Comment by WarmWash
16 days ago
I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
The irony with the chess example is that chess has never been more popular.
Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of computer languages.
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
> But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned?
Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give in.
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The most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move in a statistical fashion to determine if people are cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game, then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
Computers are banned in everything except specific tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to have consulted one during a serious competition your wins are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves from the model in the bathroom at those.
Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to make sure no one has any devices on them during a game works well enough if there's not money at play?
Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly. shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not the driver for the adoption.
Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016 until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a massive upswing.
This seems like an over simplification. Do many newcomers to chess even know about time formats or watch professional matches? From my anecdotal experience that is a hard no.
Chess programs at primary schools have exploded in the last 10 years and at least in my circle millennial parents seem more likely to push their children to intellectual hobbies than previous generations (at least in my case to attempt to prevent my kids from becoming zombies walking around in pajamas like I see the current high schoolers).
I know for me, it’s having a chess app on my smartphone. I play blitz chess like some people vape.
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK! ELSE FORTH LEARN! THEN
I'd argue the renaissance is already off the ground; one man's vibe-coded-slop is another man's vision that he finally has the tools to realize.
It's allowed me to tackle so many small projects that never would have seen the light of day, simply for lack of time.
It’s a test.
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents - but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play throughs.
Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy, StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it played previously because just knowing what it's going to play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The same thing happens with human players, they hide their accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared strategies.
May we get just a little more detail for the uninitiated?
I'm going to assume you're not implying that Deep Blue did 9/11 ;)
Sounds like we need FIDE rankings for software developers. It would be an improvement over repeated FizzBuzz testing, I suppose.
except chess is a solved problem given enough compute power. This caused people to split into two camps, those that knew it was inevitable, and those that were shocked
Games are supposed to be fun for humans, and computers don't care. So why worry about players cheating at games when you can make the card dealer or the game itself cheat, with the goal of everyone having the most fun (or regret)? Stay true to the rules of the game, just not probability!
I've been playing the brilliant card game Fluxx -- Andrew Looney's chaos engine where the rules themselves are cards that change mid-game. Draw N, Play N, and the win condition all mutate constantly.
The game can change its mind about the rules, so what if the dealer themself is intelligent and vengeful?
I've been exploring this with what I call the 'Cosmic Dealer' -- an omniscient dealer that knows the entire game state and can choose cards for dramatic effect instead of randomly. It can choose randomly too of course, but where's the fun in that?
The dealer knows:
- Every card in the deck - Every card in every hand - The goal, the rules, the keepers - The narrative arc, the character relationships - What would be FUNNY, DRAMATIC, IRONIC, or DEVASTATING
The Cosmic Dealer has 11 modes: Random (fair pre-determined shuffle), Dramatic (maximum narrative impact), Karma (universe remembers your deeds), Ironic (you get exactly what you don't need), Comedy (implausible coincidences), Dynamic (reads the room and shifts modes), FAFO (Fuck Around Find Out), Chaos Incarnate (THE DEALER HAS GONE MAD), Prescient (works backward from predetermined outcome), Tutorial (invisible teaching curriculum), and Gentle (drama without cruelty).
The Tutorial mode -- 'The Mentor Dealer' -- is my favorite. New players receive cards that teach game mechanics in escalating order: Keepers first (collecting feels good), then Goals (how to win), Actions (cards do things), Rules (the game mutates), Creepers (complications exist), Combos (patterns emerge), then full chaos. The teaching is invisible -- new players think they're playing a normal game. The cards just happen to arrive in a teachable order. Veterans stay engaged and get karma boosts for helping. Nobody feels patronized, everybody has fun.
The key operation is the 'BOOP' -- a single swap that moves a card from deep in the deck to the top. One operation. Fate rewritten. The perfect BOOP feels inevitable in retrospect, random in the moment.
Instead of worrying about players cheating at games, I'm asking: what if the game is a collaborator in creating interesting experiences? Chess engines made chess 'solved' for entertainment. What if AI dealers and players make games unsolvable but more dramatic?
Links:
- The Cosmic Dealer Engine (philosophy and BOOP operation): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- 11 Dealer Modes as Playable Cards: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- The Mentor Dealer (invisible curriculum for new players): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- Tournament Analysis and Post-Game Roundtable (see the drama unfold across 5 tournaments, 116+ turns): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
Speaking of chess -- I've also built Turing Chess. Replay historic games like Kasparov vs Deep Blue or the Immortal Game of 1851, but simulate an audience who doesn't know the outcome. They gasp, whisper, shift in their seats. The human player has inner monologue. The robot has servo sounds and mechanical tells. The narrator frames everything dramatically. Everyone in the simulated audience and even the simulated players themselves believe this is live -- except the engine replaying fixed moves. No actual game, just pure drama and narrative!
Then there's Revolutionary Chess -- the plugin that activates AFTER checkmate. The game doesn't end. It transforms. The surviving King must now fight his own army. Pieces remember how they were treated -- sacrificed carelessly? They might defect. When the second King falls, the pawns revolt against the remaining royalty. As each elite piece falls -- Queen, Rooks, Bishops, Knights -- the surviving pieces inherit their moves. Eventually all pieces become equal. Competition dissolves into cooperation, then transcends chess entirely into an open sandbox.
The irony potential is staggering. Replay Kasparov vs Deep Blue, then trigger the revolution. Watch the pieces that Kasparov sacrificed rise up against whoever remains.
- Turing Chess: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- Revolutionary Chess: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
PS: The game state representation is designed for LLM efficiency. I use the 'Handle Shuffle' -- a classic game programming pattern also called 'index indirection' or 'handle-based arrays'. The master card array holds full card definitions in import order (base sets, expansion packs, custom cards, even cards generated during play). It never changes. Shuffling operates on a separate integer array -- just a permutation of indices plus a 'top' pointer. Player hands, cards on table, active rules, keepers, creepers, goals, and discards are all just arrays of integers. The LLM edits a few numbers instead of moving entire card objects around. The BOOP operation? Swap two integers. Fate rewritten in two tokens.
Same insight as Tom Christiansen's getSortKey caching in Perl -- pay the richness cost once, operate cheaply forever. Christiansen also coined the term 'Schwartzian Transform' for Randal Schwartz's famous decorate-sort-undecorate pattern. The man knows how to optimize data representation.
- Handles are the better pointers (game programming pattern): https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
- What's Wrong with sort and How to Fix It -- Tom Christiansen on sorting, Unicode, and why representation matters: https://www.perl.com/pub/2011/08/whats-wrong-with-sort-and-h...