Fairer Chess: A Reversal of Two Opening Moves in Chess Creates Balance
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Two amateur chess players guessed the best sequences of WBBWW and then plugged the result of their guesses into an engine to statically analyse the position. There is absolutely no chance that they found the best options for either player.
The sequencing argument that they make has no real foundation. Introducing double moves could have all kinds of side-effects which they later mention when showing their guesswork-variations but skip over when trying to make the previous "logical" argument.
The only semi-useful sentence in this paper is the following:
> More light would be shed on this question if the two leading machine-learning chess programs, AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero, were taught to play with our proposed change in the order of the 3rd and 4th moves from White-Black to Black-White.
The rest can be summarised as "We thought of this potential rule change and it seemed to us to be more even for black."
If they had wanted to then there are only around 10,000,000 possible game-states after the first WBBWW and potentially looking at computer evaluations of the whole tree of possibilities could be semi-interesting and definitely very achievable. Probably better and easier to guess instead though to be fair.
Or they could have inserted a couple of `if` statements into Stockfish, recompiled, and simply analyzed the root position.
Even calling this a "paper" is a stretch. I'm usually against twitter post threads as content but that seems about the level of analysis that's actually present here.
This is what I was expecting them to do from seeing the abstract. Instead they just examined a handful of novel lines and evaluated them with Stockfish. An interesting proposed rules change, but a rather low quality analysis of it.
You don't even need to go that far. After WBBW you are already reverting to normal alternating play. Maybe that's around 400,000 positions?
Also, there has been plenty of exploration around this in the recent past. "No-castling chess" was briefly popular in 2020 following some investigations by DeepMind and Vladimir Kramnik that found that training AlphaZero from scratch to play this led to more exciting games. [0]
They didn't try this specific rule, or didn't publicize their results if they did. It's too different from chess to be of intrinsic interest to serious chess players. Maybe it's interesting as a variant in its own right! But this is the worst imaginable investigation of whether that's true.
[0] https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik...
https://www.chess.com/news/view/anand-beats-kramnik-in-no-ca...
Do you have a source for that?
Many of the famous openings that are still used by top players were elaborated and built over centuries. Stockfish is pretty incredible but it can't solve chess (yet). Meaning, that if you only examine the current most popular openings you can only draw a conclusion based on those start points but you have potentially omitted what could be new ones. Potentially, with this move ordering there may be an opening for white or for black that is extremely imbalanced, but the move ordering to get there is currently beyond stockfish's depth from the start position (or any starting positions they tried). Unless I misunderstood their methods.
Still pretty interesting IMO
Because I find the mainline Scandi to be dreadfully boring, I've been experimenting with playing 2. Nc3 with white. The tempting 2. ... d4 equalises but leads to a more complex game, with white's night rerouting to g3. Black's will often seize the centre with e5 and c5, but white gets attacking chances with Nf5 ideas as well as playing for the f4 break. The frustrating downside is that black can just play 2. ... dxe4 and force me to pick between the scandi I'm trying to avoid and a Caro Kann where black has already equalised...
e2-e4, f7-f6, g7-g5, Qd1-h5#
One interesting variant that I would love to see tried is no-black castling (or no-black-short-castling) chess. Draws would count as wins for black (called Armageddon scoring). You could still play two games (one per side) to get the most fair outcome. This starting position should still allow a large variety of openings and it would always be balanced on the edge without the large dead zone of draws. All chess programs can already play this variant as well, though maybe not most optimally.
Chess960 is also a pretty good solution that reduces the value of memorizing openings.
This line is very dubious. TCEC SuFi openings highly promotes one side over other as otherwise it was seen that almost all matches ends in a draw. It could very well select 1. g4 and black will win all matches. Also there had been an incident where Leela won an opening both with black and white pieces and it happened only once in TCEC history.
> Some players, including world champions such as José Raúl Capablanca, Emanuel Lasker, and Bobby Fischer, have expressed fears of a "draw death" as chess becomes more deeply analyzed.
> To alleviate this danger, Capablanca and Fischer both proposed chess variants to revitalize the game, while Lasker suggested changing how draws and stalemate are scored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_ches...
The result was controversial (the championship match would be restarted), and the other alternative formats that have been used are also controversial. Such as the reigning champion retaining the championship if a decisive result isn’t produced, and the current format where they play classical games, then rapid games if it’s tied, then blitz games if it’s still tied, then an “armageddon” game if it’s still tied. The most recent championship match was decided by rapid games, which a lot of people basically considered to be a non-result.
The effect is to give one side draw odds in the regular game or match. The other side, knowing that a tie means a loss for them, will have to play more aggressively for the win. This should lead to more decisive games.
Would also love different overtime ideas played out in soccer, e.g. put players out of the game. When it's 8 vs 8 maybe that leads to more goals in overtime or something... also, there was a time/place where penalties were shot differently (with running with the ball like in hockey), so there exist opportunities to change but as far as I see it there's an unwillingness.
'the problem with soccer' implies that there's a fundamental problem preventing it from working rather than the reality of it being the most successful sport in the world, regardless of what fans of American sports enjoy and in spite of corrupt leadership and perverse financial incentives.
This is simply the nature of games where you need a decisive advantage to turn a draw into a victory. In high level chess you need a decisive material advantage to win, and in soccer, a game where both teams scoring 0 points isn’t uncommon, you also need a somewhat decisive advantage to win.
But these are also both games that are very simple and well balanced. I think they’re better without additional complications, and the best solution is simply to extend play. In the 1984 chess championship I mentioned, the match was abandoned by the organisers. Karpov and Kasparov were both happy to continue playing for another 5 months if that’s what was required.
I think that’s the point. You had your chance to win the game and it took too long, so now you play a shorter, modified version of the game to determine a winner.
The same criticism could be leveled at 8v8 soccer that “it’s not soccer”. Your team depth matters less and your stars matter more.
It would create injuries to “extend play”, not to mention creating boring 2 or 3 hour long 1-0 matches.
What would happen if chess was reduced to purely "normal" piece moves? What happens if pawns lose their initial two square move? Obviously it would reduce the space of potential games by quite a lot but would it reduce chess to draughts/checkers?
Shall I pick my own stake to be burned at?
Those rules were added in to make faster games. Taking them out would slow the game down, and we've at least a hundred years of the new rules (faster games) being preferred.
It's literally on the wikipedia entries, respectively:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling "Castling was added to European chess in the 14th or 15th century and did not develop into its present form until the 17th century. The Asian versions of chess do not have such a move. "
"Castling was added to allow the king to get to a safer location and to allow rooks to get into the game earlier (Davidson 1981:16). "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant "The motivation for en passant was to prevent the newly added two-square first move for pawns from allowing a pawn to evade capture by an enemy pawn.[14]:16 "
The two-square pawn move is commonly regarded as being introduced in order to make the game faster/more dynamic.
Not exactly what you were asking, but you may be shocked to learn that Chess has had two significant patches very recently - namely clarifying the rules to prevent promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (sometimes causing a smothered mate), and to prevent castling with a pawn promoted to a rook on the 8th rank (annotated humourously as 0-0-0-0-0-0!!). These patches were seemingly implemented in the late 19th century and 1970s respectively, although it's surprisingly hard to find out precisely when.
Obscure, but also completely to do with how the pieces on the board can actually move, which I bet most people would have suspected that we worked out a few centuries ago.
The decision of who goes first doesn't really matter, it's a purely aesthetic choice. Similarly there's a lot of regulatory changes to this day around things better described as "playing conditions". But banning 0-0-0-0-0-0 is fundamentally the same category of change as saying "oh and also the queen can move like a knight now", which seems like an absolutely ridiculous thing to have still been refining in the 1970s.
There was nothing ambiguous about it. There was no possible interpretation of the rules that would have prevented those moves.
It's happened several times in MtG tournament history for example, where some mechanism was so clearly against the intended rules that the judges just didn't allow it even though it would have worked as a strict reading of the rules (nonsense about actions "between turns" and I recall Yawgs Will exiling as a triggered effect both just getting shut down by judges).
The two things you mention are solely gags for funny chess puzzles about what is an obvious oversight in some specific written rulesets, not actually something that would have actually been legal play.
I would not describe either of the chess examples as "stupid". "silly", sure, but neither of them is really any more ridiculous than en passant is.
> It's happened several times in MtG tournament history for example, where some mechanism was so clearly against the intended rules that the judges just didn't allow it
I feel like it's fair to make a distinction between a game like MtG where interactions and synergies are sufficiently complex enough to make those weird edge cases requiring an arbiter an inevitability, and chess, a game that's surely simple enough that it's reasonable to expect the rules to cover all on-board actions.
That said, if you have any specific examples here I'd love to hear them. I know of some absolutely batshit things that are technically possible in MtG, but I'm not sure I've heard of any stories of them happening in ostensibly legal tournament play.
(Since we're discussing absurd rules lawyering in TCGs now, you may be interested in the legendary 3000 card Yu-Gi-Oh! deck that was once played in a tournament setting)
But really I don't think any of the rules of chess ever unambiguously allowed either of the things you said, they are both extreme rules lawyering primarily known for their humorous value, and the rules being clarified they aren't allowed doesn't prove they were allowed before. E.g. 0-0-0-0-0 claimed a pawn promoted to a rook is "a piece that hasn't moved", and easily could have been rejected as saying it is the same piece that moved while it was a pawn.
En Passant is widely know and explicitly specified in the rules, taught, and played by even low level players, so there's no way it's similar.
I think it's impossible to know unless you can find a case where someone actually attempted the moves, but I feel pretty confident they just wouldn't have been allowed and if you tried a similar gag at a rated chess event today the arbiter would just tell you that you're crazy.
> In mathematics, the Thue–Morse sequence is the binary sequence obtained by starting with 0 and successively appending the Boolean complement of the sequence obtained thus far. The first few steps of this procedure yield the strings 0 then 01, 0110, 01101001, 0110100110010110, and so on, which are prefixes of the Thue–Morse sequence. The full sequence begins 01101001100101101001011001101001....
It has a number of interesting fairness properties, but I don’t I don’t think I’ve ever seen it suggested for turntaking in a game like Chess.
Connect 4 and Connect 5 (aka Gomoku) significantly favor the first player, but Connect6 follows a BWWBBWW... pattern where each player places two stones per move expect for the first move where only one is placed. It ends up being very balanced.
But tbh it seems a bit silly; at least TFA realizes there at least naively seems to be more at stake in moves 2 and ..2.
Paul Morphy (one of the greats) commonly played mortals a rook or more down
white gets the first tempo on the first move, black gets the first tempo on the second move, and then white gets the first tempo on remaining moves, and black's chances are improved.
I wonder what it would be like to continue the pattern? it would drastically alter the game as there would be many more opportunities to take pieces, but if it could be grokked it might be fun.
all the variants that breath a little new life into the game can be fun for semi serious players, I find.
”As part of a trial to reduce a potential first-mover advantage, the IFAB sanctioned in March 2017 to test a different sequence of taking penalties, known as "ABBA", that mirrors the serving sequence in a tennis tiebreak (team A kicks first, team B kicks second)
[…]
During the IFAB's 133rd Annual Business Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland on 22 November 2018, it was agreed that due to the lack of strong support mainly because of its complexity, the ABBA option would no longer be used in future competitions.”
I wouldn’t know whether that decision was the best possible, but guess that the popularity of football makes them more resisting to change than other sports (“Never change a winning team”)
Rugby union has several different offside rules - well one rule but it is quite involved. Also they are laws! https://www.world.rugby/the-game/laws/law/10
I don't follow the sport much - what's so complex about it? It always seemed fairly simple to me, especially in comparison to other sports' more complex rules (good luck explaining the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern system to someone).
The first player chooses white's move. The second player chooses whether to play as black or to take over playing as white.
Problem solved. The first player is incentivized to make white's first move as value neutral as possible. It's exactly the same principle as the "sister cut's the cake, brother chooses which piece to take" trick many will have used as kids.
I think you'd see many more opening with oddly position a-c/f-g file pawns, or horses thrown into the rail. I think it could make for a radically different game opening game that would be just as diverse as the current game. Perhaps more so.
I wonder if you misunderstood? Since this is very far from agreeing to a draw at the outset. I meant the cake cutting for only the very first move. Not the subsequent moves. Only the very first move played on the board is incentivized to be value neutral.
No, I got that.
> I fail to see how this would be the case. I think it may even increase opening variety.
At a high level players will be relatively comfortable with playing at least one opening from any (sensible) opening move, so swapping would offer very little disadvantage in terms of not being prepared. So the decision on whether or not to swap is almost entirely based on how good that opening move is.
Now, white has a significant advantage on just about every opening move that's currently played with any regularity. Therefore black will almost always swap, and gain that same advantage. So it's in white's interest to not play those moves, and instead pick whichever moves are as close to 50/50 as possible, so that their opponent cannot get an advantage.
The crucial thing to note is that most possible moves white can make are either good (preserve a meaningful advantage for white) or bad (immediately gives advantage to black). There are not many first moves that result in a 50/50 game. Therefore the number of viable first moves is decreased.
They're certainly different first moves, and we'd see a lot of variety for a year or two, maybe even up to a decade as people play and learn entirely new lines. But in the long run the number of opening moves that don't immediately give up an advantage would be reduced.
It begs another question though, is chess a worse game if white begins with a pawn on a3 instead of a2 (assuming this is the result every time the suggested procedure is used), and black moves first? Maybe. But I think it's an okay solution if you want a neutral platform for a tie-breaking game.