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V. Reinhart wrote on Wed, Nov 1, 2017 04:57 PM UTC:

Does anyone know how well a chess engine will play this game against a human?

It's not convenient, but this game can be played against an engine by setting the engine to its strongest level, then letting it play a move. If you refuse the move, then you make the engine go back, and play a different move (temporarily setting to a lower level, until you find the engine's "2nd" best move).

The computer will reject your moves by checking if they are "best" or not.

To me it seems that in a chess opening to the mid-game, there are enough move options that the computer's "2nd best" moves will always be very good - better than most human players. Therefore the board position will start to favor the computer.

In an end-game, the engine may falter - because it will not play well knowing that the best move will likely be refused. But to get to the end-game, the computer may already have achieved a formidable advantage, and the human player will already be in a hopeless position.

I tried this once, and couldn't find a flaw with this type of strategy (from the computer's point of view). But I only got to about 8 moves, and then stopped the experiement. The computer was in a winning position, but this was winning as judged by normal chess - not refusal chess. So I could not say for sure the result was conclusive.

I'd like to try again, but am already busy in other games. Can anyone predict (or know) the result if taken to its conclusion?


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