Fair Chess and Simultaneous Games

People get hung up on the unfair White advantage in chess, but actually it's not large enough.

In tennis, on every point there's a big advantage to the server. Not because he "gets to go first" but because he gets a second chance in some situations. You can prove this: in high level mens tennis the server wins ~70% of points [0] but on a second serve - equivalent to playing without the second chance - he wins almost exactly 50% [1]

This creates a tension in every game where one player is attacking and expected to win, the other player needs to "break" him at least once or twice in the course of the match to win the overall contest.

Chess is similar, but worse because of the possibility of draws. 60-90% of top level chess games end in draws.

Computer chess is even worse again! 95%+ of top computer play ends in draws. Organisers of engine tournaments have solved this: they let the computers play from positions considered advantageous to white, usually where they expect White to score ~75%. They play each position with both White and Black. [2]

This wouldn't be a popular or practical change for human play. But that's not the point, letting White take back his moves à la tennis wouldn't be a change people would accept either. The point is that chess isn't in need of evening out the first-move advantage.

[0] https://www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com/statsLeaders [1] https://www.braingametennis.com/the-art-of-winning-2nd-serve... [2] https://tcec-chess.com/articles/TCEC_Openings_FAQ.html

Isn't this game with the given conflict resolution rules just broken? But forcing conflicts feels like a way to cause a game to become a draw. Imagine I move my queen next to the opponent's king (with no defense). My opponent's only legal move is to capture it in the next move. Let's say I don't like my chances of winning, so I just keep on trying to move the queen away from that square. Every such attempt results in a conflict, eventually leading the game to be drawn.

The proposed resolution scenarios on conflicting moves would make the "moves stuck" to often. My proposal would be to split move into two phases: - simultaneous selection of moves (players select action at the same time) - non-simultaneous execution of moves (with circular queue of order rotating each turn) It's not a perfect solution, because in case of the conflict on the first move it gives advantage to first player in execution order, however many complex games (Chess, Go) allow to perform multiple moves before first conflicting move may happen. Some other (Tic Tac To, Othello) allow to make conflicting moves from start. Keeping an eye on the execution order would give additional strategy layer for planning moves. I like also idea on resolution of conflict depending on the set "strength" of the piece, or annihilation of both when it's equal. This would also bring interesting complexity for decision making.

My solution to fair chess:

1. White makes their opening moves - they can move more than one piece, and even the same piece more than once, but: all moves must be legal, and no captures.

2. When White is done, Black has the option to change sides, taking over the white pieces.

3. Regardless of step 2, the player with the black pieces makes the next move.

4. A draw counts as a win for the player with the black pieces.

Thus there are no longer drawn results, and the start must be relatively equal (between a white win and a black win or draw) in White’s estimation.

If the point of this exercise is to create a game that removes first move advantage, while keeping the game as unchanged as possible, this is an utter failure.

Turning a game of perfect information into a bluffing and anticipation game is not a minor change. It's a fundamental change of the essence of what the game is.

Successful moves don’t always commute. Black has just moved his pawn from g7 to g5. White submits what he thinks is an en passant capture, fxg6. Black submits a knight move, Ng6. One order removes a Black pawn, the other a Black knight.

"Players enter a boxing ring and fight for the square." - I LOLed :) Great stuff!

In human play, white has somewhere between 0.25 - 0.5 pawn advantage. There's evidence that at higher ELO's, the advantage declines but it's not clear what the lower bound is.

So for top players (and even more-so for top chess engines), the white advantage isn't enough to translate to a win.

In human play, the top players often need to play suboptimal moves to convert a win. Magnus Carlsen is probably the most famous for doing this. The point is to break away from the well studied lines, and play something that other pros aren't familiar with.

Basically: It's not clear that white's small advantage actually counts for much, at least at the very top tiers of chess.

Changing the game in such a way that white and black odds become even more balanced, would just lead to more draws - which I personally would think makes the game less interesting.

I think this could be a very interesting way to reinvent chess which is in my opinion less interesting with AI, it would add a strategy facing the type of player but as my colleagues said the risks are conflicts like queen next to the king (and a lot of other situations).

We should have to create many rules to avoid this.

Nice post :)

One game I've played and thought of as similar to some sort of simultaneous chess was Toribash. It's a turn-based fighting game where you control your character via contracting/extending muscle pairs on a simplified skeleton. Your opponent chooses which joints to move at the same time as you, then the time advances a few frames. The game gives you a preview of what would happen if your opponent did nothing that turn. "Conflicts" are resolved via physics (e.g. a punch is stopped by an arm blocking it).

Makes more sense to slightly buff black's opening move. E.g. allow two pawns to move one square, or select a few pawns that can move three squares. The flexibility will make white harder to play than black.

This is how esports are balanced, and how a game like Starcraft was (at least when I played) more fair than Chess even though there were three "colors" involved (Zerg, Protoss, Terran) and way more "pieces" and complexity.

Interesting to read the various[1,2] discussions on this chess variant

1 - http://www.hexenspiel.de/engl/synchronous-chess/ 2 - https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/synchronous-chess

When we consider sets of rules that show emergent properties,very small details like the conflict resolutions discussed here can have a tremendous impact on how the general strategies would pan out at high level play. That really makes me think of how rules for "game-of-life" type of cellular automata rules can be designed. Small tweaks decide if the automata has a trivial computational power or is Turing-complete. Within the Turing-complete class there's a wide range of behaviors that can be obtained if we look at the structure that can spontaneously appear or statistical properties (e.g. what is the probability that the grid ends up entirely empty).

These observations are interesting as they give a test suite, or 'local properties', that can be run against any given simultaneous ruleset to characterize it. It would be fascinating to be able to run an AI to have an idea of how 'optimal strategies' (global properties) would look like in each case and see what relations we can draw from it.

(unfortunately I would assume it is still unreasonably costly to do something like this?)

I was expecting: The players play two games against each other concurrently. Each plays white on one board and black on the other.

I believe a tactical move blocking strategy could evolve from these rule changes. Imagine we're in a game that's more complex than what's depicted in fig 6 but the rooks are positioned identically. Additionally, there's a white pawn at c5. Wouldn't it then be advantageous for black to make the same move as shown in fig 6? If this move results in an illegal state nothing is lost since the pawn remains blocked. Perhaps this isn't the best example as my chess knowledge is somewhat limited, but do you see what I mean? Wouldn't this tactic allow players to maintain control over two positions simultaneously in certain scenarios?

When my grandfather taught me to play chess, he always made me play as Black, and I would get upset because I wasn’t the one to move first. Now I know why

The simultaneous move requests sound like Diplomacy. I'm not convinced this would improve the game in any way.