Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, May 20, 2005 03:11 PM UTC:
Mark:
Your idea is very clever, and deserves an 'A' for inginuity!  This will
allow a person to play synchronous chess against Zillions so long as
computer is White.  But there's a problem... When the computer considers
what move to play, ('thinking',) it is recursively looking at hundreds
of thousands of sequences of move-counter-move combinations to determine
which is best.  During this look-ahead, whether Zillions is White or
Black, Zillions is playing both sides and uses perfect information.  The
way Zillions decides on moves will not change from a non-synchronous game
(and I'm pretty confidant that sometimes different moves are better in 
synchronous chess; and if not, then what's the point?)  So, essentially
what you have is a way for a person to play synchronous chess with the
computer, but the computer is still just playing chess.

Derek:
It is almost certainly possible to write a program to do it... (not that I
know how to go about it...)  But the suggestion you make of a computer vs.
computer synchronous match has an additional nasty complication that is
really hard to explain, but I will give it a shot.  
To have computer vs computer synchronous, you need not one capable
program, but two seperate (and different) programs.  Here's why:  say you
try to do it with one program... You give it the ability to handle the
hidden information by not including any code that looks at variables that
it's not supposed to.  Ok, so far, so good...  So, now it must try to
'guess' what the other player is going to do.  Chess programs all do
this by assuming that the opponent will make the best move he can.  In
this case, the 'best move he can' determination is being made by the
program!  After thinking about it, the program is going to determine that
the best move is always the actual move!  So, you've slowed it all way
down by making it think about the same things over and over again, but you
haven't changed its play at all!  It's still just playing regular Chess
against itself... Wierd, huh?!?

Edit Form

Comment on the page Synchronous Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.