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Thanks @HGMuller for the info about Stockfish (SF) and AlphaZero (AZ). I was curious about the hardware in the SF/AZ games. Stockfish was certainly not handicapped, and yet apparently didn't win a single game. It lost 28 and tied 72.

One source I saw says that Google's most recent TPU can process instructions at a rate of 45 TFLOPS, which I believe is significantly faster than what most people have available at home (cpu or bandwidth limited)

I think it's pretty much hopeless for anyone to argue that humans can win against computers in any type of game. Our only chance of winning a game is to play it before it gets studied by computers. So people like @Aurelian and @JoeJoyce will need to stay busy inventing new games faster then people like @GregStrong and @HGMuller can program this stuff!!

That computers can play games better than humans should not be a deterrent for playing those games. Motorcycles also can transport us faster than the fastest athlete can run, and we still have track and field competitions.

I see computer involvement more as an opportunity to help us design better games. E.g. games like Spartan Chess, or Chess with Different Armies, would be very hard to balance without computer help. I would also have had much more difficulty desiging a variant like Team-Mate Chess when I would ot have had the opportunity to easily judge the mating potential of pairs of pieces through generatig 3+1-men End-Game Tables. Computers can also be very useful for extracting simple strategic concepts, like piece values, which help us humans to play newly designed games better, but otherwise would oly have been available if the game had bee played for a long time by a large player base.

I admit that computer cheating is an adverse effect. For instance, I now have a dilemma what to do with my Tenjiku Shogi engine. There is a yearly correspondence competition for Tenjiku Shogi, and it seems the engine is at least on par with the top player. So I am afraid that releasing the engine would completely spoil that competition. OTOH, the engine is a great research tool for developing opening theory (which is very tactical in Tenjiku Shogi). I don't know a good way to allow one, ad prevent the other. Perhaps I should release an engine that is date-aware, and would refuse to run during the correspondence competition. But I am sure hackers could easily bypass such locking.

Actually I'm more in it for the mathematics of chess variants, and computer competitions, and then for personal fun. Maybe handicap games could work fun against computers. I don't know what do you think? I'm not sure as I think they will just be blunder avoiding games. Time odds are a must in any human vs ai games. Let us think about my own apothecary games. Let's say apothecary 1. In order to improve I could choose to start at the biggest level of handicap I'm proposing in the article! I delete one of the AI's rook and  give him 2 pawns on the 4th rank also deleting one of my pawns. If I don't blunder a minor piece at the cost of a pawn (which is roughly slightly bellow), I'll probably still worsen the position during play but  not enoguh to be worst, and I'd actually practice attacking in the endgame. Most likelly the AI would lose only with me doing a decent level blunder or at least falling into a trap :(!

@HG

I totally agree with your different armies games points.

"Aurelian Florea wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

@Vickalan

I will make sure that machine learning does invade the chess variants world. :)!"

Good! Make me an opponent for Macysburg and its bigger (and smaller) relatives. ;) I need a good opponent to learn from.

"V. Reinhart wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

I think it's pretty much hopeless for anyone to argue that humans can win against computers in any type of game. Our only chance of winning a game is to play it before it gets studied by computers. So people like @Aurelian and @JoeJoyce will need to stay busy inventing new games faster then people like @GregStrong and @HGMuller can program this stuff!!"

I actually agree that AI on good hardware will generally outperform humans, eventually. And for games, I suspect the AI will start with something very like AlphaZero as described by HG Muller below. If not, it will be something better.

I do think, however, people grossly underestimate the size of the game space AZ must evaluate each turn for a more complex abstract, or just how much the possibilities expand with each additional ply investigated. The ‘best moves’ often depend on enemy intentions and *exactly* where each piece winds up in 2 – 3 turns, and may depend on which order you move your 50 or 100 or 250… pieces each turn.

"H. G. Muller wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

Note that AlphaZero is not just a neural network. It is a tree search guided by a NN, the NN being also used for evaluation in the leaf nodes. The tactical abilities are mainly dependent on the search. The NN is just good at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics."

The key to how well the AI does on commercially available machines in a few years (under reasonable assumptions) depends heavily on just how good the neural net is “at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics,” I believe. That may be enough of a handicap for humans for a little while.

 

“Aurelian Florea wrote on 2017-12-16 EST

Actually I'm more in it for the mathematics of chess variants…”

Grin, that comment may have been a mistake! I would truly like to understand just why the Command and Maneuver games I’ve designed work as well as they do. In considering the introductory scenario A Tale of Two Countries: Intro, the first thing I noticed was that there are an amazing number of essentially equivalent moves available each turn, of which the player can only make 8. Which 8? It’s a small game, 12 x 24, with only 36 pieces/side at start, and while there are replacements and reinforcements arriving during the game, 36 units is probably the largest size either army will ever be.

 

I totally accept for the sake of argument that the AI will be a tactical genius in Tale, but I question the strategic elements because it seems to me that future game states are indeterminate, because while the AI may/will make the best tac moves this turn, the human probably won’t. So how does the AI ‘guess’ the game state in 2 or 3 turns, say 3 – 6 plys (player turns) deep?

 

In Macysburg, the situation is probably worse, at 32 x 32 and 84 pieces/side, all able to move each turn, arriving in 4 even-sized groups around the edge of the board over 20 turns, with ‘rally” allowing 1/3rd of the captured pieces to be returned to the board.  

 

The pieces dance back and forth seeking advantage. Where a piece is on the next turn is often difficult to determine. And ‘combat,’ standard chess capture, is totally dependent on the exact locations of every piece. While you can figure out/guess some of what your opponent might do in reply to your current moves, you really can’t do predictions accurate enough to put your pieces in motion for a couple turns and expect to have them all positioned right to demolish the enemy without taking equal losses.

 

For humans, there’s a very strong indeterminacy that provides the necessary ‘fog of war’ in the game. Why would the AI do so much better at penetrating that indeterminacy?

 

When I considered the paths - world lines - of the pieces in Tale, I saw that they were chaotic in the same sorts of ways that mathematical chaos is explained for the non-mathematical mind. Some strategically or tactically located pieces of terrain act as strange attractors, pulling in pieces from all over the board. Pieces that start off next to each other may all follow the same general (parallel) world line or split apart to end up almost anywhere on the board. And starting with the same board configuration, you may get some similar world lines from game to game, or wildly divergent ones.

 

Agreed, just in this description, I’ve given handles with which to attack the problem, and good statistics helps - a lot, I’d imagine. But isn’t there some sort of limit to how accurate a projection an AI could make? If AIs could truly predict the future, there’d be an awful lot of very rich programmers, no? ;) Doesn’t the strong presence of chaos wash away the ability to predict accurately? And isn’t that the AIs best weapon?

 

Finally, just for the record, the games I’m describing I’ve designed only because I wanted to play them, not to defeat computer players. I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a  genuine, workable fusion of chess and war games, and for humans at least, these games work well, according to the people who managed to play them with me (some discussion on boardgamegeek.)

@Joe Joyce

I don't understand how I have confused you by saying I'm in it for the mathematics :)!