Comment by squidgedcricket
6 hours ago
Would it be feasible to create a complete lookup table of 'best' moves for all given board configurations? I'm not sure how to determine the total number of configurations. Not the same as a tablebase, just a single next move rather than sequence to checkmate.
It wouldn't be competitive against top tier players and AI, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could beat me. 'Instantly' knowing the next move would be a cool trick.
There are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. It can't be solved by brute force.
There's a lot of chess configs, but there's a LOT of atoms in the observable universe. I suspect there's a few in the unobservable universe too.
Chess configs = 4.8 x 10^44, Atoms > 10^70
https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.html https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/47941/dumbed-dow...
You might be able to pull off a low-resolution lookup table. Take some big but manageable number N (e.g 10^10) and calculate the maximally even distribution of those points over the total space of chessboard configurations. Then make a lookup table for those configs. In play, for configs not in the table, interpolate between nearest points in the table.
That is basically what a neural network based chess engine is. The function the neural network is encoding is logically equivalent to "probability this move is the best for this board state".
The resolution isn't great, and adding search to that can be used to develop an implicit measure of how accurate the function is (ie, probability the move suggested in a position remains unchanged after searching the move tree for better alternatives).
The amount of data that would be required for a lookup table for all best moves for every board configuration would be infeasible.
They have managed to create one for 7 pieces. Last update on trying to get to 8 piece database: https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-tablebases-a-...
Yup, and it looks like a complete tablebase from the start of the game won't ever be feasible.
> From May to August 2018 Bojun Guo generated 7-piece tables. The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes.
Almost halfway there ;)