Later this week, Shahade will provide commentary for a Chess960 tournament including world number one Magnus Carlsen and Kasparov, the former champ. Interest in Chess960 has grown too, suggesting an appetite for new types of play, including from some superstars. “All in all it just makes the game more beautiful,” he says.Ĭhess has been gaining popularity for years but experienced a pandemic boost as many people sought new intellectual stimulation, says Jennifer Shahade, a two-time women's US chess champion. The rule effectively gives a player more opportunities to sacrifice a piece to get ahead, Kramnik says, a tactic considered a hallmark of elegant play for centuries. A more extreme change, self-capture chess, in which a player can take their own pieces, proved even more alluring. No-castling chess provoked rich new patterns for keeping the king safe, he says. Kramnik saw flashes of beauty in how AlphaZero adapted to the new rules. A technical paper released Wednesday includes more than 70 pages of commentary by Kramnik on AlphaZero’s explorations. “This is not about numbers, but whether it is qualitatively, aesthetically pleasing for humans to sit down and play,” says Tomašev. It's a nice feeling, like you're a child.”ĭeepMind’s researchers were ultimately more interested in the analysis of the other great chess brain on the project, Kramnik. “After three moves you simply don’t know what to do. And learning different rules shifted the value AlphaZero placed on different pieces: Under conventional rules it valued a queen at 9.5 pawns under torpedo rules the queen was only worth 7.1 pawns. Draws were less common under no-castling chess than under conventional rules. One way of reading AlphaZero’s results is in cold numbers. Five of the variants altered the movement of pawns, including torpedo chess, in which pawns can move up to two squares at a time throughout the game, instead of only on their first move. It eliminates a move called castling that allows a player to tuck their king behind a protective screen of other pieces-powerful fortification that can also be stifling. The nine alternative visions of chess that AlphaZero tested included no-castling chess, which Kramnik and others had already been thinking about, and had its first dedicated tournament in January. English grandmaster Matthew Sadler described poring over AlphaZero’s games as like “discovering the secret notebooks of some great player from the past.” In the process it rediscovers ideas seen in centuries of human chess and adds flair of its own. Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more natural, than prior chess engines. In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces. “But seeing it evolve from a void of nothingness is exciting and almost pure.”
“When it starts playing it’s so bad I want to hide under my table,” says Ulrich Paquet, another DeepMind researcher on the project.
It starts learning a game equipped with only the rules, a way to keep score, and a preprogrammed urge to experiment and win. Vladimir Kramnik, former world chess championĪlphaZero is a more flexible and powerful successor to AlphaGo, which laid down a marker in AI history when it defeated a champion at Go in 2016.
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“For quite a number of games on the highest level, half of the game-sometimes a full game-is played out of memory.”
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