[HN Gopher] Positions chess engines don't understand ___________________________________________________________________ Positions chess engines don't understand Author : diplodocusaur Score : 51 points Date : 2021-05-17 21:48 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.chess.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.chess.com) | dwohnitmok wrote: | Does anybody know if advanced chess/centaur chess (chess play | where a human uses a computer for assistance) is still a | thing/whether a human+computer combo is a meaningful improvement | these days (i.e. last couple of years) over just a computer. | | I can't find any recent advanced chess tournaments and though I | see quotes of people saying that the combo is stronger than a | computer alone, I haven't found any recent examples of a top tier | engine by itself losing to a human + engine (e.g. Stockfish + | human vs Stockfish). | edouard-harris wrote: | Fully automated engines are now probably even with centaur | teams. | | See, for example, this great write-up: | https://www.gwern.net/Notes#advanced-chess-obituary | dwohnitmok wrote: | A quick glance doesn't seem to give conclusive evidence that | pure engine play strictly dominates centaurs (the footnotes | only have tournaments where centaurs still win, but these | tournaments are also getting a bit old). | | The usual messaging I see around centaur-based styles such as | certain correspondence chess tournaments is that you will | lose if you just do "push-button play," that is just blindly | do what the computer tells you to do. | | I'm curious if that's no longer true with the new crop of ML | engines. | edouard-harris wrote: | You're absolutely right! Edited the gp from "strictly | dominate" to "are probably even with". My memory of the | piece was playing tricks on me. | | My best guess based on a rereading of the footnotes is that | the performance ceiling for chess is probably low enough | that it has been ~reached by both centaur teams and pure | engines. | perihelions wrote: | Here's a particularly extreme example: | | https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/ndz2lj/simple_mate_i... | | It's a mate-in-93 puzzle that's fairly accessible to humans, | using abstract reasoning. But not chess engines. Comparing | against the OP article, the main "technique"/"trick" is zugzwang | (#7), but on a dramatic scale. | TchoBeer wrote: | I think there are some engines (Crystal is the one I'm thinking | of) which do well in fortresses; these come at the cost of play | strength. | thaumasiotes wrote: | Presumably the next step is a synthesizer which can choose the | appropriate engine to delegate to based on its own reading of | the board. | senkora wrote: | It seems dubious to show that engines are sometimes bad at | evaluating positions by giving a position with three black | bishops on black squares. | awb wrote: | There are other more realistic examples like the Nakamura game | sacrificing 2 useless rooks to give the engine a false sense of | winning. Then the engine sacrifices a valuable pawn to avoid a | 50 move draw. Turn out the pawn was much more valuable than the | 2 rooks in the particular closed position and Nakamura goes on | to win. Basically, the only way to beat an engine is to try to | create an unusual situation that the AI hasn't practiced | before. | | But as others other out, AI suffers when it doesn't have enough | experience in a particular situation. So, the author is really | just pointing out the extreme edge cases AI hasn't mastered | yet. But over time and getting these examples into the training | process there's no reason to believe that the AI couldn't learn | these situations as well. | [deleted] | diplodocusaur wrote: | are you assuming the engine got there by itself in the first | place? | lmilcin wrote: | While unheard of, this is not illegal. | | You could theoretically convert two pawns to bishops and have | three black bishops. Nobody would do that as it is usual to | convert pawns to queens, but it is within the rules for you to | choose. | | So if you plan to write chess engine it would be pretty stupid | of you to not prepare it to face multiple black bishops. If I | knew that it would give me a lot of advantage. | ioseph wrote: | I could imagine such a move making sense with the king on the | backline such that promotion to queen would trigger a | stalemate | tialaramex wrote: | Underpromotions are one of those "toy problem" things. A | human might finish a whole professional career having never | once promoted a pawn to anything but a queen, but in | theoretical problem positions - like the one you're talking | about - they happen "all the time" because it's a fun twist. | | So it's understandable for a machine not to even bother | modelling these weird cases I think. | matsemann wrote: | When watching the WC games, I've seen it happen that a move | wasn't considered as a top move by the engine, but once played | the engine realizes it's actually crushing. Something about the | heuristics used to prune the vast search space can make it miss | sacrifices or seemingly sub-optimal moves that temporarily | weakens the perceived position but has a huge payoff in the end. | But humans find them. Of course, given enough time and depth the | engine will eventually circle back and try the move. But it has | no intuition. | | Also, an engine without an endgame tablebase can be pretty | stupid. There are certain rules one can deduct when there are few | pieces left, but a min/max engine will search forever, not | knowing the patterns. | thaumasiotes wrote: | > I've seen it happen that a move wasn't considered as a top | move by the engine, but once played the engine realizes it's | actually crushing. Something about the heuristics used to prune | the vast search space can make it miss sacrifices or seemingly | sub-optimal moves that temporarily weakens the perceived | position but has a huge payoff in the end. But humans find | them. | | Just to observe, humans display exactly the same phenomenon of | ignoring a move before it's made while still being able to | realize, after it's made, that it was very strong and ignoring | it was a mistake. | bottled_poe wrote: | No intuition? What is intuition other than a position | assessment heuristic? Game-tree AI must limit the game tree | search at some depth. In order to exploit this, the opponent | would need to identify the position strength at a deeper level | than the AI's search depth, which seems unlikely. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-17 23:00 UTC)