SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the How-about-a-nice-game-of-chess? dept.
Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:
Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowadays," writes Olsen. "Even the world’s current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world’s elite."
The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."
Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead “draw death,” where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent “draw death,” but it never really seemed to catch on.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:20PM
Fischer agreed with Capablanca, and came up with Fischer Random Chess, where the back rows are permuted. That adds a few bits to the complexity, you now have to master a thousand more opening "moves". Of course, computers have a lot more free time to master these, and will quickly become dominant.
There are plenty of games in the world, we shouldn't get hung up about just one stagnating. Try Dvonn, try Amazons, Try 6x6 Dots & Boxes. Play lightning versions. If the games are short, play several with a doubling cube. Invent a new one, even!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:25PM
or you could play go. the rules are simpler, so you don't even need to be that smart to play it :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @07:10PM
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday April 10 2015, @06:14AM
Go with informative. It is "Go", after all. And you do not have to be smart to play, that is true. But to win. . . .
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @07:18PM
FTFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:36PM
gnu go beats the crap out of me every time I try it. maybe I'm just dumb.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 10 2015, @02:04AM
I've long thought of Age of Empires II as modern chess.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @01:57PM
That adds a few bits to the complexity, you now have to master a thousand more opening "moves". Of course, computers have a lot more free time to master these, and will quickly become dominant.
Are you sure about this? I'm reminded of Go which has orders of magnitude more complexity and where computers still can't hold a candle to the best human professionals. It could be the more complexity is still computable with currently known technology so computers would become dominant, or it could become so complex that human "intuition" would win out.
Actually, does anybody know of any theories or paradigms about what hard problems a computer beats a human at (e.g. checkers) and what hard problems a human beats a computer at (e.g. Go)?