Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> The no-castling restriction means that players cannot rely on memorized patterns; they are forced to think creatively from the beginning.

It's not obvious that this is true at all. Once top-level players have played no-castling-chess as much as they've played ordinary chess, I don't see why they wouldn't have just as many patterns memorised.

View on HN

I think the article is saying castling makes for intrinsically more predictable patterns.

This makes sense. It’s such a good idea to castle, players pretty much always do. That should indicate it is cutting off lots of uncontrolled variations.

Moving the king to a safe place is going to make threats have a narrower set of possibilities.

I see no reason, in principle, why such a rule change shouldn’t have a dramatic effect on the number of feasible strategies.

I believe the underlying assumption is that castling dominates (in a loose sense) the strategy space for both white and black, and tends towards draw-heavy game play.

The evidence for the claim that no-castling would fix this is alpha go's performance against itself under no-castle rules.

While it is true that eventually, the patterns would be recognized and we'd have the same problem, I think the gambit (to use a chess term) Kramnik is making here is that for the current form of chess, it took us hundreds of years of practice, experience, and study to get to this point. Before we reached this stage, chess was, as Kramnik is arguing, more exciting and entertaining.

This time around the adjustment period would no doubt be significantly shorter for a couple of reasons:

1) Computer-aided analysis will greatly accelerate the evaluation of new openings and positions

2) This change does not really affect end-game theory, so that part doesn't change

It just removes a large swathe of current possible lines I guess. Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings). I don't think it'll produce amazingly creative chess, it's true, but it may produce more interesting opening games?

> Analysis through an engine becomes tough, for example, because it might produce a line which hinges on castling at some point in the future (this restriction is obviously lifted once both players have moved their kings)

This is only true for the brief period until someone modifies an engine to train on the new ruleset.

Analysis through an engine is trivial with a 'hack' of inputing an artificial chain of fixed moves in the beginning. No-castling chess rules are exactly equivalent to ordinary chess rules after both players move both knights, move both rooks, and return them to the original positions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com