Summary: The history of chess has involved changing various rules of the game to make it more interesting and popular. Recently Alphazero, a modern neural network chess engine, has been able to change how humans approach chess. This engine learns superhuman strategies from scratch and can compose new games and can create new opening theory that appeals to chess grandmasters. This research study, “Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero” by Nenad Tomasev, Ulrich Paquet, Demis Hassabis, and Vladimir Kramnik (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3460349), used alphazero to provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of atomic changes to the rules of chess. These rules include disabling castling and allowing the pawns to move in sideways or backwards, all of which are not allowed in a classical game of chess. The statistical and aesthetic properties of these new variants can provide insight into possible rules for the game, making it more appealing to players.  

Reaction: This article was eye-opening since, previously, I had thought that alphazero was only used to analyze the classical game of chess, not look into other variants. At first, I was slightly confused as to why alphazero was being used to find new possible rules for the game. As an avid chess player myself, I believe that alphazero’s development of new ideas in classical chess makes it unnecessary to bring up  ideas for new variants of the game. However, after some deeper thinking, I have realized the true greatness of alphazero, and that its ideas from the other variants can be used to change the approach to classical chess (for example, through the non-castling variant). My research questions involved how chess engines change the approach to chess and chess training. By comparing variants to classical chess, grandmasters can try to build bridges based off of alphazero’s ideas and try to apply them to classical chess.

Citation:

TOMAŠEV, NENAD, et al. “Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero: AI Is Driving the next Evolution of Chess, Giving Players a Glimpse into the Game’s Future.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 65, no. 2, Feb. 2022, pp. 60–66. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.eznvcc.vccs.edu/10.1145/3460349.

Are chess engines revolutionizing chess for the better or worse? How have engines such as Deep Blue, Stockfish, and Alphazero changed the way humans approach chess? Is the easier access to postgame analysis giving humans a deeper understand of the games, or is it simply making them lazier. Has the accessibility to chess engines increased cheating in in-person and online tournaments?