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Naveen's Chess (Other)
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| [March 28, 2012 11:42:54 AM]
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So my second game of chess against my roommate ended in a loss as well, much to my anguish. The game was much closer this time around though and it took a fair while for him to defeat me but in the end it was a deserved victory. I think the game changed when I lost two pawns in quick succession. This gave him control of the area just outside my base and from then on, I was trapped in my own area, not being able to make any attacks of my own. I made quite a few more observations about the game of chess in this sitting but since I explained a lot about the game play in my first gamelog, I will leave most of that out for this one.
Being such an ancient game, you can’t really say chess has any innovative elements. A lot of games have indeed been inspired from chess like checkers or Go and so there is not much that is unique to chess maybe with the exception of the distinct movement of the individual pieces as compared to checkers where there are no unique pieces and all pieces have the same degree of movement.
I would think the design elements that make chess such a great game would have to be the simplicity of the rules and the uncomplicated nature of the game. It does not take a long time for even a beginner to figure out how the game works as the only restrictions are the movement of the individual pieces. Having a variety of movement from the diagonal mobility of the bishop to the single step advancement of the pawn also makes the game more interesting as the player has a great deal of options to choose from at each step and thus a diverse range of tactics to employ.
I think the game mainly keeps the player interested due to its great replay value. No two chess games are the same and in every game the player will face new scenarios and board positions to overcome. This is made possible by the myriad of choice of moves available to the players. Hence, it is interesting as you have to think on your feet and every game brings with the opportunity to try out new strategies.
There is not much I would change about the game seeing how popular a game it is. But the one thing that for me, makes it a bit unfair is that white always gets the first move. This makes the game biased in favor of the white player as he gets to set the tempo of the game and the other player may forever be responding to his moves. There is no obvious solution to this, maybe except to have two sittings in each game and alternating who gets to start first.
As we are thinking of developing a puzzle/strategy game ourselves, chess does certainly provide some have some features we can borrow for our game. For example, we could have two characters who have different degrees of movement and who must work together to achieve a common goal.
Chess certainly has emergent complexity. In fact, that’s what the whole game is about. Developing more complex tactics from the simple movement of the pieces is the basis for winning the game. The more clever the tactic developed the less chances the opponent has of guarding against it. Beginners may not be able to develop complex tactics but as they get more experience in playing, they will learn to how to respond to certain situation and thus be able to come up with their own tactics.
There is no reward structure to the game and the only goal is to capture the king. Maybe the only other place where you are rewarded for your efforts is when you can get a pawn to the end of the enemy line and which allows you to get him promoted to another piece. However, I do not concentrate much on this as it is very difficult to do and can divert attention from the main aim of the game which is to capture the king. There is also no real feeling of flow to a chess game. In fact, each board position can be imagined to be a separate puzzle to solve in itself.
I had a great deal of interaction with my opponent while playing the game. Some people believe psychology to be an important part of chess and both of us engaged in various taunts to influence the others moves.
Chess will certainly work as a computer game as there have been chess programs developed which have even beaten the World champion in chess. Microsoft’s Chess Titans has also been quite successful since its release. As per what I was taught in my AI class, the way the AI chess player works is to do a depth limited look ahead of every board position and evaluate these through a evaluation function developed through machine learning. The greater the difficulty level ,the more look ahead the AI player does. As such, it can provide a challenge to even the most advanced chess players.
So, that’s the end of my gamelog on chess. Chess is a great game which everyone can and should play at some time.
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| [March 25, 2012 01:20:15 PM]
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So, after numerous failed attempts at persuading my roommates to get off their computers and play a board/card game together, I finally managed to convince one of them, an avid chess-player to engage in a game of chess with me. Yes, I would have preferred to write about a more original game but the only other thing I could find around my room was a dusty laden Risk board game box with many missing pieces. So, the following is my reflection from the first epic war of chess I waged with my roommate.
I didn’t get off to a good start. I opened with one of my favorite opening moves, the “Ruy Lopez”, or at least I attempted to but my roommate saw what was coming and attacked my pawn causing me to move a knight out of position to cover for the pawn. However, after a couple of turns, I was powerless to resist as out of nowhere I saw a pawn taken and then another one. I then quickly lost what ended up a short-lived one-sided game, even though weirdly enough, I managed to capture my opponent’s Queen. In retrospect though, this was not as weird as I thought and it brings me to my first observation about the game of chess, a greedy approach never works. Making a locally optimum choice at each step does not enable one to reach the global optimum in chess. Once I had gotten over my aghast at the loss, I realized I had been baited. He had transfixed my attention on his Queen leading me to neglect the defense of my King. This enabled him to isolate my King and capture him easily thus winning the match. This is a great example of how you have to think a few steps in advance in chess and not just about your next move. It is certainly not a feature unique to chess though as in most strategy games, there is an element of planning for the future, but in few games are the consequences of failing to do this as stark as in chess.
It has been remarked that the complexity of a chess game tree is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. With so many different moves, one has to find the right move and this is where tactics comes in. Tactics in chess are born out of the distinctive restrictions of movement of each chess piece. The pawn has the greatest restriction, while the Queen the least, with other pieces falling somewhere in between. This gives a natural order of importance to each chess piece and the more pieces of greater importance you capture, the more closer you are to winning the game. There are quite a few famous chess tactics which you can expect to see in most games, Examples include forking, where you place a chess piece in a position in which you can attack more than one of the opponents pieces. The opponent is then only able to protect one of his pieces, leading to the capture of the other. One of my favorite tactics is that of the pinning where you can force an opponent piece to not move as doing so can result in the capture of a piece behind it. This is normally executed with a bishop or the Queen as these can travel multiple steps. Likewise, other pieces are better at executing other tactics and their importance can change depending on the game conditions. The bishop and the knight are normally ranked of equal importance but the bishop is much more deadly at the end of the game where there is vast amounts of space to move into and the bishop can exploit this more easily as it can travel multiple steps. Likewise the rook is of limited use in the middle of a game where the chess board is crowded and the rook can only take one or two steps at the most. As there is no definite rule, it is fully up to the discretion of the player to decide the optimal move.
In most games of chess, players also, whether knowingly or unknowingly prefer certain styles of play. A common preference is to control the center of the board by placing many of your pieces here as this is seen by many as a key area from which the you can have access to most parts of the board. It has been shown that most captures take place in the center. Another approach could be to take the initiative in a game and attack from the go, forgoing control of the centre in favor of moving your pieces to as close to enemy lines as soon as possible. This could be very useful as then your opponent spends most of his time responding to your moves and has little opportunities to launch attacks of his own.
Among advanced players, chess is also seen to mainly comprise of identifying common board positions and employing the best preset strategy to deal with it. Examples include the Sicilian defense, and the King’s gambit. Professional players are able to memorize various board positions and the appropriate moves for them.
That’s all from my first gamelog of chess. Hopefully, I will have a victory to write about in the next gamelog.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Mar 25th, 2012 at 13:21:58.
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Naveen's Chess (Other)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Sunday 25 March, 2012
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