Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange
Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [chess]

For questions about chess playing engines such as AlphaZero and Leela, and questions about AI methods and theory related to Chess. (Questions purely about chess are off-topic but can be asked on SE:Chess.)

Chess is non-chance, perfect information, partisan, sequential two-player game played on an 8×8 grid. This tag is to be used for questions about chess playing engines based on artificial intelligence. (Questions purely about chess are off-topic but can be asked on our SE:Chess.)

Games can result in a win/loss for either competitor, stalemate, or no result (infinite loop). Chess is conducted under normal play, formally defined as victory for the last player to take a turn, except in the case of stalemate.

Chess has been studied extensively, and has been extensively utilized in Artificial Intelligence. The latest and strongest generation of chess engines, Alpha Zero and Leela, utilize machine learning.

Chess is considered partially solved.

SEE:

Chess (wiki)

Deep Blue (wiki)

Stockfish (wiki)

Giraffe

AlphaZero

Chess Engines (wiki)

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How do neural networks play chess?

I have been spending a few days trying to wrap my head around how and why neural networks are used to play chess. Although I know very little about how the game of chess works, I can understand the following idea. Theoretically, we could make a…
stats_noob
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Are humans superior to machines in chess?

A friend of mine, who is an International Master at chess, told me that humans were superior to machines provided you didn't impose the time constraints that exist in competitive chess (40 moves in 2 hours) since very often games were lost, to…
grandtout
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Are methods of exhaustive search considered to be AI?

Some programs do exhaustive searches for a solution while others do heuristic searches for a similar answer. For example, in chess, the search for the best next move tends to be more exhaustive in nature whereas, in Go, the search for the best next…
WilliamKF
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Why were Chess experts surprised by the AlphaZero's victory against Stockfish?

It was recently brought to my attention that Chess experts took the outcome of this now famous match as something of an upset. See: Chess’s New Best Player Is A Fearless, Swashbuckling Algorithm As as a non-expert on Chess and Chess AI, my…
DukeZhou
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Why spend so much time and money to build AIs to play games?

I was reading about John McCarthy and his orthodox vision of Artificial Intelligence. To me, it seems like he was not very much in favour of resources (like time and money) being used to make AIs play games like Chess. Instead, he wanted more to…
Suraj Shah
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What is the definition of rationality?

I'm having a little trouble with the definition of rationality, which goes something like: An agent is rational if it maximizes its performance measure given its current knowledge. I've read that a simple reflex agent will not act rationally in a…
Mr. Eivind
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How do you encode a chess move in a neural network?

In a neural network for chess (or checkers), the output is a piece or square on the board and an end position. How would one encode this? As far as I can see choosing a starting square is 8x8=64 outputs and an ending square is 8x8=64 outputs. So the…
zooby
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Is the play of strong Chess AI easily distinguishable from human play?

I don't play nearly enough Chess to be able to answer. For context, AlphaGo is stronger than the current strongest human player, but AlphaGo's game play has been cast as "inhuman" in the sense that it doesn't resemble human play. (In Go, this can…
DukeZhou
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How does the Alpha Zero's move encoding work?

I am a beginner in AI. I'm trying to train a multi-agent RL algorithm to play chess. One issue that I ran into was representing the action space (legal moves/or honestly just moves in general) numerically. I looked up how Alpha Zero represented it,…
Akshay Ghosh
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Clarifying representation of Neural Nerwork input for Chess Alpha Zero

In the Alpha Zero paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf) page 13, the input for the NN is described. In the beggining of the page, the authors state that: "The input to the Neural Network is an N x X x (MT + L) image stack [...]" From this, I…
Andrew
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Do AlphaZero/MuZero learn faster in terms of number of games played than humans?

I don't know much about AI and am just curious. From what I read, AlphaZero/MuZero outperform any human chess player after a few hours of training. I have no idea how many chess games a very talented human chess player on average has played before…
220284
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Can games be solved without an evaluation function?

Fundamentally, a game-playing AI must solve the problem of choosing the best action from a set of possible actions. Most existing game AI's, such as AlphaGo, do this by using an evaluation function, which maps game states to real numbers. The real…
dshin
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What are some resources for coding some artificial intelligence techniques in the context of games?

I know the most basic rudimentary theory on AI, and I want to delve into actual practical coding with AI and machine learning. I already know a decent bit of coding in C++ and I'm learning Python syntax now. I think I want to start implementing…
Tarun
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How powerful is OpenAI's Gym and Universe in board games area?

I'm a big fan of computer board games and would like to make Python chess/go/shogi/mancala programs. Having heard of reinforcement learning, I decided to look at OpenAI Gym. But first of all, I would like to know, is it possible using OpenAI…
Taissa
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How would you encode your input vector/matrix from a sequence of moves in game like tasks to train an AI? e.g. Chess AI?

I've seen data sets for classification / regressions tasks in domains such as credit default detection, object identification in an image, stock price prediction etc. All of these data sets could simply be represented as an input matrix of size…
ZYH
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