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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.
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)
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).
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 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? :-)
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.