Related papers: Chess, Chance and Conspiracy
It is odd that chess grandmasters often disagree in their analysis of positions, sometimes even of simple ones, and that a grandmaster can hold his own against an powerful analytic machine such as Deep Blue. The fact that there must exist…
AI research in chess has been primarily focused on producing stronger agents that can maximize the probability of winning. However, there is another aspect to chess that has largely gone unexamined: its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, there…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
Unlike tic-tac-toe or checkers, in which optimal play leads to a draw, it is not known whether optimal play in chess ends in a win for White, a win for Black, or a draw. But after White moves first in chess, if Black has a double move…
Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
Understanding the properties of games played under computational constraints remains challenging. For example, how do we expect rational (but computationally bounded) players to play games with a prohibitively large number of states, such…
The strength of chess engines together with the availability of numerous chess games have attracted the attention of chess players, data scientists, and researchers during the last decades. State-of-the-art engines now provide an…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases…
Unlike repetitions in Western Chess where all repetitions are draws, repetitions in Chinese Chess could result in a win, draw, or loss depending on the kind of repetition being made by both players. One of the biggest hurdles facing Chinese…
Predicting player behavior in strategic games, especially complex ones like chess, presents a significant challenge. The difficulty arises from several factors. First, the sheer number of potential outcomes stemming from even a single…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
This short communication shows that the Chessography encryption scheme is incorrect, redundant, and the the security claims based on the complexity of chess games are unjustified. It also demonstrates an insufficient randomness in the final…
In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…
Motivated by the controversy in the chess community, where Hikaru Nakamura, a renowned grandmaster, has posted multiple impressive winning streaks over the years on the online platform chess.com, we derive the probabilities of various types…
Complexity develops via the incorporation of innovative properties. Chess is one of the most complex strategy games, where expert contenders exercise decision making by imitating old games or introducing innovations. In this work, we study…
It has long been believed that Chess is the \emph{Drosophila} of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Studying Chess can productively provide valid knowledge about complex systems. Although remarkable progress has been made on solving Chess, the…
Cheating in chess, by using advice from powerful software, has become a major problem, reaching the highest levels. As opposed to the large majority of previous work, which concerned {\em detection} of cheating, here we try to evaluate the…