Mapping Chess Aesthetics onto Procedurally Generated Chess-Like Games

Abstract

Variants of chess have been generated in many forms and for several reasons, such as testbeds for artificial intelligence research in general game playing. This paper uses the visual properties of chess pieces as inspiration to generate new shapes for other chess-like games, targeting specific visual properties which allude to the pieces’ in-game function. The proposed method uses similarity measures in terms of pieces’ strategic role and movement in a game to identify the new pieces’ closest representatives in chess. Evolution then attempts to minimize the distance from chess pieces’ visual properties, resulting in new shapes which combine one or more chess pieces’ visual identities. While experiments in this paper focus on two chess-like games from previous publications, the method can be used for broader generation of game visuals based on functional similarities of components to known, popular games.