Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/complexity-physics-finds-crucial-tipping-points-in-chess-games/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

73 32 1 year ago

arstechnica.com

dentemple• 1 year ago

Okay, but will this research help me get above 700 ELO rapid on chess.com?

skulk• 1 year ago

No, but

  1) don't hang pieces

  2) notice when your opponent hangs pieces

  3) win endgames where you're up material

should be enough to get you to 1500.

BalinKing2• 1 year ago

As a ~900 Elo player, I feel like point #3 is doing the heavy lifting here—kinda reminds me of that "rest of the owl" meme (not that you're wrong, of course!) :-P

rozim2• 1 year ago

practice tactics..don't study openings..

somenameforme5• 1 year ago

A huge one is also to assume your opponent will make the best move. Don't just make one move threats hoping your opponent will miss them.

This seems like it should be somewhat more advanced, because players at a low level often will miss one move threats. But it is basically the first principle from which nearly all other good habits directly derive. Why develop all your pieces, not bring your queen out early, etc. Why do all those things when you know your opponent will often just miss something anyhow if you start pecking him with one move threats?

It's because if your opponent does not miss those threats, then you've likely just made your own position even weaker. And as a corollary a one-move threat which improves your position is perfectly fine of course, but in that case you're not hoping your opponent misses it. I mean you probably are, but you expect him to see it. But it doesn't matter - because your position has improved regardless.

YZF• 1 year ago

4) Develop your pieces first. 5) Castle. 6) Don't move the queen prematurely. 7) Analyze all your games.

irjustin• 1 year ago

At our ELO, games tip back and forth like a metronome, almost move to move. Confuses the AI - never can tell who the winner is!

throwaway81523• 1 year ago

Stop playing rapid until you're well above 700. Play classical so you can think about each move long enough to not hang pieces.

rozim2• 1 year ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02333

somenameforme5• 1 year ago

This sounds like an extremely convoluted way of demonstrating a very basic fact, that the authors of the study probably knew beforehand. And that's when a player's position has many weaknesses (or a high 'fragility score') they're probably going to be losing soon. And determining how quickly many pieces can attack a given point versus defend it is, more or less, exactly how you determine if that point is weak. Publish or perish reigns supreme.

A lot of science feels like it's becoming much closer to art where you splash a canvas with a few splotches, and then spend an hour describing how it's an insightful representation of the isolation of the modern world and the struggle against depersonalization. At least there you get to then sell it for a few hundred thousand dollars, rather than just live to renew your contract.

dmurray6• 1 year ago

One thing chess engines are still bad at is determining which positions are difficult for humans to play. If there is a sequence of moves where Black has to make the right choice every time from several plausible alternatives to reach a drawn endgame, but White has plenty of margin for error at every turn to keep that situation, the computer will happily evaluate this as "0.0" - a draw.

Solving this would allow handicapped computers to play interesting games against humans, and it would also be hugely useful for strong players preparing opening surprises, but no one seems to have figured it out.

Note that this isn't a simple graph theory question of looking for how narrow a path through the graph is: the word "plausible" is very important above, and a narrow path where most moves can quickly be eliminated is one of the easier things for humans to calculate.

Anyway, I was hoping this was a step towards solving that, but they don't seem to have even tried to apply it there.

somenameforme5• 1 year ago

For sure, but I think this is really quite difficult even with the wildest of hand-waving. Take, for instance, take the R+B v R ending. The weaker side has literally two pieces, including the king, to move. There are many well studied drawing plans, and in most positions literally any move would lead to a draw (short of absurd things like hanging your rook).

Yet this ending is extremely difficult to the point that GMs lose it with some regularity. That stat about 40% of the possible positions being forced wins is useless, because it includes mostly very weird positions that nobody would voluntarily walk into. The overwhelming majority of times this ending is entered into, as well as normal moves from such, are all textbook draws.

jampekka• 1 year ago

"Knowing" something is different from formalizing it into a mathematical model. Almost all papers are about relatively minor findings at best.

Publish and perish is real though. As are hype and bad popularization of research.

maxmynter95• 1 year ago

The insight of this article is less in describing the dynamics of chess games than in the fact that you can apply the methodology of network analysis, percolation, phase transitions etc. to recover them.

This is interesting because both chess and complexity science have a long but unrelated history. So it’s a bit harsh to call this out for “Publish or Perish”.

lubujackson• 1 year ago

I agree the takeaway of the article is mostly garbage: middlegames are complex and hold pivotal moments. But the real value is quantifying the "pivotal-ness" of each piece, which could have real world uses. How about a chess tutor that can instantly highlight the linchpin of any position? This is how grandmasters see the board and I imagine just flashcarding complex positions with a heatmap of pivotal pieces could be illuminating.

beyondCritics• 1 year ago

Facility score may IMHO be understood as some statistical measure of tactical involvement. It has really nothing to do with the established and important concept of weakness in chess, which looks at significant static features of a position. For example in the position from figure 1, white's pawns on the queen side are all weak, especially c4. Also the black squares around the white king are weak. After 1...exd4 these weaknesses are pronounced sharply. Considering fragility score, I see nothing that points towards these weaknesses. a4 and b6 are not attacked, hence ignored. c4 is attacked once and defended once, but there is no trajectory over it. Weak squares are not considered. If we look at the knight D4, it's BC score may tell us, that after taking it with a pawn, which can be done in two different ways, the bishop e3 is hanging, hence we gain a tempo, which is significant, also f3 is weaker (noise) and bishop e6 is not under pressure any longer. Hardly something which convinces to identify the key moment, but may be useful in a statistical sense. Nevertheless it appears to be an oversold complexity measure.

billforsternz• 1 year ago

It's really difficult to pick my least favourite part of this article. Could be this;

"But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.

Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further..."

At least AI systems can write slop fairly well. Why do I hate this so much? It just feels lazy, underdone, superficial, vaguely nonsensical. The magic of chess has little or nothing todo with the "psychological complexity conferred by player strategies". It has much more to do with aesthetic beauty, and many a great writer has illuminated that. It's utterly unsurprising that you can model the game as nodes interacting in a network graph (I mean essentially that's what it is), and even more unsurprising that the complexity of the interactions is higher in the tense and complicated positions that do indeed often decide the fate of individual games. Note, games not matches. If you can't get even the most basic domain terminology correct, you don't deserve anyone's attention.

I'll probably calm down in an hour or two.

Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games

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