Position criticality in chess endgames

Some 50,000 Win Studies in Chess challenge White to find an effectively unique route to a win. Judging the impact of less than absolute uniqueness requires both technical analysis and artistic judgment. Here, for the first time, an algorithm is defined to help analyse uniqueness in endgame positions objectively. The key idea is to examine how critical certain positions are to White in achieving the win. The algorithm uses sub-n-man endgame tables (EGTs) for both Chess and relevant, adjacent variants of Chess. It challenges authors of EGT generators to generalise them to create EGTs for these chess variants. It has already proved efficient and effective in an implementation for Starchess, itself a variant of chess. The approach also addresses a number of similar questions arising in endgame theory, games and compositions

Most people think playing chess makes you ‘smarter’, but the evidence isn’t clear on that

Chess has long been an important part of school culture. Many people believe chess has a range of cognitive benefits including improved memory, IQ, problem solving skills and concentration. But there is very little evidence supporting these conclusions. We conducted two studies (still unpublished) that found educators and parents believe chess has many educational benefits. But children in our study who played chess did not show significant improvements in standardised test scores compared to children who didn’t play

The role of deliberate practice in expertise: Necessary but not sufficient

The paper discusses recent data on deliberate practice in chess, and argues that other factors mediate expertise in chess

Rise of human intelligence: Comments on Howard (1999)

Based upon the evidence that the best chessplayers in the world are becoming increasingly represented by relatively young individuals, Howard (1999) claimed that human intelligence is rising over generations. We suggest that this explanation has several difficulties, and show that alternative explanations relating to changes in the chess environment, including increased access to chess knowledge, offer better explanations for the increased presence of young players at top-level chess

Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines

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 of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected. In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are ``comparable'' to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books one compiled from humans' games and the other from machines' games. Our analysis using several nonparametric measures, shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans' and machines' choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

6-man chess solved

Eugene Nalimov has completed the computation of a set of endgame tables for 6-man chess, and independently, Marc Bourzutschky has completed tables for 3-3 chess and for 4-2 chess where Black is not just ‘KP’. The ICGA salutes both achievements and looks ahead