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

Chess software and its impact on chess players

Computer-aided chess is an important teaching method, as it allows a student to play under every condition possible, and regulates the speed of his/her development at an incremental pace, measured against actual players in the rated chess community. It is also relatively inexpensive, and pervasive, and allows players to match themselves against competitors from across the world. The learning process extends beyond games, as interactive software has shown it teaches several skills, such as opening, strategy, tactics, and chess-problem solving. Furthermore, current applications allow chess players to establish rankings via online chess tournaments, meet international grandmasters, and have access to training tools based on strategies from chess masters. Using 250 chess software packages, this research classifies them into distinct categories based mainly on the Gobet and Jansen's organization of the chess knowledge. This is followed by extensive discussion that analyzes these training tools, in order to identify the best training techniques available building on a research on human computer interaction, cognitive psychology, and chess theory. --P.ii.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b151379

Comparing move choices of chess search engines

Anecdotal evidence exists that in many positions two distinct chess engines will choose different moves and, moreover, that their top-n ranking of move choices also differ. Here we set out to quantify this difference, including the difference between move choices by chess engines and those made by humans. For our analysis we used FRITZ 8 and JUNIOR 9 as representative chess search engines and the POWERBOOK opening book as representing human choices. We collected the top-5 ranked moves and their scores as reported by FRITZ and JUNIOR, after 15 and 30 minutes of thinking time, and the top-5 moves recorded in the POWERBOOK, for the Nunn2 test positions and the initial board position. The data analysis was carried out using several nonparametric measures, including the amount of overlap in the top-5 choices of the engines and their association as measured by three variants of Spearman’s footrule. Our preliminary results show that, overall, the engines differ substantially in their choice of moves, and, furthermore, the engines ’ choices also differ substantially from human choice. 1