to your concept of Chess getting 'stuck', but it is more > practical and less theoretical. Stuck has to do with the framework hitting a deadend. All variants keep bashing into this just about. They work from the same framework and fail to catch on. This also does touch on to chess being more universal in what people learn from it, rather than limited to its own subset, where skill is more of an art than a science. > The other part is that we want more games like that of Labourdonnais > versus Macdonnell and Anderssen versus Kieseritzky. Exciting > sacrifices, blazing tactical fireworks, not draws and defensive play. > But subtle positional play is not without beauty, but it is a bland > steady diet. For the audience to get caught on, it is the surprise element. I would agree there. The finding of new ways to adjust and discover. To have chess seem new and fresh, and to be in a place where it can continue to evolve. Not reducing the last "great" finding that pawn structure is critical, or that a certain line of play is dead and so on. > The solution to that? I have no idea. I am neither the first or last > to suggest giving partial credit for forcing stalemate to have fewer > draws, but I'm not sure if it will promote more tactical play or more > defensive play. Chess isn't like hockey or football, where a simple > subtle rule change - the equivalent of replacing the 50-move draw rule > with a 35-move draw rule - can change the balance between offence and > defence. And the more you end up doing refining rather than expanding, the end result is you will finalize your rules until you end up putting them into a state where a game can be "perfected". In that state, it is no longer growing. It is more of a treasure hunt to find the last pieces of its corpse. And if you have an attitude that the game is meant to be like this, it will die off, with an entire community left with not knowing how to go out. You then break off an occasional maverick who proposes this or that, but then the community screams no, because it doesn't feel that the rebel belongs. And you have a glorious crystalized corpse that everyone is in awe at, but people except the uninitiated, don't have much fun playing. Well, you can always pitch it as an educational tool, and try to get people not to see other games. Or, you can end up this attitude displayed: Why is it that afficianados of a game can't just let it go? If the game can be "solved" or can always be won against a human by a computer, just admit the game is flawed. It's time is no more infinite than music. Move on. If you are moving around pieces and the like, is it really the same game? And why would it worth it to "re-invent" chess. Connect Four is solvable. Once you and your children figure this out, you move on. You don't play it any more. You find a better game that isn't solved. ----------------- In other words, once the game becomes a crystalized corpse, you drop the game and let it slide into oblivion. Or you keep telling yourself that people playing the same lines a million times over and over is fine, because they are mortal and won't see it all anyway in their lifetime. This last attitude then makes one to argue books on chess should be banned. Just my dogmatic 2 cents... - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 20:51:25 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 6:07 pm, Quadibloc <[email protected] > wrote: > > I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, since it has a bigger game > tree. Of course, computers are improving there too, but at least it > has a little time left. Go is often mentioned in discussions of large game trees. I think it's a little overestimated though. Starting out you've got 361 places to move and then 360 and so on, so there is of course a tremendous branching factor. A crude estimate of the number of final board positions would be 3^361. Each of the 361 intersections can be empty, black, or white. (It's a high estimate because you'll usually end up with the board approximately half filled. You won't have a final position with 3 stones on the board.) You can always move anywhere you want, except eyes. On top of that it's a difficult game to program, adding to the mystique. But the thing that's often overlooked is redundancy. There are a gazillion ways to arrive at any particular position, effectively reducing the game tree size to a something manageable for humans. In other words the possibilities aren't so astronomical that you never are able to form any kind of a strategy. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of Go equipment. I've designed 5 games for it in the past 16 years: Tanbo, Rush, Crossway, Oust, and Palisade (http://marksteeregames.com). I believe in simple rules and simple equipment. Equipment doesn't get much simpler than that of Go. > > Then there's the game of Gess, which seems to have been deliberately > devised to be a game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily difficult > for computers. > I can't imagine a more cumbersome game. Game equipment should be used (I believe) in the manner for which it was originally intended. So for example, stones should be added, not moved, one at a time, and occasionally a stone placement is accompanied by the removal of a group of stones.   Date: 02 Apr 2008 18:19:37 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 3:20 pm, [email protected] wrote: > And there are times where people DO want the rug pulled out > from under them, because it beats being bored. I suggest all this be > accounted for. You can have one version that is forever pulling the > rug out as a challenge. Well, one can already play a lot of different board games besides Chess. Since Chess with one or two extra pieces, even with people like Capablanca behind it, never took off, it seems like there isn't enough interest. Look at Glinski's hexagonal chess. It is the most popular hexagonal chess version, but whoever hears of it? It seems like most chessplayers don't want too much excitement. Maybe they figure that people who want excitement and change will play Dungeons and Dragons. Or, maybe they would like something regular Chess does not have - but none of the variations anyone has suggested are any better than regular Chess. John Savard   Date: 02 Apr 2008 18:07:17 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 1:09 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote: > When you say "turn Chess into a solved game" it sounds like something > that will ruin the game. When Chess is eventually solved that will be > testimony to the state of the art of computer science and nothing > more. It won't have any impact whatsoever on Chess gameplay among > humans. Checkers was solved. Does that mean that you or I can now > sit down and force a draw against the world's leading Checkers > player? No. Does Checkers being solved have any impact whatsoever on > its gameplay among beginners, intermediate, or even expert players? > No. Not unless you happen to have a supercomputer handy that can play > perfectly. > All games are on a "path to being solved". That's a consequence of > ever increasing computational power. I'm surprised you didn't mention Go here, since it has a bigger game tree. Of course, computers are improving there too, but at least it has a little time left. Then there's the game of Gess, which seems to have been deliberately devised to be a game for supergeniuses and extraordinarily difficult for computers. John Savard   Date: 02 Apr 2008 18:03:31 From: Quadibloc Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 10:43 am, [email protected] wrote: > This is a philosophical piece for the most part meant to give thought > to where things can head, and why. I will acknowledge that this is > potentially heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider > it handed down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is > meant to last FOREVER. > > I personally believe there is part of > the answer in a game like Seirawan Chess, or a pocket version with > reserves, but I don't think they alone have the answer. It also > doesn't address the framework issue either that gets chess stuck, and > all the classic abstract strategy game (stuck here means set on a path > to being "solved", without a way to adjust before it does). > > My take on Godel's Incompleteness Theorm is that you don't solve the > systemic issues with a certain set of rules by creating more rules of > the same type. If it is show, for example with chess, that a set > configuration of chess pieces on the board eventually produces > something that is solved, then changing the configuration of the > pieces on the board alone doesn't resolve it either (one time, > fixed). You can change the their starting position (aka Chess960/Pick > your Army/MetaChess or the V and X versions of IAGO Chess), the layout > of the board at start (and also changing it during play, aka Beyond > Chess), or when the pieces enter the game (IAGO/Seirawan/Pocket Knight/ > Pocket Mutant), and help to push things out further. If you build > into the framework by which you can do all of the above, you buy more > time. What regular chess has now is not a way to make chess get > "unstuck", allowing it to adjust over time. For one thing, most chess players are not worried about Chess getting stuck. Yes, there is more and more opening theory to study, but that means we are learning more and more about the implications of this one set of rules, and obtaining better and better play. To speak on the philosophical plane, to make a Chess that always moves out of being unstuck in the way you seek means that it has to grow, and grow, and get more complicated without limit. So after a Chess on a 12 by 8 board with thousands of variations - one idea I proposed - eventually gets solved, we have to switch to a 16 by 8 board or something bigger, and then something bigger still. Until the chessboard, even though the chessmen are so small we need tweezers to pick them up, is to wide for the chessplayers' arms to reach, so they have to walk to Kingside or Queenside to make their moves. To get more practical, then, the problem isn't really Chess getting 'stuck' in the abstract mathematical Godel sense. That could not be solved. Part of the real percieved problem is that what is wanted is a contest of tactical and strategic skill, not of memorizing opening variations. This relates to your concept of Chess getting 'stuck', but it is more practical and less theoretical. The other part is that we want more games like that of Labourdonnais versus Macdonnell and Anderssen versus Kieseritzky. Exciting sacrifices, blazing tactical fireworks, not draws and defensive play. But subtle positional play is not without beauty, but it is a bland steady diet. The solution to that? I have no idea. I am neither the first or last to suggest giving partial credit for forcing stalemate to have fewer draws, but I'm not sure if it will promote more tactical play or more defensive play. Chess isn't like hockey or football, where a simple subtle rule change - the equivalent of replacing the 50-move draw rule with a 35-move draw rule - can change the balance between offence and defence. John Savard   Date: 02 Apr 2008 15:14:53 From: David Kane Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) <[email protected] > wrote in message news:4d19b8b5-1c1c-43e8-87e8-6184c0cb6598@s37g2000prg.googlegroups.com... > This is a philosophical piece for the most part meant to give thought > to where things can head, and why. I will acknowledge that this is > potentially heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider > it handed down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is > meant to last FOREVER. It is a piece to ponder, refute, consider > insane, or thought of value. I am not going to lay out here the exact > form, but lay out what I believe is a direction chess could in that > would be worth considering. Please DON'T cross-post this to politics, > and try to keep it as a philosophical discussion. For those who think > this is off, look at the changes that have been made to chess. The > clock has been played with and so on. Scoring on the tournament level > has been considered also. It goes on and on. Anyhow, onto the core > of the document. > > I believe the framework of chess can be addressed now so that we never > turn chess into a solved game. I don't think solvability has any practical connection to how good a game is. If a chess variant is good, it will be for other reasons.   Date: 02 Apr 2008 14:50:19 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 1:27 pm, Sanny <[email protected] > wrote: > > >----------------------------------- > > >----------------------------------- > > >PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP > > >RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR > > > >So we have to Finish Two Kings. Current Chess with 1 King you just > > >find a way to kill the King and you win. With Grand Chess you have to > > >play much tough game to beat the Opponent. > > > What are the rules for castling? Can you castle your kings' king with > > either of your queens' rooks? > > Chastling not allowed. As it is already too big. And it would take me until next week to get my pawns across the board, or my knight. My personal preferences would have myself falling asleep about a third of the way through playing your game. Also, your pawns over your outer knights on the board are unprotected. I personally don't get the point of you doing this variant, outside of maybe you thought it as a cool idea. Any idea of how well it plays? - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 14:48:19 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 5:10 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >I will say, keep in mind that merely doubling everything doesn't make > >a game better. Position, balance, protecting pawns, structure, etc... > >all count. > > In addition, Sanny the spammer didn't even manage to double > everything. He has twice as many men and four times as many > squares. Anyone who has played with a variety of chess variants > knows that having a higher percentage of empty squares makes > bishops and queens more powerful while weakening knights, pawns, > and kings. Being able to move 16 squares away also strengthens > bishops and queens against knights. > > Chess is just fine the way it is. It doesn't need fixing. I assume you believe that Chess960 is fundamentally broken then? And what are your thoughts on Bughouse and Dark Chess/Kriegspiel? Do you see that variants are useful, but not chess, or that variants are heresy? Regarding how to nearly double chess, there is Millennium Chess, which at least lays out the pieces mirror images of one another. - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 14:20:56 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 3:09 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote: > Making these occasional changes to Chess that you suggest doesn't > really make sense. Not everyone is going to agree on what the changes > should be, how often they should occur, etc. The notion of keeping > Chess "off balance" like this, to prevent anyone from ever becoming > truly expert at the game is ill fated. People like to become expert > at things and they're not going to take kindly to having the rug > pulled out from under them just when they're approaching grandmaster > status. Fischer proposed Chess960. Seirawan and Harper propose their version of Chess. People who are innovators, particularly on the Grand Master status, get bored at times, and thus propose variants. Or they see this and that, and want changes to make things better in their eyes. And there are times where people DO want the rug pulled out from under them, because it beats being bored. I suggest all this be accounted for. You can have one version that is forever pulling the rug out as a challenge. > One thing you seem to be getting at here is game tree size. You could > play Grand Chess on a 16x16 board but that has four times the number > of squares an 8x8 board has, which has a monumental impact on the size > of the game tree. A relatively huge game tree can create tedious, > lengthy, difficult games for beginners. Beginners love Chess. They > don't have a problem with it. It takes a half hour to 45 minutes to > play and produces a winner almost every time. But there's a very > broad range of skill levels in an established game like Chess. > Experts are so much better than beginners that they wring the game > out. Sure you could fix it for experts but at the cost of ruining it > for beginners. If there was a fair way to handicap at Chess, that would be well for the novice and experts. Go has this. If it was found, it would work. > You have Chess960, etc. but this creates problems for > beginners too. You can't get started learning a few basic opening > plays. Now you have this big, complex range of opening possibilities, > as well as the problem of randomness (a topic in its own right). Beginners is an issue with handicapping mostly. > The only games which are immune to these tradeoffs are scalable games > like Othello or Rush. For scalable games you just increase the board > size a tad for increasing skill levels, gradually varying from 9x9 to > 11x11 to 13x13, etc. It's exactly the same game - just a little > bigger. Chess is not a scalable game. You don't have that option > with Chess. Mark, I will say Chess can scale by the use of reserve pieces you can adjust accordingly. Pocket Mutant, Pocket Knight, Seirawan, and even the core IAGO Chess game rules (B, C, and M-Class), in the IAGO Chess System do this. This approach allows for a migration strategy and to scale the game, without disrupting the foundation. It also allows for players to be handicapped. You can change what is in the reserve, and still keep the core game the same. I would also add that you can add "mutators" to chess and balance accordingly that way. Mutators being something that changes the rules of the game, as you play it. A main part of what I wrote here is to have a way for the variant community to be more relevant to the general chess community, as a source for tested ideas that may be considered. And, in this, you can possibly see the future of chess happen. - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 21:10:59 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) [email protected] wrote: >I will say, keep in mind that merely doubling everything doesn't make >a game better. Position, balance, protecting pawns, structure, etc... >all count. In addition, Sanny the spammer didn't even manage to double everything. He has twice as many men and four times as many squares. Anyone who has played with a variety of chess variants knows that having a higher percentage of empty squares makes bishops and queens more powerful while weakening knights, pawns, and kings. Being able to move 16 squares away also strengthens bishops and queens against knights. Chess is just fine the way it is. It doesn't need fixing.   Date: 02 Apr 2008 14:10:20 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 1:22 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ > wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >This is a philosophical piece for the most part meant to give thought > >to where things can head, and why. > > One problem. The rest of your post was 100% "where things can head" > and 0% "why". Like many who propose changes to chess, you have > neglected to explain what it is about the present game that you > believe needs fixing. Would you be so kind as to go back and fill > in this gap for us? Thanks! As a set of rules, chess is great in and of itself. It has been tested and proved by a community of players, and works for what it is intended. One can argue that it is potentially "kludgy" and not elegant in how it does things, but all this is the result of evolutionary development, and not some master creator. It works as is, and things are in harmony. The issue isn't with the game, but with the reality some run into that play it. As for a list, look at what has been stated by people all over regarding issues they have with it. Observe how different grandmasters, from Capablanca and even before, have stated what they have. If everything was just great, why do you see grandmasters of note, wanting to do this and that different. Capablanca adds two new pieces (not a new idea, as it has been proposed before). Fischer promotes shuffling of the board (and Chess960 is catching on). People even have done Bughouse. You have Kasparov recommending a computer-human tandom approach. Recently, you have Seirawan bring up his answer to Chess. These are what people have spoken on. It is over and over. Besides this, you don't even have Chess on TV. It fails to draw at all. This is rationalized as "Oh, we are just too brainy for the average Joe who would rather drink beer and oggle cheerleaders". You run a tournament for $1.5 million in Mexico last year, and no one in the world cares. It isn't that the set of rules is a problem, per-se, but the fact is that the game isn't fully serving the community of players, potential or otherwise. It rides on its laurels and tells people to make suggestions about this and that, "There is NOTHING wrong with chess that merely having some mature people can't fix". I will say, if things were going well, then you wouldn't be having these issues. Do you think poker has less problems? It doesn't even have an association for it, and it is functioning and growing. Oh, but this will be rationalized in a lot of different ways. If it wasn't for the name recognition, then it wouldn't have much, in light of all these issues. Beyond this, do I need to go and explain about the draw issue that happens on the highest level? The scoring system is codified for draws. These are the tournament rules. People make excuses and rationalize this and that. Its time control SUCKS for spectators, and this is also rationalized by saying the masses is idiots who don't get it. Not growing is taken as a badge of honor, not a problem. Oh, you manage to pitch it as some sort of educational tool, and hope that someone manages to hope tax dollars fund it in schools as teaching. Maybe you get more interested into it. In other words, opening lines that are played out that have been seen over and over. Unless one plays suboptimally, > BTW, starting off by insulting anyone who disagrees is usually > a poor method of initiating a dialog. If, as you claim, you > wish to "keep it as a philosophical discussion", why did you start > with an insulting straw-man argument like "this is potentially > heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider it handed > down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is meant > to last FOREVER"? What I was trying to do is recognize that a bulk of players are FIDE purist out there, and suggestions about the direction chess could head in, complete with possible changes to the rules, is considered heresy. This crowd would be a number of people you find at chess clubs. I know a club where I am local that it is FIDE Chess and that is it (ok, Speed version, due to their time limits). For them, what I discuss here IS heresy. I acknowledge what I write as possible heresy and leave it at that. I know this from personal experience actually. > Do you have a direct quote from anyone here > claiming that the present rules came directly from God, or is that > just something you made up to belittle anyone who dares to disagree > with you? If would be great if I found the exact quote on it. That is an over- the-top paraphrase of what chess player had said, how Chess was some sort of game handed down by the divine. I figured I would be a bit over the top here, to have people say that is "absurd" and then move on with the discussion. - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 13:49:28 From: Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 12:56 pm, Sanny <[email protected] > wrote: > > Please feel free to comment here. I ask people to consider finding > > some merit in this, taking what they will of value and discard the > > rest. > > I invented GRAND CHESS Christian Freeling had a game called "Grand Chess" before you did. For reference: http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/freeling.html There is also Ministers Chess that has a copyright with that name. Please change the name, and allow the variant community to evaluate it. Also, get ahold of Zillions and run your game in it, to see how it plays. Your desire to keep calling it what someone else has isn't going to facilitate its adoption. I will say, keep in mind that merely doubling everything doesn't make a game better. Position, balance, protecting pawns, structure, etc... all count. And, as I had posted in an earlier post, a game like Millennium Chess does nearly what you want to do, but it also happens to have balance to it. It is double chess, where the sides mirror each other. If you are serious about wanting it considered, do a Zillions adaptation of it, and have the computer play itself like 100 times or so, to see how lines play out, etc... - Rich   Date: 02 Apr 2008 12:09:55 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy On Apr 2, 9:43 am, [email protected] wrote: > > I believe the framework of chess can be addressed now so that we never > turn chess into a solved game. When you say "turn Chess into a solved game" it sounds like something that will ruin the game. When Chess is eventually solved that will be testimony to the state of the art of computer science and nothing more. It won't have any impact whatsoever on Chess gameplay among humans. Checkers was solved. Does that mean that you or I can now sit down and force a draw against the world's leading Checkers player? No. Does Checkers being solved have any impact whatsoever on its gameplay among beginners, intermediate, or even expert players? No. Not unless you happen to have a supercomputer handy that can play perfectly. More and more Chess opening plays get cataloged but that doesn't move Chess any closer to being solved. It just creates more opening plays that aspiring Chess masters have to learn. Eventually (or perhaps already) there will be a balance between the number of new openings that are sufficiently unique and thus worth memorizing and the number of openings that can reasonably be memorized. > ... (stuck here means set on a path > to being "solved", without a way to adjust before it does). > All games are on a "path to being solved". That's a consequence of ever increasing computational power. By the way, Backgammon is no further from being solved than a lot of other games without dice. Yes the dice rolls between moves increase the branching factor, but Backgammon is played on a one dimensional board with simple, uniform playing pieces which results in a small branching factor (for a given dice roll) compared to something like Grand Chess. Solving a game has absolutely zero consequences for gameplay among humans. It's only an issue for robots. Making these occasional changes to Chess that you suggest doesn't really make sense. Not everyone is going to agree on what the changes should be, how often they should occur, etc. The notion of keeping Chess "off balance" like this, to prevent anyone from ever becoming truly expert at the game is ill fated. People like to become expert at things and they're not going to take kindly to having the rug pulled out from under them just when they're approaching grandmaster status. One thing you seem to be getting at here is game tree size. You could play Grand Chess on a 16x16 board but that has four times the number of squares an 8x8 board has, which has a monumental impact on the size of the game tree. A relatively huge game tree can create tedious, lengthy, difficult games for beginners. Beginners love Chess. They don't have a problem with it. It takes a half hour to 45 minutes to play and produces a winner almost every time. But there's a very broad range of skill levels in an established game like Chess. Experts are so much better than beginners that they wring the game out. Sure you could fix it for experts but at the cost of ruining it for beginners. You have Chess960, etc. but this creates problems for beginners too. You can't get started learning a few basic opening plays. Now you have this big, complex range of opening possibilities, as well as the problem of randomness (a topic in its own right). The only games which are immune to these tradeoffs are scalable games like Othello or Rush. For scalable games you just increase the board size a tad for increasing skill levels, gradually varying from 9x9 to 11x11 to 13x13, etc. It's exactly the same game - just a little bigger. Chess is not a scalable game. You don't have that option with Chess.     Date: 03 Apr 2008 10:49:18 From: Erich Schneider Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) "[email protected]" <[email protected] > writes: > Making these occasional changes to Chess that you suggest doesn't > really make sense. Not everyone is going to agree on what the changes > should be, how often they should occur, etc. The notion of keeping > Chess "off balance" like this, to prevent anyone from ever becoming > truly expert at the game is ill fated. Doesn't the US governing body for Mah Jongg do this every year? Or so I've heard. -- Erich Schneider [email protected]   Date: 02 Apr 2008 10:27:40 From: Sanny Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy > >----------------------------------- > >----------------------------------- > >PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP > >RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR > > >So we have to Finish Two Kings. Current Chess with 1 King you just > >find a way to kill the King and you win. With Grand Chess you have to > >play much tough game to beat the Opponent. > > What are the rules for castling? =A0Can you castle your kings' king with > either of your queens' rooks? Chastling not allowed. As it is already too big. Bye Sanny Play Chess at:http://www.GetClub.com/Chess.html   Date: 02 Apr 2008 17:22:30 From: Guy Macon Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) [email protected] wrote: >This is a philosophical piece for the most part meant to give thought >to where things can head, and why. One problem. The rest of your post was 100% "where things can head" and 0% "why". Like many who propose changes to chess, you have neglected to explain what it is about the present game that you believe needs fixing. Would you be so kind as to go back and fill in this gap for us? Thanks! BTW, starting off by insulting anyone who disagrees is usually a poor method of initiating a dialog. If, as you claim, you wish to "keep it as a philosophical discussion", why did you start with an insulting straw-man argument like "this is potentially heresy to those who live and die FIDE chess and consider it handed down from the divine as some immutable set of rules that is meant to last FOREVER"? Do you have a direct quote from anyone here claiming that the present rules came directly from God, or is that just something you made up to belittle anyone who dares to disagree with you? -- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/ >   Date: 02 Apr 2008 18:15:39 From: Nick Wedd Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy for FIDE chess purists) In message <d3d1fe58-079d-4821-8ccf-fbce490d9818@i36g2000prf.googlegroups.com >, Sanny <[email protected] > writes >> Please feel free to comment here. �I ask people to consider finding >> some merit in this, taking what they will of value and discard the >> rest. > > >I invented GRAND CHESS > >Learn about Grand Chess > >http://www.getclub.com/Show/view.php?best=Discussion&itemid=18 > >It increases the Size of Board to 16x16. With Each piece doubled. > >RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR >PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >----------------------------------- >PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP >RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR > >So we have to Finish Two Kings. Current Chess with 1 King you just >find a way to kill the King and you win. With Grand Chess you have to >play much tough game to beat the Opponent. What are the rules for castling? Can you castle your kings' king with either of your queens' rooks? Nick >I hope my reply is as per your satisfaction. > >Bye >Sanny > >Play Chess at: http://www.GetClub.com/Chess.html > -- Nick Wedd [email protected]   Date: 02 Apr 2008 09:56:13 From: Sanny Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy > Please feel free to comment here. =A0I ask people to consider finding > some merit in this, taking what they will of value and discard the > rest. I invented GRAND CHESS Learn about Grand Chess http://www.getclub.com/Show/view.php?best=3DDiscussion&itemid=3D18 It increases the Size of Board to 16x16. With Each piece doubled. RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP RRNNBBQQKKBBNNRR So we have to Finish Two Kings. Current Chess with 1 King you just find a way to kill the King and you win. With Grand Chess you have to play much tough game to beat the Opponent. I hope my reply is as per your satisfaction. Bye Sanny Play Chess at: http://www.GetClub.com/Chess.html     Date: 07 Apr 2008 23:03:27 From: ChessVariant Inventor Subject: Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy forFIDE chess purists) > I believe the framework of chess can be addressed now so that we never > turn chess into a solved game. I personally believe there is part of > the answer in a game like Seirawan Chess, or a pocket version with > reserves, but I don't think they alone have the answer. It also > doesn't address the framework issue either that gets chess stuck, and > all the classic abstract strategy game (stuck here means set on a path > to being "solved", without a way to adjust before it does). I am 100% behind Richard in promoting chess variants and if IAGO is means by which this can be done - great! I do not however see a problem with people wanting to keep one fixe set of rules because all GOOD games do have this. Chess is also one o those games that some people have gotten quite attached to and canno stand the idea of someone lecturing that the game is flawed or needs t be 'changed'. Rather than proclaim that CHESS needs to be changed - why not simpl promote this new framework as an organized, logical categorization o chess variants and related tournaments and events. The key point being keep chess the way it is but you dont have to jus play chess - there is a wide assortment of very playable chess variant out there which even a dedicated chess player might enjoy playing. A good analogy - Poker. Sure, many people might specialize in Texa Holdem but there are many other types of games that a player can dabbl in Omaha, Stud etc Playing chess on a bigger board with extra pieces has always intereste me, the game below: http://chess.computerwebservices.net/titan.php has an entire new class of pieces with different capturing mechanisms And it is a large board variant 12x12. While the much weakened knigh remains, the leaping ninja guard - a new type of leaper has roughly th same power as the now more powerful bishop due to larger board size. find the game play of this variant to be quite intriguing. Sure th gameplay is similar to chess, but it is NOT the SAME as chess. While it is every chess variant inventor's dream to replace chess wit their variant , perhaps this enthusiasm is sometimes mistaken as disdai for orthodox chess. (there are some who do actually hate chess bu thats another story ...) Sanny;265259 Wrote: > Please feel free to comment here. I ask people to consider finding- > some merit in this, taking what they will of value and discard the > rest.- > > > I invented GRAND CHESS > > Learn about Grand Chess > > http://www.getclub.com/Show/view.php?best=Discussion&itemid=18 > > It increases the Size of Board to 16x16. With Each piece doubled. > A very quick and easy way to CHECK your variant is to play it b yourself - You can sign up for a free account at chessvariants and pla around with your new variant. At least some adjustments are necessary. I suggest allowing the pawn t move maybe 2 squares forward (if vacant) and allowing enpassant at an point - this suggestion was already implemented in a variant o chessvariants called Toulousain chess. http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/toulousain.html Consider adding also another row of pawns - maybe another type of paw like in Titan Chess http://chess.computerwebservices.net/titan.php Also the knights can be powered up a bit by adding some additiona leaping movements to them. Then your 16x16 variant would be much mor playable. I tend not to worry too much about the king being weakened on thes larger boards - this is intrinsic to these larger boards. You canno exactly replicate standard chess but you can certainly create a interesting playing experience -- ChessVariant Inventor