Author: Uri Blass
Date: 21:32:23 10/10/00
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On October 10, 2000 at 21:27:38, Christophe Theron wrote: >On October 10, 2000 at 20:47:28, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > >>On October 10, 2000 at 16:16:34, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>>On October 10, 2000 at 10:52:54, Pekka Karjalainen wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> Hi folks, >>>> >>>> there were some postings some time ago by Bruce Moreland, I believe, about >>>>tablebases for chess on the 6x6 board. That seemed quite interesting actually >>>>and I started to wonder: Could we solve 6x6 chess? If not, how about an even >>>>smaller variant? >> >>it's nice to talk about small chess at 6x6, but some pieces you >>gotta miss then which you have on 8x8. like if you remove >>the queen and the king, then the game gets totally different. >> >>how do you want to castle without rooks for example, not to mention >>without king? >> >>if you remove the queen and another piece on each side then you have a >>pretty easy positoin left to play. how the hell do you plan to >>win that anyway? >> >>within a few moves all pawns are against each other and you shake hands >>and it's a draw. >> >>somehow i'm missing realism here. >> >> >> >> >> >>>I don't believe that we can solve 6 x 6 chess via retrograde analysis, since >>>powers of 36 are not shockingly better than powers of 64. >>> >>>I built a 6-man table and it was well under a gigabyte, but if you try to add a >>>seventh you are doing multiple gigabytes again, and there are 24 pieces on a >>>full board. >>> >>>In case anyone has a burning desire to know, there aren't any huge long wins in >>>KRR vs KRN on a 6 x 6 board. This s contrasted with 8 x 8 chess, where there is >>>some godawful huge conversion case. It seems intuitively obvious that a knight >>>is stronger on a 6 x 6 board than it is on an 8 x 8 board, and perhaps this is >>>enough to draw if there isn't a way for either side to win immediately. >>> >>>You must be right that it would be possible to solve chess on a board that's >>>small enough. I haven't tried to figure out what that size would be. It might >>>be practically impossible to do it for any interesting case. >>> >>>bruce >>> >>>> >>>> You can find several actual small chessvariants from this URL: >>>>http://www.chessvariants.com . Basically you can make them up yourself by >>>>taking a smaller board (any size from 3x1 upwards is possible). Just set the >>>>starting position as you please and call it <foo>chess. The smallest ones are >>>>obviously trivial and can be solved even on the back of an envelope. You might >>>>want to remove the castling rule and double pawn moves, and even treat stalemate >>>>as a win to avoid total drawishness. >>>> >>>> But this is not what I am after really. I was thinking that would it be >>>>interesting to try to solve these? Could we get a program that would search all >>>>the way from a starting position to its (smaller NB) tablebases? >>>> >>>> One might even get a little feeling about the actual (and huge) computing >>>>resources that would be needed to solve standard chess. If 5x5 takes this much >>>>effort and 6x6 takes that much then 8x8 takes SO much (exponentially more of >>>>course). What would a solution to a 5x5 chess variant really look like? >>>> >>>> As I am not much of a chess programmer I do not want to take on this challenge >>>>myself. But if it interests anyone at all, maybe it was worth mentioning. >>>> >>>> Comments? >>>> >>>> Pekka K. > > > >The first chess program that actually ran on a computer was on a 6x6 board (the >bishops had been removed). > >I think it was called the "Palo Alto Chess Program". > >Some time ago I have downloaded a program that plays this game. The game is less >interesting than chess of course, but it is still entertaining, and you've got >some new problems to deal with. > >For example the king becomes a very embarassing piece in this game (because >castling is not allowed). Wherever you put your king, it always seems to be in >the way of some other useful piece. Funny. > >BTW after a few attempts I have been able to defeat badly the program in >question. 6x6 chess must be much simpler for the human brain. I think that the reason that you could beat the program is the fact that the programmer did not work on the program like programmers worked on chess programs. I believe that 6*6 chess is easier than 8*8 chess also for programs. I think that increasing the board is going to give more problems for computers. I know that the game go is hard for computers because the board is 19*19. I believe that doing chess programs for this size of board will force programmers to use selective search if they want to have good programs so maybe you and Ed have an advantage if you decide to do it because I understood that you use selective search. Uri
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