Dev.SN

Computer-Resistant Chess Variants

posted by mattie_p on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:00AM   
from the computer-resists-you dept.

andrew writes: "Over the last decade, computers have been able to dominate human chess players. in that time attention has shifted from creating anti-computer strategies to creating computer-resistant chess variants. The inventor of one such game, Arimraa, has an interesting article on Chessbase.com about what it takes to make a board game in which it is still possible for the best human players to remain competitive against computer software."

• Re:Go (also called Igo, Weiqi, or Baduk) (Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:27PM

  by TheRaven (270) on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:27PM (#4905) Journal

  Backgammon was quite difficult for computers to win at, because the random element makes the tree of possible games very broad and difficult to exhaustively search. The first AI to win at a competition level used neural networks and so mimicked the approach that a human takes to learn the game. I wonder how many of the proposed games are intrinsically hard for a computer, and how many are just hard for the specific approach used for chess (pattern matching on similar moves then exhaustive search of the space once you reach the end).

  I tend to find purely deterministic games to be quite boring. It's quite difficult to get the balance right: you need just enough nondeterminism that it's possible to play perfectly and lose, but not enough that it's likely. A good player should be able to beat a weaker one about nine times out of ten.

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