Space-efficient indexing of endgame tables for chess

Chess endgame tables should provide efficiently the value and depth of any required position during play. The indexing of an endgame’s positions is crucial to meeting this objective. This paper updates Heinz’ previous review of approaches to indexing and describes the latest approach by the first and third authors. Heinz’ and Nalimov’s endgame tables (EGTs) encompass the en passant rule and have the most compact index schemes to date. Nalimov’s EGTs, to the Distance-to-Mate (DTM) metric, require only 30.6 × 109 elements in total for all the 3-to-5-man endgames and are individually more compact than previous tables. His new index scheme has proved itself while generating the tables and in the 1999 World Computer Chess Championship where many of the top programs used the new suite of EGTs

Space-efficient Indexing of Chess Endgame Tables

Chess endgame tables should provide efficiently the value and depth of any required position during play. The indexing of an endgame’s positions is crucial to meeting this objective. This paper updates Heinz’ previous review of approaches to indexing and describes the latest approach by the first and third authors. Heinz’ and Nalimov’s endgame tables (EGTs) encompass the en passant rule and have the most compact index schemes to date. Nalimov’s EGTs, to the Distance-to-Mate (DTM) metric, require only 30.6 × 10^9 elements in total for all the 3-to-5-man endgames and are individually more compact than previous tables. His new index scheme has proved itself while generating the tables and in the 1999 World Computer Chess Championship where many of the top programs used the new suite of EGTs

Computer Chess: From Idea to DeepMind

Computer chess has stimulated human imagination over some two hundred and fifty years. In 1769 Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen promised Empress Maria Theresia in public: “I will invent a machine for a more compelling spectacle [than the magnetism tricks by Pelletier] within half a year.” The idea of an intelligent chess machine was born. In 1770 the first demonstration was given.The real development of artificial intelligence (AI) began in 1950 and contains many well-known names, such as Turing and Shannon. One of the first AI research areas was chess. In 1997, a high point was to be reported: world champion Gary Kasparov had been defeated by Deep Blue. The techniques used included searching, knowledge representation, parallelism, and distributed systems. Adaptivity, machine learning and the recently developed deep learning mechanism were only later on added to the computer chess research techniques.The major breakthrough for games in general (including chess) took place in 2017 when (1) the AlphaGo Zero program defeated the world championship program AlphaGo by 100-0 and (2) the technique of deep learning also proved applicable to chess. In the autumn of 2017, the Stockfish program was beaten by AlphaZero by 28-0 (with 72 draws, resulting in a 64-36 victory). However, the end of the disruptive advance is not yet in reach. In fact, we have just started. The next milestone will be to determine the theoretical game value of chess (won, draw, or lost). This achievement will certainly be followed by other surprising developments.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

WCCC 2019: the 25th World Computer Chess Championship

WCCC 2019, the 25th World Computer Chess Championship, continued the ICGA's longitudinal computer chess experiment begun in 1974. This event was held in Macau, featured six chess engines and was won by KOMODO which thereby retained its title of World Champion. CHIRON and SHREDDER were respectively second and third

WSCC 2019: the World Speed Chess Championship

WSCC 2019 was ICGA's continuation of its investigation of top chess engines playing at Blitz tempo with the consequential loss of accuracy. It was held in Macau in parallel with the 'WCCC' classical tempo and 'WCSC' neutral-hardware events. The ICGA demonstrated that, even so, the engines play at super-GM level. On this occasion, JONNY proved incisive to win while KOMODO sustained two losses

The Computational Intelligence of MoGo Revealed in Taiwan's Computer Go Tournaments

International audienceTHE AUTHORS ARE EXTREMELY GRATEFUL TO GRID5000 for helping in designing and experimenting around Monte-Carlo Tree Search. In order to promote computer Go and stimulate further development and research in the field, the event activities, "Computational Intelligence Forum" and "World 99 Computer Go Championship," were held in Taiwan. This study focuses on the invited games played in the tournament, "Taiwanese Go players versus the computer program MoGo," held at National University of Tainan (NUTN). Several Taiwanese Go players, including one 9-Dan professional Go player and eight amateur Go players, were invited by NUTN to play against MoGo from August 26 to October 4, 2008. The MoGo program combines All Moves As First (AMAF)/Rapid Action Value Estimation (RAVE) values, online "UCT-like" values, offline values extracted from databases, and expert rules. Additionally, four properties of MoGo are analyzed including: (1) the weakness in corners, (2) the scaling over time, (3) the behavior in handicap games, and (4) the main strength of MoGo in contact fights. The results reveal that MoGo can reach the level of 3 Dan with, (1) good skills for fights, (2) weaknesses in corners, in particular for "semeai" situations, and (3) weaknesses in favorable situations such as handicap games. It is hoped that the advances in artificial intelligence and computational power will enable considerable progress in the field of computer Go, with the aim of achieving the same levels as computer chess or Chinese chess in the future

On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess

The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies. Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and to grasp

WCSC 2019: the 9th World Chess Software Championship

The 'WCSC 2019' World Chess Software Championship was the ICGA's ninth experimental test of computer chess software in a neutral hardware environment. Held in Macau, this event was won by KOMODO with JONNY and CHIRON scarcely separable in second and third