Slashdot Mirror
A Data-Driven Exploration of the Evolution of Chess
HughPickens.com writes Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:
Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowaday," writes Olsen. "Even the world's current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world's elite."
The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."
Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead "draw death," where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent "draw death," but it never really seemed to catch on.
Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowaday," writes Olsen. "Even the world's current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world's elite."
The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."
Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead "draw death," where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent "draw death," but it never really seemed to catch on.
first post.
We evolve as chess players from enthusiastic amateurs who leverage our native skills to hard core analysts with a library of books on chess strategy. At what point does the game cease to be fun and become an obsession?
...omphaloskepsis often...
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
. .
God dammit... alright I'll give you credit for actually getting me with that one you motherfucker...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Unless mechanics prevent them by some hard method any sufficiently analyzable game will inevitably result in nothing but draws between two sufficiently skilled players. There will be variation on an individual level of course, nobody plays at the top of their game all the time, but as a whole the larger trend will be towards universal stalemates. Only games where mechanics do not permit stalemates by optimal play will avoid this.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
More defensive and more draws. Sounds like chess is getting boring.
Draws are much more common nowadays, because in 1850 there was no ELO system and competitors were more likely at different levels. Nowadays, in official competitions a lot of games have people with similar ELO playing together, increasing drastically the odds of a draw.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Not only is chess inherently racist it is also sexist and dangerously violent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I actually had to read the article to figure this out. The statement that White wins 56% and Black 44% is for games in which a non-draw decision is reached (per the actual article). But with 10% to 33% draws, the actual difference in score is definitely lower. Conventional scoring is 1 for a win and 0.5 each for a draw.
So White does have a persistent advantage, but the spread is lower than 8% going by score. And I think you have to go by score, that's what counts in tournament play.
Let's say over the time period in question there are 20% draws (just for the sake of calculation). Out of 1000 games there are 200 draws. White wins 56% of 800 or 448, so Black wins 352. White scores 548, Black 452, or 54.8% to 45.2%. Still a clear White advantage, but somewhat less, and lesser still as we approach the modern 33% drawn.
I had a chess computer, maybe a Kasparov 1985 16K. It had a 'behavioral' error. It would allow it's side to "castle" when the king was in check, a violation of the rules. It would enforce the rule and not allow "your" side to do that.
As evidence that the programming in chess computer games has been recycled, I have seen that same error happening in a few other chess games on computers, including a mid-2000 'oughts' computer chess by Ubisoft. Check Wikipedia Chessmaster, which only mentions games after 1988.
Hmmm...
First, for someone who has been playing chess competitively for the last twenty years, none of the results of the analysis is a revelation. Like so many "data" posts that seem to be in vogue, this one states quite the obvious viz the game of chess has evolved and has improved in quality. Hence opening colour matters, games are longer and many end in draws. DUH! As a secondary point, the OP makes a big show of the "steady increase" increase in length of game from the 1970s. On closer inspection, what is implied is that the average game has gone from 37 moves to 42 moves. For a chess player, that increase is hardly significant and can be attributed more as a result of prevailing opening theory and chess playing style than reflective of anything else. A clear case of data-blindness.
is chess inherently racist
And what about when a Black man is offered to play first with the whites against a White man who has the blacks?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
When did 'data driven' become a buzzword? And why is it a thing? Shouldn't every news article be data driven to some degree?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Otherwise known to the rest of us civilized folks as "next game".
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44%
Que the SJW's in 3, 2, .... oh dang, someone's already done it.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I propose getting rid of the First Move advantage by getting rid of turns entirely. Either side can move whenever they want, first come first serve. Should also take care of that trend of chess games taking longer.
It's actually worse!
Old stories were written with the story idea first, then data to back it up.
You can tell from this one that someone said "look! I have a bunch of data hanging around! Let's give it a driver's seat and make up a story to go with it!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The study completely ignores the fact
Pathetic fallacy. Please rewrite.
the only game that can defeat a computer is the game of love..
I don't know... I can beat a computer at Whack-A-Mole if I've got a big enough hammer....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It was established well before my time - ask the three and four digit guys...
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Variants aren't. Baroque Chess and Alice Chess are really the only forms of chess I play nowadays.
Please someone post a link to the first "first post" message on Slashdot. For the sake of documenting history.
My karma ran over your dogma
So, the only winning move is not to play?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I always liked the Shogi variant of chess. Other than a slightly larger board (9x9), and a few more pieces (20), you also have unit promotions, and deployment of captured pieces. The deployment of captured pieces especially keeps the late game from becoming simplified.
Malin Akerman and Michael McKean, plus a Lake Bell bonus!
We used to play a version of chess whereby the purpose was to lose the game. You played in reverse where you were trying to get yourself to lose your king. The wrinkle on playing is that you have to have the rule that if a piece CAN be captured during a players turn then the piece MUST be captured. If there is more than one option to capture the player being forced to capture has choice unless the King is one of the options. (can be played King capture optional too) If your King is captured, you win (by losing).
It's kind of an interesting mental exercise to play this way because it makes you think about the game very differently.
I propose increasing the number of squares to double or quadruple to drastically reduce the number of draws and discourage opening 'book knowledge' over pure brainpower. As a side effect, we may even bew able to beat the top computers gain. I wrote about such a topic on Reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/chess/...
Go has various board sizes. Why not chess?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Fun story to read.
This posting made me think of it.
And the complexity is (over a dozen?) orders of magnitude greater. And for which a decent amateur human still stands a pretty good chance against an average computer program.
Although the opening may seem like that, the complexity of chess is such that it's unlikely that every board position has been played.
However, this is incredibly counter-intuitive because of the numbers involved.
Do you know how many combinations there are of a standard 52-card pack of cards? 52! (factorial) = 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.
It would take - on average - billions of years of billions of people each shuffling billions of deck a second to end up with the exact same deck twice.
Chess's complexity provides slightly less more possible states than that but potentially much larger (over twice as complex, so billions of billions of billions of billions of....) actual viable game trees. However, Go's complexity is greater even on a 9x9 board. On the standard 19x19 board it's UNBELIEVABLY more complex.
Feudal's complexity doesn't even come close.
You seem a bit too clever for the likes of us simpletons here at Slashdot.
Yep, knew I was putting myself on a cliff with that but it's how it works.
While true that the number of permutations of a standard deck of cards is 52!, but you must consider that for many card games (Bridge, for example), the order of the cards in your hand is irrelevant. This reduces the number of permutations by a fair amount. It's still a big number, just not the plain 52! as presented.
Agreed.
Now consider the average casino game, however, where up to seven packs are shuffled together.
The game rules determine the actual complexity, yes, but the point was that complexity is an inherently difficult and counter-intuitive thing to estimate, let alone calculate.
A simple pack of cards holds so many possibilities. And chess is approximately that complex (give or take a few orders of magnitude).
1. e4
Play Go then. Black moves first.
Happy people make bad consumers.
There are about 300k games played per week just on FICS. There are a few hundred USCF games played each week just in Louisville KY (where I play). I would imagine if you managed to pull from all of the sources, 600k wouldn't even amount to a day's worth of games.
The set the author used suffers greatly from selection bias. Games are usually only included in commercial databases because they're interesting, or were played by interesting people. So I'm not sure anything interesting can be drawn from his results.
Also, there needs to be some control put in place to account for rating differences. The Eli system isn't that old, and in the past players with drastically different levels of skill were more likely to play each other.