Chess in Online Articles

Submitted by nocab on Mon, 11/09/2009 at 8:12am.

In an article on the website, Lubbock Online, 'The historic connection between chess and baseball in the U.S.', Susan Polgar writes, "Between 1857 and 1860, there were only two major sports "crazes" in the United States: baseball and chess." She also writes, "Unlike other board games, chess is considered a combination of art, sport and science." This is not true. For example,the same can be said about the game of Go. The entire article can be found at:

Larrey Anderson has written an article, 'Constitutional Chess', in American Thinker online. This is what he writes in the second paragraph: "Imagine that our Constitution is the equivalent of the rules of the game of chess. How would the modern Supreme Court and our progressive Congress conduct a chess tournament? How would they interpret the rules of the game? In making this comparison, I hope to demonstrate the inanity of modern constitutional interpretation, and to portray the legislative abuses of the Constitution, since the late 1930s. Let the games begin."
If you would like to begin the games, you can do so at: http://americanthinker.com/2009/11/constitional_chess.html

Also today, Jamie Engle, a staff writer for writes an article, 'Murphy game inventor puts moves on chess'. It is about the new game Arimaa, "launched in 2002"( http://www.arimaa.com/) a game computers have yet to beat. She writes this, "That’s no mean feat, considering that computers have been beating human chess players for years, with no sign of humans beating computers anytime soon.
According to comments posted on BoardGameGeek.com, many of them like it even more than chess (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/372482 ).
Each year there’s an online Arimaa World Championship, which (Karl) Juhnke, a Garland resident, has won twice. He recently released a book on Arimaa called “Beginning Arimaa: Chess Reborn Beyond Computer Comprehension” (Flying Camel Publications, 2009)."
What really captured my attention was this: “There are a few other games where the top human players are also better than the best computer programs, but all of these games use a much bigger board and many more pieces; also these games take much longer to finish. Arimaa is now considered the second deepest strategy game ever invented, according to ,” he said."
Checking the link, I found the most complex games listed in this order: 1) Go; 2) Arimaa; 3) Shogi; 4) Amazons; 5) Quoridor; 6) Xiangqi; 7) Backgammon; 8) Chess.
The article can be found at: http://murphymonitor.com/articles/templates/news.asp?articleid=7538zoneid=3

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Comments:

by Fritzlein - 9 months ago
Garland, TX United States

Member Since: Jul 2009
Member Points: 8

The ranking is not by "strategy" but by "game tree complexity". The game tree complexity is defined by the number of different ways a game can play out. Go has a higher tree complexity than chess because Go has about 250 choices per move for about 150 half-moves, whereas chess has about 35 choices per move for about 80 half moves. There are more ways to play out a game of Go than to play out a game of chess.

Backgammon is also more complex than chess by this definition because it can play out in more ways too, but many of the "decisions" on which way the game plays out are made by the dice. The dice add to the game-tree complexity without necessarily adding to the strategic depth.

Note that there is also a "state-space complexity" which measures, not how many ways the game can play out, but how many different positions can possibly be reached. In a ranking by state-space complexity, backgammon falls far out of the top seven. Intuitively, backgammon gives lots of different ways to arrive at the same exact position.

But neither game-space complexity nor state-space complexity fully captures the concept of strategic depth. The amount of "strategy" contained in a game is a human phenomenon that says something about our brains rather than about mathematics. At best the mathematical complexity of a game is an upper bound on how strategic a game can be, but the game might not actually rise to its upper bound in practice.

Arimaa is #2 in the list by game-tree complexity. That is less interesting to me than the fact that it appears to be rising to its potential to have strategy. Arimaa isn't just a dizzying array of possible moves. It turns out that the complexity is shot through by patterns within patterns within patterns.

by billwall - 9 months ago
Palm Bay, FL United States

Member Since: May 2007
Member Points: 2847

This came from an article by Bob Bemer on the computer history and IBM.

Many claim that the Japanese game of "Go" is more complex than chess. Once my IBM chess experts decided to validate the claim, and started to learn it. By coincidence, some months later a team of female Go experts from Japan were touring and visiting New York City. Someone had the bright idea of hosting them at IBM, and naturally our crew was asked to play a few games with them. It was an absolute disaster. Those young ladies triumphed in every game, after which Go became less popular in my department.

by backrow1720 - 9 months ago
Louisville, KY United States

Member Since: Aug 2008
Member Points: 70

I find it hard to believe they rank Backgammon above chess by strategy. Backgammon is so reliant on the relative probabilities of the dice roll in the position. You can make the perfect strategic play for 35 of your opponents possible die rolls, but they happen to get that 36th. The "turning point" in backgammon games always seems to be a die roll, not the actual strategic play.

As for Go, I can easily see why it's number 1.

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