Talk:Chess/Archive 5

Deletion

Removed from main page: Theoretically, at some point in the future, a computer will be able to play all possible chess games and determine the optimal move for any given board position (using Moore's Law as a guide, it probably won't happen until 2030). For example, the fastest chess programs can 'look ahead' and completely finish the last 15 moves in a game (because of "pre-calculated" endgame tables). This is possible because there is a finite number of ways the chess pieces can be arranged on the chessboard.

Finite, yes, but very, very large. As noted at the beginning, the number of possible board positions is probably greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe. Moore's misquoted law says computers double in speed every 18 months, but to search one more possible move on a chessboard typically requires a factor of 16 increase. Computers in 2030 (by Moore's Law) are a mere million times faster, which gets you all of 5 more moves. --Belltower

Particles in Universe

I have seen estimates for the number of particles in the observable universe ranging from 10⁸⁰ to 10⁸⁸ or so. Have there been recent changes in those estimates? --AxelBoldt

No, I was acting on seemingly robust, but in hindsight vague recollection. Thanks for catching this. I'm reverting now.--AV

History

I am fairly sure that the bishop never jumped three squares diagonally. It was originally an elephant, and jumped two squares diagonally, i.e. over one intervening square or piece. However, I am not quite confident enough to change it. Can anyone confirm? --Karl Juhnke

Yes you're right. I wrote that part, and I meant that it skipped one intermediate square. Can you change it? AxelBoldt

Unicode

The table in Chess/Board is plagued by the same problem as described in talk:Hebrew_alphabet. The HTML code is crashing some browser. I beleive the indentation of the table code is causing Wikipedia to insert a PRE tag and /PRE tag around the entries. It may or may not be the cause of the crash though.

If you can be more specific, we can diagnose this. Particularly, if it consistently crashes when you use a specific browser, please tell us exactly what that is here; we'll then edit the page, and you can try again with that same browser. But if you just talk in generalities we can't help. --LDC

According to the descriptions on talk:Hebrew_alphabet, there were two problems. One with extra spacing with Netscape; the other is crashing on MS IE 5 on Macintosh. Apparently, they are browser bugs that triggered by certain type of HTML code style for table. One person fixed the problem on the Hebrew aphabet page by removing all the extract line feeds and tabs outside of the td tags. If you have a debugger, you can try to see how each browser treats text or white space outside the td tags. My observation is that Netscape will collect them and treat those out of place text in front of the table, but IE tries to collect them and crash on the Macintosh while handling them. On both pages, someone was trying to beautify the HTML code by inserting linefeed and indentation inside the table HTML code without knowing that some browser cannot stand too much beauty.

I cannot speak for the IE problem, but on my Netscape 4.5 on Windows NT, I have to scroll the Chess/Board page 4 times before seeing the table.

Now the center of the boards is white on Netscape. On IE, it looks fine.

In IE6, which does come with all unicode stuff you can imagine, and which displays thinds like δ correctly, I only get empty rectangles on the unicode chessboard. How can I fix that? --Magnus Manske

It's not the browser, it's your fonts. Even some of the largest Unicode fonts available (such as MS Arial Unicode) do not have _all_ characters, such as the chess pieces. Some fonts might have the chess pieces but not the Chinese characters. The browser does a pretty good job finding a font with the right characters when needed, but you do have to have the fonts installed. --LDC

Downloads

Comments that I've just placed at Talk:Unicode

I am not a techie! Nevertheless I can see the usefulness of much of the material available in Unicode. Neither am I the sort of anti-techie that complains that anything in other than plain-Jane unaccented English alphabetical characters must be thrown out of Wikipedia, or that articles should not be displaying meaningless question marks. I was visiting the chess page, and someone there has made a valiant effort to produce diagrams of how the pieces move by using only ordinary keyboard characters. I'm sure that he would not take it as a sign of disrespect when I say that it looks like shit.

I'm sure that most of us would like to see the special symbols, letters, or chinese characters at the appropriate time and place. At the same time I understand that for many Wikipedians there are technical reasons which prevent their hardware from dealing with this material (eg. limited memory). Then there are others for whom only the appropriate software is missing. Even some of the people with hardware restrictions may be able to handle Greek or Russian, though probably not Chinese. In cases where I've tried to find the code, I've ended up wading through reams of technical discussions. These discussions may be very interesting, but they don't provide a solution to my immediate problem.

The practical suggestion may be a notice at the head of any article containing symbols not in ISO 8859-1 saying in effect. "This article contains non-standard characters. You may download these characters by activating this LINK"
Eclecticology

Computer chess

Isn't gnuchess is vastly weaker than other widely distributed software? Fritz or Rebel could defeat most master players under tournament conditions, but I am not sure gnuchess could. Can anyone confirm or contradict? Thanks. --Karl Juhnke

From the main article: "Minor variations to the rules would either make chess a trivially easy task for a computer to win, or conversely leave even elaborate computers easy pickings for amateur players." Really? What minor variations? Does anyone have a citation for this? -- The Anome

It is partly a supposition on my part, but I believe a good one. It is based on the facts that: a) the different algorithms for playing various board games (checkers, chinese chess, othello, etc.) are all variations on minimax searching with pruning heuristics, and that in some of these computers can be beaten by rank amateurs, but others computers are the undisputed world champions. Secondly, it is a general characteristic of tree search algorithms like this that they are *extremely* fragile - a minor change in the pruning heuristics and suddenly things go to pot. --Robert Merkel

I, too, am curious what "minor variations" you have in mind. For example, I understand that it doesn't particularly tip the balance of power between computers and humans to play FischeRandom chess, or chess at material odds. The variations at which computers are known to stink relative to humans all seem to me to involve major rule changes, e.g. bughouse.

The reason computers excel at some games and do poorly at others depends, AFAIK, mostly on the presence/absence of a quick, reliable static evaluation function. In chess you get a very fast and reasonably accurate static evaluation simply by counting up material. Similarly for pruning heuristics, the most important thing is to keep examining a position as long as there are captures, checks, or promotions. Otherwise the static evaluation is OK.

In the absence of any specific examples of how a small change in rules makes a big change in computer playing strength relative to human playing strength, isn't the contested sentence purely speculative? --Karl Juhnke

Nice edit, Axel, issue resolved. Does that mean we should delete the talk section about it? --Karl Juhnke

No, we usually junk talk entries only if the discussion refers to a completely different version than the current one. AxelBoldt

50 Move Rule

If fifty moves have been played by each player without a piece being taken or a pawn moved (in tournament play, some situations are extended to one hundred moves).

I´m quite confident that this was abandond a few years ago. --Vulture

which was abandoned, the fifty move rule, or the hundred move rule? If you're confident, why not amend the text to say that X rule applied for a (insert approximate period of time), but the rule was changed to Y in (approximate time frame). --Wesley

See the official rules linked from the article, specifically rule 5.2e. I don't know that there ever was a hundred move rule; the person claiming this should cite a source. What there used to be was a provision that allowed an extension where it could be demonstrated that a forced mate would take longer. This is theoretically possible with some minor piece endings, but those who find themselves in such a situation during a game are unlikely to have the skill needed to demonstrate a forced mate. The practical application of the rule comes in games involving inexperienced players who have great difficulty concluding a game, and even then they have great difficulty in maintaining the score sheet which would prove that 50 moves have passed. In my experience as arbiter in children's tournaments, I can count on someone raising the rule at least once in every tournament in a situation where it is not applicable at all. Eclecticology

Back when I was an active USCF player, there was an addendum to the 50-move rule published by the USCF explicitly laying out one specific set of conditions under which 100 moves would be allowed: it was for certain Knight-vs-Pawn endings, laid out in great detail in the addendum. I still have it in my paper copy of the rulebook. If Vaulture says it was abandoned, and you can't find it in the present rules, I have no doubt that it was in fact abandoned. I was not able to find any information about exactly when that happened, or why. --Lee Daniel Crocker

Board Images

What Lee has been doing with the diagrams makes the article(s) on chess look great! Is there a technique available for creating these drawings to illustrate other articles about chess? Eclecticology

I created the diagrams with "xboard" and "Gimp". If you'd like some diagrams for specific things, let me know. The piece movements were already in separate articles. I think they might be better in a single "Rules of chess" article as well, but that would be a lot more work chasing down old links. Maybe after I get the text itself up to shape we can look at a reorganization. --LDC

Great additions and edits to the chess article, Lee, thanks. I'm trying to imitate you to create images for my sample game. GIMP is rad, judging by my first use. I seem to be succeeding, but I wonder why my images have so much larger file size than yours, maybe five times as big. Default GIMP png compression is 6. Should I compress more? TIA --Karl Juhnke

P.S. I am working on Windows, and I find Winboard isn't as good as the (gratis) ChessBase Light program for drawing diagrams, because the latter can highlight squares and add arrows. Of course, this could be done in the GIMP, but would be relatively laborious, whereas in CBL one can bang out diagrams in a minute or two. For example, here is an image of a knight fork:

File:Chess fork knight chessbase.png

But this raises another issue. For the chess pages to look really slick, all the diagrams should look the same, shouldn't they? But that won't happen unless we all use the same tool. And the biggest inducement to using the same tool would be to have an automated generation of diagrams from a description of the position... --Karl Juhnke

Can we hunt down any software which can produce a png out of a position description? I would really like to add some boards to Chess Strategy and Tactics. AxelBoldt

Sounds good. I'll resist my urge to interfere. The first place where I considered adding diagrams was at Chess strategy and tactics to illustrate elementary mating positions, etc. Eclecticology

No no, please do interfere. AxelBoldt

Interference comes in degrees. I'm willing to let people complete a task before I work to screw it up. Any earlier entry is like having the phone ring during sex.

I imagine xboard and gimp might be hacked and scripted to do that, but I'm not sure whether that would get enough use to be worth the effort, or if there might already be something out there. Xboard will read and write game positions in text files. --LDC

If you have gifs of the pieces, here's a cgi script which can create a board on the fly: http://shawn.apocabilly.org/pwg/examples/4ex.html.

There's also a chess style and fonts for LaTeX.

The CGI used Perl's "GD" module, which only creates GIFs, I think. I might also be able to hack something quickly that uses ESR's "sng". --LDC

GD creates png and jpeg but not gif (newer versions, at least). AxelBoldt

Organization of related pages

What I find difficult to accept is why the rules about the movement of the pieces are now in separate articles. If you look at this from the point of view of the potential user he is more likely to want to print out the information to have available beside the chessboard. It is unlikely that he will want to click on a different link for each piece. Eclecticology

I agree that many users will want the rules all in one place. On the other hand, there will also be some users (albeit fewer) who are not interested in playing chess but still want information about an individual piece. For example, I might be writing a poem in which I am playing on the various meanings of knight/night, and want a quick reference on the moves, history, strategic importance, etc. of the chess knight. As the mass of chess material on Wikipedia grows, it seems both advisable and inevitable to have a separate article about each piece.

My question is how much repetition to countenance. My programmer's instinct is say "as close to zero as possible", i.e. do it right in one place and then link from everywhere else. But it would definitely disrupt the flow of Axel's strategy article if the blurb about bishops were moved to the bishop article and linked. Similarly, it will break the flow of reading about a tactics article to link to separate pages on fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, overloading, undermining, interference, underpromotion, zwischenzug, ablenkung, hinlenkung, etc.

Is it possible to put links inside a page, as in HTML? For example, there wouldn't need to be a separate article for forking if one could link directly to the section of the tactics article which deals with forks. That would allow for both readable articles and precise linking. --Karl Juhnke

Right now, that's not possible, but I agree that it would be very desirable. AxelBoldt

A bold black adventurous Knight
Climbed Rooks for the white Queen's delight
Not high Bishop's roar
Nor Pawns at the door
Could save the poor King from this fright.

Your reference to poetry made my descent into doggerel inevitable.

In my view an encyclopedia attempts a balance between long tedious articles one one hand and fragmentation on the other. With specific reference to chess, I consider this long string of separate articles to be fragmentation. May I therefore suggest the following possible organizational outline for this topic

Chess - General considerations

Rules of Chess - including how the pieces move
- Tournament organization
- Administrative bodies
History of chess
- Origins of chess
- Modern chess - as with any historical topic, the transition date is debatable.
- Tournament history
- Famous chess players
  - World chess champions
  - National chess champions
Chess strategy and tactics - basic concepts
- Tactical elements
- Strategic elements
- Openings
- Middle games
- Endgames
Chess problems and puzzles
Chess and the computer
Chess in literature
Variants of chess
- National variants
- Fantasy variants

This proposal is obviously open to alternatives. I would be delighted if it could give impetus to precedural models in other areas. Eclecticology