Chess Problems Research Articles

Realization of the chess mate solver application

This paper presents details of the chess mate solver application, which is a part of the author?s Geniss general chess application. The problem chess is an important domain connected with solving of the chess problems. The Geniss Mate Solver (G.M.S.) application solves Mate-in-N-move problems. Main techniques used for the implementation of the application are full-width searching with Alpha-Beta pruning technique and zero evaluation function. The application is written in Delphi for Windows programming environment and the searching engine is completely coded in assembly language (about 10000 lines). This hybrid software structure enables efficient program development by using high-level programming environment and the realization of a very fast searching engine at the same time. The machine code is manually coded and could achieve above 7 million generated positions per second on the 1Ghz Celeron PC.

On-Coupling and Off-Coupling of Neocortical Areas in Chess Experts and Novices

Abstract This paper presents a pilot study on the differences in evoked EEG coherence measures (computed as zero-lagged cross-correlation, “EC”) between chess experts and novices while solving chess problems. One of our earlier investigations ( Volke, 1999 ) had shown that both location and direction of EC changes in task processing (compared with a resting condition) depend on the degree of task performance. As a result we postulated that when solving the same tasks experts and novices would show different EC. The results of the recent study confirmed this supposition. Chess tasks of varying difficulty were presented to 25 chess players of different performance levels. The EEG was recorded from 29 positions (enhanced 10:20-system). EC were computed for post-stimulus intervals of 1.6s. A special averaging procedure (considering Fisher's Z transformation) was applied for summarizing the single EC of each type of task. These subject- and task-related EC-values (29 × 28/2 = 406 values per frequency band) were subjected to a MANOVA after a two-staged principal component analysis. Significant differences between experts and novices, compared with the resting condition, were found in the delta frequency range. The relevant cortical areas of experts, defined by a topological analysis of the differentiating principal components, were located rather posterior and more in the right hemisphere, compared with those of the novices. Furthermore, the essential EC of the experts showed higher values in the task situation (“on-coupling”), compared with the resting condition, whereas those of the novices were lower (“off-coupling”). The results are interpreted as a higher task-related functional integration of the cortical areas in experts.

Winning strategies for robotic wars: defense applications of linguistic geometry

This paper reports new results of research, which started in 1972 in Moscow, USSR. For 16 years Boris Stilman was involved in the advanced research project PIONEER led by a formed World Chess champion, Professor Mikhail Botvinnik. The goal of the project was, at first, to discover and mathematically formalize methodologies utilized by the most advanced chess experts (including Botvinnik himself) in solving chess problems almost without search. The next step was to apply this new theory to complex search problems from various problem domains. In the 1980s, in Moscow, Stilman developed the foundations of the new approach. In 1991, while at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Stilman coined the term “Linguistic Geometry” (LG) as a name for the new theory for solving Abstract Board Games. After 1991, this research continued at the University of Colorado at Denver, USA. In 1995, V. Yakhnis joined the LG effort. In the 1990s, it was shown that LG is applicable to a wide class of higher-dimensional, multi-agent games with concurrently moving agents, which are ideally suited for combat planning and control. Also, it was proved that for several classes of games LG generates optimal strategies in polynomial time. This groundbreaking results also suggests that for much wider classes of games LG strategies are also optimal or close to optimal. Over a hundred papers on LG have been published. Stilman wrote the first scholarly book on LG,Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction, published in February 2000. Over the last two years, defense applications of LG have attracted so much attention at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Rockwell, and Boeing that the number of LG-based projects has skyrocketed. In 1999, recognizing the maturity and power of this technology, a group of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs founded a company, STILMAN Advanced Strategies, to facilitate development of government and commercial applications of LG.

AN IMPROVER OF CHESS PROBLEMS

Computer chess programs achieve outstanding results at playing chess. However, no existing program can compose adequate chess problems. In this paper, we present a model that is capable of improving the quality of some of the existing chess problems. We have formalized a major part of the knowledge needed for evaluating the quality of chess problems. In the model, we attempt to improve a given problem by a series of meaningful chess transformations, using a hill-climbing search, while satisfying several criteria at each step. This model has been implemented in a working system called Improver of Chess Problems (ICP). The results of the experiment we carried out show that the majority of the problems examined were optimal. However, the software has improved almost one-third of the tested problems most of them needing only slight changes. General lessons learned from this research may be useful in other composition domains.

On Thomas Kuhn's Philosophical Significance

On Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophical Significance Paul Hoyningen-Huene (bio) In the first section of this paper, I will by way of introduction survey Thomas Kuhn’s bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This introduction is necessary because it is by no means clear how a book of Structure’s type can be philosophically significant at all. In the second section, I will then discuss some aspects of its philosophical significance. The most important change in Kuhn’s views after Structure is his turn away from a more perceptual view of scientific revolutions toward a more conceptual one. This new view, together with its basis, a new theory of meaning for empirical concepts, will be the subject of my third section. In the final section I will discuss some philosophical consequences of Kuhn’s new theory of meaning. I. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—Survey Probably the most important single work contributing to the turmoil in philosophy of science in the early 1960s was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Let us look at its outline in order to survey its subject, which will prepare the discussion of its philosophical significance. The table of contents of Structure presents a developmental scheme for scientific fields in the basic sciences. I note in passing that this sort of structuring occasionally makes the close reading of a particular topic very difficult, as passages scattered through the whole book must be considered. The first chapter of Structure opens with a much-quoted sentence that concisely describes what the book is all about: [End Page 1] History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. 1 Here, Kuhn refers to two different approaches to the history of science, or two different historiographic traditions. 2 For the older tradition, the primary goal was to reach a deeper understanding of contemporary science by displaying its historical evolution. This was to be achieved by a chronological presentation of the discoveries of today’s concepts, theories, experimental methods, and so on. The image of scientific development that resulted was necessarily cumulative: science grows step by step, adding new pieces of knowledge to those already in place. But this form of historiography invariably distorts the presentation of the older science by projecting contemporary science into the past. The “new historiography of science,” as it was called, attempts instead to display the historical integrity of a science in its own time, mainly following Alexandre Koyré’s model. More specifically, the concepts, the research problems, and the standards of evaluation of an older science must be reconstructed in a historically adequate way—that is, understood in their own terms, not from today’s perspective. Kuhn’s project is irretrievably tied to this second mode of historiography. The aim of Structure, as Kuhn puts it, is to delineate a new image of science “by making explicit some of the new historiography’s implications” (p. 3). The image of science that emerges from this kind of historiography contains a developmental scheme for scientific disciplines. Before reaching maturity, nascent scientific fields are typically characterized by controversies between competing schools; there is no general consensus among the practitioners of an emerging field about its foundations. This competition may eventually end when one group produces an exemplary solution to a preeminent research problem with two characteristics: the solution is both sufficiently unprecedented, and sufficiently suggestive for further scientific work, that it attracts members from the other schools. These model solutions are called paradigms; they implicitly guide research in the following period called “normal science.” Normal science is characterized by a broad consensus of the practitioners in that field about [End Page 2] fundamental questions, and consequently, by a particular mode of research. This mode of research can be described by its analogy to puzzle-solving, where exemplars of puzzles include chess problems and crossword puzzles. The most interesting property shared by puzzle-solving and normal science is that in both cases there are regulations that are constitutive of the respective activity, which therefore cannot be called into question by the activity—and consequently, neither activity can be described as...

Penrose's triangles: The large, the small, and the human mind

Penrose’s Triangles: The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind Arkady Plotnitsky Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Steven Hawking), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; with a glance back at The Emperor’s New Mind, Shadows of the Mind, and The Nature of Space and Time. At 4 p.m. on May 11, 1997, “the truly impossible occurred,” as Newsweek reported (May 26, 1997, 84). The computer Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion and one of the greatest chess players of all time, Garry Kasparov. In the process, his confidence, bolstered by his impressive previous victories over computers, was shattered along with the confidence and hopes of much of the chess world. Indeed, the defeat was taken by some, including by Kasparov, as a humiliation. It appears to have been especially humiliating because it was inflicted on a great chess mind, capable of the most complex tactical and strategic thinking, by the raw power of computation. A great chess mind was defeated by crude number-crunching—a much inferior form of thinking or, in this case, not even thinking. Such minds have always been seen as able to circumvent and transcend protracted computational routines, and as entities whose own workings are themselves inaccessible to computational analysis. In the last installment of his ongoing argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, Roger Penrose uses chess to illustrate the difference between the computational approach used by digital computers and non-computational thinking, which, according to him, fundamentally defines the human mind and gives it ultimate superiority over computers or computer-like computational intelligence (103–5). Penrose gives examples of two chess problems that are easily solved by even mediocre human players but have defeated a computer (in this case Deep Thought, the forerunner of Deep Blue). Penrose’s lectures (given in 1995 and published earlier this year) preceded the latest chapter of the story of computer chess just described, and he may even have been inspired in part by Kasparov’s previous decisive victories over computers and by the seemingly unquestionable ultimate superiority of chess players or, one might say, chess thinkers over chess computers. This latest episode of this, by now long, history does not prove the opposite. Nor does it prove the ultimate superiority of any one form of thinking over another, or of (human) thinking over (computer-like or other) non-thinking. That is, assuming that human thinking is indeed non-computational—a claim that, however appealing or likely, remains hypothetical, as Penrose admits. Everyone acknowledges that Deep Blue cannot think—leaving aside here the complexity, if not impossibility, of the latter concept itself. Nor does the episode prove that artificial intelligence is any more likely now than it was before. What it does prove is that computational thinking or (even more humiliatingly for its opponents) computation without thinking, number-crunching, can be taken to a level high enough to supersede non-computational thinking in certain specific cases. The fact that this is possible in some cases is in part (there are more general conceptual reasons) what drives the idea—which is more or less the idea of artificial intelligence—that it may be possible in any given case. Much else, it is further extrapolated, would be possible as well for computational devices. It may, for example, be possible for machines to perform any given task that human thinking can perform, or conceivably even to think or have consciousness or even to feel, just as humans do. Or—a rarely, if ever, discussed but interesting and radical possibility—it may be possible to perform even the most complex tasks better than humans without thinking and, thus, in a certain sense without intelligence. Or, as I said, it might also be possible to assume that at bottom the human mind is itself only a computational device, a number-crunching machine. These are the types of possibilities that are pursued in the field of artificial intelligence and related endeavors and that are argued against by, among others, Penrose. At a certain level, at stake here is still the power of creative...

Non-dominant dorsal-prefrontal activation during chess problem solution evidenced by single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT)

Expert chess players can recall meaningful chess positions with extraordinary precision in comparison with inexperienced players. We hypothesized, therefore, that their mental performance during chess deliberation could be an appropriate target for single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) studies. We studied cerebral activation with 1110 MBq 99mTc-Bicisate SPECT in five expert male chess players during mental solution of a complex chess problem. Region of interest (ROI) analysis, in comparison with average weighted cerebellar counts, showed activation by 10% or more, of the non dominant prefrontal area (right in four dominant right handed players, left in one dominant left handed player) and by 2–6% in the non-dominant middle temporal areas. Maximum variability of ROI analysis versus cerebellar counts in test/retest evaluation is in our laboratory, as in others, 1.5%. Our results are in agreement with neuropsychological studies suggesting that the non-dominant hemisphere is specialized for chess skill, and show that non-dominant prefrontal and temporal lobe activation during chess deliberation can be detected by SPECT.

Pale Fire : Three Notes towards a Thetic Solution

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 87-103. CHRIS ACKERLEY (Dunedin, New Zealand) PALE FIRE: THREE NOTES TOWARDS A THETIC SOLUTION* There is, I suggest, a close analogy between the chess problem discussed in chapter 14 of Speak, Memory and the structure of Pale Fire. Few readers, it seems, have teased out the cryptic instructions which accompany that chess problem, and fewer still, I imagine, have related the problem to the novel. The three Notes offered here are not completely original , but are designed to convey something of the excitement which Nabokov expressed upon completion of the problem, and to intimate how a like excitement of discovery may inform our response to the novel. I propose, therefore, in my first Note, to look closely at the chess problem , and, at the risk of boring the few to whom its magic is manifest, to explicate in prosaic terms the solution which Nabokov proffers. Then, in my second Note, I shall outline the correspondences (of structure, theme and chronology) that exist between the two compositions, chess problem and novel. Finally, in my third Note, I shall look at the title "Pale Fire" and suggest that it too invokes something of the thetic mysteries intimated here, as our poetic understanding moves from Timon of Athens to Hamlet A constant point of reference is the chapter on Pale Fire (chapter 18) in Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,' the argument of which may be furthered in the poetry of Shakespeare and chess. Note 1 : The Chess Problem. Beauchamp - Campbell (Onhava, 1928) Towards the end of chapter 14 of Speak, Memory,2 Nabokov dis * I should like to thank Andrew Caulton for stimulating my discussion of the Hamlet theme; Anthony Ker for checking my chess; and Brian Boyd for the endless arguments about Pale Fire which nave formed so much of the pleasant experience of this roundabout route. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991. Cited in text as AY. 2. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam 's, 1966). Cited in text as SM. 88 Nabokov Studies cusses a chess problem particularly dear to him, not only because it rendered , with humor and grace, a difficult theme he had despaired of expressing before, but because, he felt, with its completion a whole period of his life had come to a satisfactory close: I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, "thetic" solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White's King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to "plant" (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this "antithetic" inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thricerepeated circuit of a newly married couple round the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight (291-92). The problem is detailed in the final paragraph of chapter 14, the pieces placed upon an imagined board (of cream and cardinal leather), and a brief outline offered of its central theme (293): "White begins and mates in two moves. The false scent, the irresistible 'try' is: Pawn to b8, becoming a knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed checks by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by not checking White and making instead a modest dilatory move elsewhere on the board." The problem with...

Desiring to Try: Reply to Adams

My argument involved a case in which 'Brett promises to pay Belton fifty dollars' for trying to solve a certain mate-in-two chess problem within five minutes. To preempt 'the objection that Belton will want to solve the problem, because only his discovering the solution can guarantee that Brett will deem him to have tried/ I supposed that 'Belton is convinced that Brett is psychic (or omniscient) and can tell whether he has tried, independently of Belton's succeeding' (252).2 1 observed that if and when Belton does try to solve the puzzle, there is a sense in which 'mating the king which is solving the puzzle (provided that it is accomplished in two moves) is a goal in Belton's thinking about chess moves.' But, I argued, the suppositions that Belton wants to try to solve the puzzle (or wants to try to figure out how to mate the king in two moves) and that he acts on that want do not entail that this goal is desired (or wanted; I

Computers, Minds and Robots.

From the Publisher: In Computers, Minds, and Robots, William S. Robinson offers a clear and lively discussion of the philosophical problems that surround the developing science of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He introduces and clarifies the basic concepts necessary for understanding these problems and discusses opposing views and possible solutions to the problems. Robinson describes the kinds of further research that seem likely to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of intelligence. He also explains the new connectionist approach to AI and relates it to the more traditional approach. This book is not a typical monograph on the latest developments in computer or robot technologies. Instead, Robinson poses philosophical questions about the nature of Al. For example, if we had a machine that could perform intelligent tasks--do arithmetic, solve a chess problem, write a poem--what would that show about whether the machine could think or feel? What does our knowledge of mathematics imply about our own thinking processes? Does the fact that we can do certain things imply anything about how we do them? Likewise, if a machine can do certain things, does that ability imply anything about its own level of intelligence? Robinson uses two famous rooms--the Turing test set-up and Searle's Chinese Room--to introduce questions of current interest about artificial intelligence. Imaginary robots help clarify relationships between different mental processes. He examines an argument that some believe to show the impossibility of a robot that is a person's double, and he explains two major approaches that others think might someday make such a robot doppelganger conceivable.

THE AESTHETICS OF CHESS AND THE CHESS PROBLEM

THE AESTHETICS OF CHESS AND THE CHESS PROBLEM

A Spinozistic Vision of God

Philosophers of today are easy to stupefy. Try suggesting that some situations, such as enjoying a chess problem, really are in themselves better than others such as being burned alive: in themselves better in the sense that situations of the first sort would be preferable to those of the second if they existed all alone, so that one did not need to take consequences into account, and really better much as Africa is really bigger than Iceland, so that talk of real betterness is not just a genuine, wholehearted act of prescribing, or an expression of personal taste like the remark that mustard really is nasty. You will stupefy many a philosopher.

Learned helplessness in chess players: the importance of task similarity and the role of skill.

The effects of noncontingency between subjects' responses and outcomes were examined with respect to treatment-and-posttest similarity and skill in the task. The experimental design consisted of three groups. The first group had to solve chess problems with objective solutions and received veridical feedback; each member of the second group faced problems with no objective solutions, and received the same feedback as the member of the first group he was yoked with, but without any control on it; the control group received a waiting task. It was found at the end of the experiment that the group with unsolvable problems was more depressed than the two other groups. The mid-strength players were the most sensitive to the manipulation, and the weakest players showed little effect of learned helplessness. It was also found that the effects were proportional to the degree of similarity between the treatment and the posttest. The results limit the domain of applicability of the learned-helplessness model.

An expert system for solving retrograde-analysis chess problems

The concern here is with the solution of a specialized form of problem (closely concerned with the game of chess) by means of heuristic methods. Defined is an expert system, RETRO, whose domain of application is retrograde-analysis chess problems. This type of problem, chess logic problems as they are sometimes called, differs from the conventional type of chess problem in that it is concerned only with the past history of the game, and what may be deduced about it. Typically, a (human) solution proceeds by the solver asking himself a series of questions in the form of a Socratic dialogue until a solution emerges. RETRO makes use of a frame-like approach to determine the questions that must be asked to effect a solution. Although RETRO cannot solve any conceivable retrograde-analysis problem, the approach taken has been designed to be of general applicability.

Chess Problems and Narrative Time in Speak, Memory

The chess problem solver's experience in time is importantly related to the experience of reading Nabokovian narrative. Two of Nabokov's own chess problems that are included in Speak, Memory not only reveal his fascination with the experience of possible and actual events but model the way the autobiography discovers and sustains connections between events.

Chess Problems and Computers

Chess Problems and Computers

Assessing problem complexity

The difficulty of objectively measuring the decision-making load imposed by a complex decision problem on a human decision maker is identified. It is suggested that a technique for such measurement would be useful in Operational Research. The secondary task technique, a method much used by psychologists and ergonomists to assess the mental processing load presented to subjects by a variety of tasks, is discussed. It is observed that the type of complex problem often of interest in Operational Research is characterised by the involvement of model building in the process of solution. An experiment is presented to compare the mental load presented by a number of different chess problems using a mental arithmetic secondary task, and it is shown that the method appears to be valid for the study of complex problems.

Advances in computer chess

A fully distributed chess program fundamental concepts in search selective trees and majority systems - two experiments with commercial chess computers sundry computer chess topics alpha-beta conspiracy number search new ideas in the field of problem-solving and composing programs can a computer compose chess problems? chunking for experience to make dumb endgame databases speak ALEXS - genetic-learning optimization for KNNKP(h) a taxonomy of concepts for evaluating chess strength - examples from two difficult categories.

SIMPLE EVALUATION FUNCTION

The quality of chess programs is based on tree searching; this limits computer chess development. Modern improvements are possible mainly by applying new concepts in a heuristic evaluation of a chess position. While seeking optimal partial solutions to obtain general solutions, one is led to huge programs that solve only a small part of a chess problem. It seems that an optimistic approach is to look for a conceptionally simple and general evaluation function which can be improved by using a computer.

Ordering method to accelerate the solution of mate-in-two chess problems by computer

The problem of solving a mate-in-two chess problem might be described as searching a move tree with the depth limit of four or five, depending on the algorithm used. Here we describe methods to increase the probability that the order of investigation of the moves will in some way approach the best order. The gain in the computing time due to these ordering methods was substantial (at least a factor of two).