dangi12012 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 8:30 pm
That leaves retrograde analysis starting from 0 pieces and building a tablebase until you arrive at 40 man tablebase. I think in chess the tablebase uses less than 1 bit per position on average.
Draughts is played on a 10x10 board (only the 50 dark squares).
Checkers is played on a 8x8 board (only the 32 dark squares).
If you do the math, then 12 piece tablebases for 8x8 checkers would already be a multi-Tb effort on disk. For 10x10 draughts, 10 piece tablebases would be a similar effort. Forget about strongly solving checkers by doing 40 men tablebases.
dangi12012 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 8:30 pm
That leaves retrograde analysis starting from 0 pieces and building a tablebase until you arrive at 40 man tablebase. I think in chess the tablebase uses less than 1 bit per position on average.
Draughts is played on a 10x10 board (only the 50 dark squares).
Checkers is played on a 8x8 board (only the 32 dark squares).
If you do the math, then 12 piece tablebases for 8x8 checkers would already be a multi-Tb effort on disk. For 10x10 draughts, 10 piece tablebases would be a similar effort. Forget about strongly solving checkers by doing 40 men tablebases.
Naive math yields naive results.
Lets do the math for chess: The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes.
18E12 * 8 Bit / 423,836,835,667,331 = 0.33Bits/Position.
I dont comprehend how syzygy tablebases work - but the compression achieved is INSANE.
I am sure with only 2 piece types - king and normal compressed on 32 squares it would even look better
dangi12012 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 9:34 pm
Naive math yields naive results.
Lets do the math for chess: The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes.
18E12 * 8 Bit / 423,836,835,667,331 = 0.33Bits/Position.
I dont comprehend how syzygy tablebases work - but the compression achieved is INSANE.
I am sure with only 2 piece types - king and normal compressed on 32 squares it would even look better
dangi12012 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 9:34 pm
Naive math yields naive results.
Lets do the math for chess: The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes.
18E12 * 8 Bit / 423,836,835,667,331 = 0.33Bits/Position.
I dont comprehend how syzygy tablebases work - but the compression achieved is INSANE.
I am sure with only 2 piece types - king and normal compressed on 32 squares it would even look better
Rein Halbersma wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 10:01 pm
You're not going to get 40 piece dbs without "finding" another 8 orders of magnitude.
Correction: 24 dbs for checkers is 8 more orders of magnitude. To get to 40 dbs in draughts, there are *another* 13 orders of magnitude required (so 21 extra above the 7 piece chess dbs).
Chessqueen wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 2:06 pm
Draughts is more difficult than chess
What is more difficult, draughts or chess? One can argue endlessly about this question according to the ex-world champion Dr. Max Eu...
It is often thought that chess is harder than checkers. Nothing is less true. The very simplicity of the game makes draughts so difficult. A chess player must calculate various possibilities at once before he moves. Draughts players are forced to think ahead. We know from Ton Sijbrands that he thought forward 35 moves during a party. While his board was full of pieces, he came calculating to a position in which he had three stones and his opponent only two. Because it would finish in a draw, he decided to make a different move .
Is blind chess not more difficult than blind draughts? Players who have studied and played both games do not say no, because although the number of pieces in chess is higher, they have clear distinguishing marks which help memory, an element missing from draughts . To the question whether draughts is harder than chess or bridge master Jack de Haas once extensively responded:
"Checkers is at least as difficult as chess and the combinations in checkers, thanks to the compulsory capture and the capture of the majority of the pieces, are brighter and deeper than in chess.
GM Ivanchuck after playing Draughts for 10 years is only ranked 1089 in the World Expert level, Whereas, Ivanchuk reached IM after studying chess for 10 years ==>
I did not try to play draughts seriously and only played few games when I was a child but my guess is that draughts is harder for humans relative to chess when chess should be harder for computers(at least relative to draaughts 10*10) because the number of positions in draughts is smaller.
From computer's point of view the board has only 50 squares that are relevant and the number of possible positions in draughts is smaller than 5^50
If I understand correctly the claim is that in most cases good draught players are better in mind games relative to good chess players.
Uri Blass wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 10:41 pm
I did not try to play draughts seriously and only played few games when I was a child but my guess is that draughts is harder for humans relative to chess when chess should be harder for computers(at least relative to draaughts 10*10) because the number of positions in draughts is smaller.
From computer's point of view the board has only 50 squares that are relevant and the number of possible positions in draughts is smaller than 5^50
If I understand correctly the claim is that in most cases good draught players are better in mind games relative to good chess players.
I've been an over the board draughts player for many years. I don't think the game is harder for humans than chess. But since draughts is a far less popular game than chess, many more draughts players also have at least tried other mind games (chess, but also bridge, and (myself included) e.g. Stratego). Chess players only transition to say Shogi (rare) or bridge and poker (more money). In the Netherlands, there used to be a yearly mind games triathlon in draughts-chess-bridge and it was often won by draughts players, since the chess players usually never had any experience in other mind games. That doesn't mean that chess players would have less intrinsic talent for other mind games.
Ivanchuk is an exception among chess players, since he is somehow acquainted with draughts world champion Georgiev and he apparently got hooked on draughts as well. Perhaps it's an interesting cross-training (like runners and cyclists sometimes do as well). BTW, Ivanchuk didn't transition to regular 10x10 draughts to but 10x10 Frisian draughts, a variant with orthogonal captures (in addition to diagonal captures). That game has an even smaller community (only a dozen or so top level players), and Georgieve managed to reach the top level in that variant as well (which is quite an achievement since the tactics make Frisian draughts a very different game).
Chessqueen wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 2:06 pm
Draughts is more difficult than chess
What is more difficult, draughts or chess? One can argue endlessly about this question according to the ex-world champion Dr. Max Eu...
It is often thought that chess is harder than checkers. Nothing is less true. The very simplicity of the game makes draughts so difficult. A chess player must calculate various possibilities at once before he moves. Draughts players are forced to think ahead. We know from Ton Sijbrands that he thought forward 35 moves during a party. While his board was full of pieces, he came calculating to a position in which he had three stones and his opponent only two. Because it would finish in a draw, he decided to make a different move .
Is blind chess not more difficult than blind draughts? Players who have studied and played both games do not say no, because although the number of pieces in chess is higher, they have clear distinguishing marks which help memory, an element missing from draughts . To the question whether draughts is harder than chess or bridge master Jack de Haas once extensively responded:
"Checkers is at least as difficult as chess and the combinations in checkers, thanks to the compulsory capture and the capture of the majority of the pieces, are brighter and deeper than in chess.
GM Ivanchuck after playing Draughts for 10 years is only ranked 1089 in the World Expert level, Whereas, Ivanchuk reached IM after studying chess for 10 years ==>
I did not try to play draughts seriously and only played few games when I was a child but my guess is that draughts is harder for humans relative to chess when chess should be harder for computers(at least relative to draaughts 10*10) because the number of positions in draughts is smaller.
From computer's point of view the board has only 50 squares that are relevant and the number of possible positions in draughts is smaller than 5^50
If I understand correctly the claim is that in most cases good draught players are better in mind games relative to good chess players.
From computer's point of view there is even a harder Draughts to be solved, which is played among people from the Dominican Republic with much more squares, I heard my uncle who is a avid player in the Dominican Republic saying that when he play the 10x10 board he visualize the tactical position much faster than playing the 12x12 board
Joost Buijs wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 3:44 pm
You make 2 mistakes here, first of all Draughts is actually played on a 50 square board, secondly the level of Draughts programs in 2012 wasn't very high, maybe comparable in complexity to chess programs with 2500 CCRL rating. Even today are top level Draughts programs relatively simple and way less advanced than top level Chess engines.
The main reason is that there is hardly any development going on in computer Draughts. If you look at the computer Draughts forum there are just a few posts per year, sometimes several months are passing by without a single message.
I guess there is no comparable massive collaborative effort like Stockfish in draughts, but if Fabien Letouzey's Senpai can have a near 3000 CCRL rating, then I think it's safe to assume that his program Scan is at least having a similarly advanced search function. So I wouldn't disqualify the level of quality of draughts programs. In my opinion, they main difference is that massive amount of testing that goes into Stockfish.
I was talking about the complexity and level of draughts programs back in 2012. The last 6 years or so their level increased by several hundred Elo points, basically due to machine learning, and even today it does not seem very difficult to reach the level of top draughts engines.
When I look at my own draughts engine it is all very basic, just a PVS search without any fancy stuff, the same I already did back in the nineties with my chess engine. The neural net is the main ingredient for it's strength, and not the complexity of the search.
From what I read here is that draughts could be solved - but that the game itself has a 100x smaller community than chess - so it would be not so interesting in that sense to do so.
