Slashdot Mirror
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.
Or in slang terms valley girl speak.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Chess equivalent Strategy: When your opponent is distracted and not focusing on the chess board, one must use a 'quick arm flick to the side area, move your captured pieces and put back them back into play'. Alternate strategy, but as effective, is to remove opponent pieces "out" of play.
Subtlety is the key to success.
Important reminder: during gameplay, you are 'physically' at all times one arms length away from opponent's fist.
Shogi sounds like it would fit the /. crowd...lotsa mating problems
*ba-dum pish*
(It's a joke. laugh.)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
FWIW, shogi is far more fun than chess and more interesting too.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If anyone wants to play some Chess, Xiangqi (chinese chess), Go or some other boardgames online then you should check out this site. Unfortunately they don't have Shogi (yet).
Whats a nice free (GPL preferred, Beer otherwise) Shogi varient for Win32 and Linux?
The submitter's section is quoted straight from the introduction of the article. (you would know that if you'd read the article, the submitter == the author)
The author is Frederic Friedel, who also happens to be the guy behind much of chessbase.com, I think. He is probably not a native English speaker; he speaks several languages (judging from Google and chessbase research), including German, English, and Spanish. He is also an expert on computer chess. (and a very good chess player, having conversed with Garry Kasparov on things like the Brains of the World puzzle)
This is just an aside. I believe that linguistically speaking, the 'like,' bit was a sly dig at Michael Jordan and US culture, i.e. he used 'valley girl' lingo to express the 'oh well it didn't work out, so what' impression that he may have received from Jordan's failed baseball career. (and contrasted that with the undisputed Shogi grandmaster who has achieved International Master status barely a decade after teaching himself chess by reading a book about it)
Now, much of the linguistic implication outlined above is relatively speculative. But it suggests that he knew what he was talking above, and that it had some 'deeper' meaning.
Besides, making fun of someone who is a fairly high-level chess player and who speaks several languages well enough to converse and report in them, simply because he used some 'funny' phrasing, is kind of silly. Don't you think?
(posting anonymously to preserve my precious karma)
ASBTA
I know no one actually cares, since its funnier just to laugh at it, but 'like' is a perfectly normal discourse marker used for a variety of purposes. It is completely abnormal to speak without such things, and where I am from (new england) everyone 35 years old uses 'like' in conversational speech.
The thing is, is that chess is sufficiently small in dimensions and variety of pieces that it achieves a certain sparness of balance compared to Shogi, which is more complex in a variety of ways.
A good way for testing computer intelligence would to have a computer playing shogi, and become expert in it's use. Point being here is that there are not alot of western experts in Shogi, and so the possibility for an AI to learn the game beyond the obvious potemtial knoledge of the western experts is interesting
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Lautier: Do you think chess and Shogi are sports ?
Habu: Chess is certainly a sport....
Ok, this is my pet peeve I get on when I've got too much time on my hands. Chess is not a SPORT. Its a game--a rather complex and intricate game, but a game nonetheless. Neither is golf a sport. (actually, this argument usually starts with someone saying golf is a sport--I use chess as a comparison). Just because something shows up on ESPN doesn't mean its a sport. Pool and poker, for example...
Anybody disagree?
Sport used to mean something done without being necessary, such as the king hunting for sport.
My definition is pretty much the same; game is just another name for sport. However, it seems to me that the modern definition of most people is "big business with a ball".
Infuriate left and right
GNUShogi:h tml
o gi.html
http://www.gnu.org/directory/gnushogi.
XShogi:
http://www.gnu.org/software/xshogi/xsh
GNUShogi comes with tutorial.
I think you can quess the license.
Larry Kaufman was an IM level chess player in the US who tried to get the game shogi to catch on in this country back in the early 1980s. Although I was pathetic at both, it was easier to get him interested in my learning shogi than learning chess.
Although this has a stronger French connection than American connection, it could be the start of a process that could finally get shogi an appropriate level of recogniztion here. Shogi is much more of an action game than chess. Pieces dropping in from the sky, possibly promoting the move after they drop in. Yikes! Shogi has a much more traditional handicapping system for matching stronger and weaker players.
The handicapping system is combined with traditional educational/learning pattern of how to win at certain handicaps. Once you have mastered a certain level of advantage, you can move to the next one against anyone, thereby seeing progress.
Try the game if you have the patience to learn it. Maybe someone can post an on-line shogi-playing site?
I think it was called "Searching for Yoshiharu Habu."
Lautier: Are computers a threat for Shogi ?
Habu: In mating problems, called Tsume Shogi, the computer is already superior to the best players. In normal games, however, the computer is still far from the professional level. Its level can be compared to a 4-dan among amateurs [approximately 2300 strength in chess Elo terms. The first dan among professionals starts after the amateur 6-dan. To get a rough idea, the best Shogi players in the world, including Mr Habu, have a ranking of professional 9-dan - JL].
This is one example of the prevailing sad state of affairs of the performance of AI in games. The best chessplaying programs are those which use brute force search and little else. The fact that they can beat world champions tells us little except that the effective branching factor in chess is small. In games like go and shogi where the branching factor is much higher, long-term strategy counts much more, and brute-force is relatively useless, computers are nowhere near the best humans.
Another example: As early as 1962 Samuels wrote a checker playing program which could learn from its previous games and beat reasonably strong humans. After that there has been virtually no progress in game strategy; all the improvement has been in hardware speed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1994 that the first wold-champion-beating checker player, "Chinook" was written. This is an amazingly slow rate of progress compared to other areas of computer science/technology.
Its a shame, considering that game playing is thought to be one of the easiest problem domains for AI.
Chess is much the simpler game from this point of view as the loss of pieces in chess is a one way trip towards simplicity. In Shogi the pieces can come back on and so the game does not have the same steady progress to an endgame. In practice, of course, most games do move towards a sparcer state but it is a major difference in the two games which would affect "solving" them.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Use Yahoo IM and Google? Try YIMGoogle
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
I like to give a plug for this book every now and then: Why Michael Couldn't Hit: And Other Tales of the Neurology of Sports. Even if you don't care at all about sports, this book is a fascinating read. It describes how the brain and neurology is linked with being a world-class athlete. What I found especially interesting is that the author makes a good case that there are small windows during growing up where you must play a particular sport in order to be world-class at it. If you miss the window, you miss your chance. After that, your brain does not have plasticity to devote a specialized part of itself to the sport. He also makes the case that being a world-class musician has similar windows.
I would imagine that there are similar cases to be made about being world-class at a particular mental sport such as chess.
Highly recommended.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There have been a number of "Game prodigies" who excelled at several games. Omar Sharif, for example, who was a bridge, chess and checkers champion. Learning any one of these games is like learning a programming language--it makes it much easier to learn a second. If you know one language you will find it much easier to pick-up a second programming language than a complete beginner.
--
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me - Churchill
I don't know which will be solved first, or which is easier, but I can tell you that end games understanding is what makes humans competitive with computers.
There are many more reasonable looking moves (especially to a computer) in the end game, than in openings and midgame. It also takes more plys (looking farther ahead in the game with mroe branches) to see if the moves pan out or not.
Several endgames were only proven as wins or draws once computers were applied to them and computers have always played best in the endgame both in Chess and Shogi.
There are far more moves that need inspecting in the midgame and each ply makes the work harder than a ply in the endgame.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Didn't Moon-unit Zappa invent valley girl speak or did she just popularize it?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
If it doesn't involve moving an object across a distance into some goal zone through a space defended by the opposing team, it is not a "sport".
Basketball, football, water polo, baseball (the object is the player; the ball is the weapon of the defenders), rugby, even that screwed up dead goat Afghani game all qualify.
The farther you get from this game definition, the harder a time people have defining something as a sport.
Sport is spoken of in the context of competition, but understood in the context of a very tightly defined game style that appears to show up cross-culturally. Interestingly enough, nobody would care about the "not a sport" thing if it wasn't from the massive legitimacy boost brought by sport-participation.
People are funny.
--Dan
"The only thing that seperates Shogi and Chess are the rules, pieces and board on which the game is played."
Hmmm... the only differences between a person and a grasshopper are the range of movement, number of legs, and average living environment.
Rules, pieces, board. Seems pretty comprehensive to me
Ahh, ONE person who understood.
First some clarification: I am a very poor otb (=over the board) chess player, my highest rating ever was about 2000 as a 19-year-old. I speak exactly two languages, English (my first) and German, but both of them proficiently enough to write and publish in. I am a computer chess expert but not a programmer. Garry has been a close friend since 1985.
In my news blurbs on the main ChessBase page I try to make every item at least theoretically amusing or interesting to visitors, even if they are not chess players. Quite a daunting task, you must admit.
Initially I wrote "Michael Jordan tried it with baseball - it, er, did not work out." An Italian visitor drew attention to the "typo". So I changed it to "it, well, didn't work out". But then I remembered this incredible turn of phrase used by American kids these days. I had recently discussed the exact meaning and usage with an American colleague, Rudy Chelminsky of Wired et al., who abhors it's current prevalence. Rudy also introduced me to the really crass form: he was like "Never ever use it, Fred!"
So I changed it again. And apparently it worked. Look at the number of posting here dedicated to one word. That's good Fleet Steet technique - get them to look twice. And I learnt a new technical term: valley girl speak. I wondered why the Fullbright students here in Germany never use it. They're like all from New England!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Sorry, you're just wrong :)
Most moves in the early to middle game, can quickly be determined as leading to material loss, and so quickly discounted. Its very rare to have as many as 3-5 non-obviously-stupid moves early to mid game.
In the end game, each rook and bishop has up to 14 squares to choose from, and there's less obvious reasons why any of those squares is obviously stupid.
The end game is tactics, mid game is strategy and chess programs suck at strategy.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"