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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H.G.Muller wrote on Fri, Apr 25, 2008 01:30 PM UTC:

Hans Aberg:
| If it is doubled, then in a 7-ply search, if the positions are 
| independent, a search for all would require 2^7 = 128 more positions 
| to search for. If there are 10 times more average moves, then 10^7 
| more positions need to be searched.
Well, actually alpha-beta pruning makes it such that in a 7-ply search you
would only need 2^4 = 16 times as many positions, or 10^4 times. (And, as
the number of transpositions would likely go up, you would save a lot of
that with a hash table.) But these are still respectable numbers, so you
would perhaps only be able to do a 5-ply or a 4-ply search. 

But it is still not clear to me that a Human would not suffer as bad from
this. The game of Arimaa was a deliberate attempt to defeat computers
through this strategy, by creating branchin ratios of thousands. But I am
not sure if this has been succesful. The prevailing opinion under Chess
programmers is that computers are poor at Arimaa not because it is too
challenging, but mainly because no serious programmer cares...

Furthermore, computers are not really totally ignorant on strategical
matters either. But they cannot found by search, and must be programmed in
the evaluation. So it would also depend on the difficulty to recgnize the
strategical patterns for a computer as opposed to a Human. And until the
game strongly simplifies, the main strategic goal is usually to gain
material, using piece values as an objective. Unless the opponent really
ignores his King safety. Then the strategic goal will become to start a
mating attack.