I can't tell if this is satire. Draws by insufficient material almost never occur in Grandmaster chess. I have not seen a single grandmaster game end this way in a year of watching top-level chess games daily. If you inspect all of the dozens of draws in this world's Tata Steel, which included ~300 GM-level games, you won't find a single that ends this way.

>If you inspect all of the dozens of draws in this world's Tata Steel, which included ~300 GM-level games, you won't find a single that ends this way.

Here's one: https://www.chess.com/events/2022-tata-steel-chess-tournamen...

Draws by insufficient material are quite common, but I wouldn't call them the bane of modern chess, or anything close to that.

Well, GMs agree on a draw well before it actually gets down to insufficient material. Many draws-by-agreement would degenerate into that if they kept playing.

Well yeah, they usually do that, but draws by insufficient material still happen pretty frequently. Also, king vs. king is not the only way it can end; you'll see king vs. king and knight (or bishop) pop up pretty often too.

In addition to what my sibling comment says-- there's a whole lot of draws by agreement because the position is one that everyone knows becomes draws by insufficient material.

While this is slightly nitpicky, from what I gather many of those draws are because neither side can make progress against the opponent. These are positions where in order for the game to move "forward" both sides would need to individually choose to weaken their position, leaving them playing non-moves until triggering threefold repetition or agreeing to a draw.

> These are positions where in order for the game to move "forward" both sides would need to individually choose to weaken their position, leaving them playing non-moves until triggering threefold repetition or agreeing to a draw.

Sure, but there's also a whole lot of draws where insufficient material is inevitable. E.g. pawn vs nothing, where the king cannot reach the pawn to defend.

And there's also draws where the only move "forward" doesn't weaken the position, but lead towards an end of insufficient material. E.g. most situations pawn vs. bishop.

Because they are ending the game before it gets to that stage. Similar to seeing check mates 3, 4, 5 moves in advance, they can see with perfect play that the reduction in pieces will end in an end game with insufficient material.

Exactly. I find it hard to see it myself, but I often play out games like that with an engine and very often the pieces just peter out to a draw.

Top-level chess leads to draws because of how points are awarded, not because of the rules. Yes, sometimes you just run out of material, but much of the time draws happen because players shut down the game or agree to a draw in a position that is just too dangerous to both parties. Chess rewards draws with far too many points.

If you could agree to a draw in tennis, you would see a lot of draws where players want to save their energy and don't think this match counts that much.

In other sports players don't play for draws. In chess, because draws are worth so much, some players will try to draw with black and win with white. If chess were more combative players would intentionally stay away from drawish lines.

Many ways to change the game have been put forward before. Including banning draws in positions that are not known to be draws from a table base, changing how many points you get for a draw (you could get less than 1/2), forbidding early draws, changing what happens if a tournament is drawn.

These kinds of rule changes make a big difference. Like, 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw. Now, you can't comfortably sit as black and bank a lot of draws because you won't be able to as easily catch up.

Rules for draws in tournaments are really absurd these days. A drawn classical tournament or even the world championship gets decided by rapid games. What's the point in playing classical if you win by playing rapid? The world championship is particularly problematic in this regard.

You'd have to make the points awarded differ with white vs black.

World champs wouldn't have been a lot different other than it would end earlier. If you lose a game, you need to win a game to be even. That doesn't change even if you make it 100 points for a win.

It would impact multi person events more, but not incredibly. I think some interesting options are things like .7 for draw and 1.2 for win as black. Other options are to make 3 move repetitions illegal (now they're a kind of zugzwang). Last option that I like would be to add a time penalty for drawing in future matches. I think chess needs to become less even, and you could do that in interesting ways if you were willing to mess with the time (or even who moves first) in future matches. Incentives to win now (vs maybe win later) should reward aggressive play early in tournaments and make players who are falling behind more incentivized to fight mid tourney.

This seems great in theory but it doesn’t address the time when people complain the most about draws in chess: the world championship match. There, no matter how little you award for draws, one single win can be decisive and so the games can be very dry until one player breaks.

the draw problem isn't entirely human. computers draw something like 80% of games even with openings specifically chosen to reduced the number of draws.

But it's that because we optimize the algorithms under the same ruleset?

I imagine if a draw was counted as a loss to both sides, there would be a lot more aggressive plays, since just stonewalling a skilled opponent would be the same as losing.

lc0 has had bets trained where draws are a loss. it doesn't change much

Humans and machines draw for totally different reasons.

Machines don't have any concept of a tournament. Humans go into drawn lines and get rid of tension in order to play the tournament meta-game. Since draws are worth so much, it's often a good idea to just bail out with a draw.

A lot of human positions wouldn't be drawn by machines, they would keep hammering the opponent.

There is only one way to fix chess and it's called Go.

Of course, this isn't exactly chess anymore but like any design decision there are no perf-

Wait a minute, Go is perfect. If we forget about ko rules.

I was really impressed by "AlphaGo - The Movie", despite not knowing much about Go, because the way they told the story, people from the Asian countries were so sure their champion would win a Go tournament against a computer, that were stunned into a new consciousness about artificial intelligence when the computer won. This started an arms race in AI is what I gather.

Edit: Full movie for free on YouTube: AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

I'm from Europe and was also sure the human would win.

The only thing that prevented me from losing a bunch of money on prediction markets was logistics.

That's a great documentary in general. Recommended for everyone :)

What's wrong with ko rules? I think it's a simple rule and ko fights are an interesting part of go.

Some ko rules only address a subset of repeating positions, and still allow for infinitely long games (sometimes ruling those as a no-result requiring the game to be played over).

The so-called superko rule simply states that no previous position can be repeated, which seems preferable.

excepting some crazy multi step ko that is possible in theory, it never happens in practice. There is nothing wrong with ko, it adds depth to the game. maybe they dont like ko becauase they have a weakness in their play and cant take advantage of them or defend against them. if you give your opponent a lot of ko threats they will end up winning most kos.

Respectfully disagree.

There's more than one way to address the problem of draw death besides bughousing captured pieces. Other win conditions are sometimes proposed - something like your king reaching the enemy king's starting square or back rank. Or count stalemate as either a win or some fraction between 0.5 and 1 for the side that inflicted it. Or do the same for draw by insufficient material (bishop or knight) for the superior side.

(I'm not advocating for any of these in particular. Although that's the problem - even if everyone agreed that we should add some kind of win or scoring condition, we'd never get a majority to agree on one solution.)

What I've always thought would be the most intriguing way would be auction Armageddon.

So, in Armageddon, there are no draws (Well, technically they are, but a draw is a win for black).

In compensation, white gets extra time.

So AUCTION Armageddon would have the players bidding for how much less time they'd be willing to have to play as black.