A Shogi Champion Turns to Chess

FFriedel writes "Michael Jordan tried it with baseball, and it, like, didn't work out too well for him. But what about a professional Shogi champion switching to chess? Yoshiharu Habu, one of the most gifted players in the history of the ancient Japanese game, has taken a casual interest in chess - and already reached IM strength. He is currently playing in a tournament in Paris, where chess grandmaster Joel Lautier interviewed him." Shogi is a very odd game if you're used to chess. Most of the pieces have biases toward forward motion, and when you capture an enemy piece, you can bring it back into play for your side.

Comments

Re:Shogi and Go

[bigsteve@dstc]

Both games have a strange aspect which westerners and programmers find tricky to handle: there are times when a game is over which the rules do not define but leave up to the players to agree.

I presume you refer to resigning and agreeing to a draw? Go and Shogi are the same as Chess in this respect. In all three, one player may resign when he thinks he has lost. In Chess and Shogi, the players can agree that the game is drawn. (A draw is not normally possible in competition Go because they normally use fractional komi.)

Note: the rules for Go say that unless one player resigns, both players have to agree that the game is over. If one player thinks game is not over, he/she continues making moves ... which the other player may ignore. In Japanese rules, you lose points by making moves that your opponent ignores. In Chinese rules it make no difference.

The difficulty is not for westerners per se. It is more a problem for novices who don't know how to judge that a position is lost. This applies equally to Go, Shogi, Chess and many other complex games with a binary outcome.

I agree that it is difficult for a game playing program to know when to resign or offer a draw. But it usually doesn't matter. Who cares if the computer is "impolite" for not resigning? :-)

Re:Computers still struggling ...

[athmanb]

Chess programs are not simple brute forcers. They could only do that if they could calculate forward to the checkmate and then apply all the movements to it.
This is obviously not possible since chess games use 6-10 times as many moves as the best computer can foresee.

So the computer must rely on an algorithm to:
a) Quickly discard stupid moves. You don't have to compute 12 moves deep if after 3 moves youve already lost the queen and two towers.
b) Anticipate the opponents moves.
c) Judge and compare different positions and take the best one out of them.

All these factors are extremely complex, and there has been a lot of software-based progress in the last years.