correspondence chess in the age of NNUE

[lkaufman]

There's probably nothing that can be done to remove the overwhelming influence of computers in correspondence chess at this point, even with modifications to the game big and small. Implementing most rules changes into Stockfish would take a decent programmer all of minutes to hours, and then they could train a very, very strong NNUE on consumer hardware in a day or two. Bugfixes, retraining, and refinement would be carried out over the course of a match as necessary.

Anyway, my favorite chess variant has always been where you start with a coin on an empty square (most often e4, but you can pick any square for variety), and then the coin duplicates the motion of both players' pieces with every move. (For example, 1. Nf3 would move the coin from e4 to d6. Castling is a king move.) The catch is that if the coin wouldn't land on an empty square, you can't make the move!

Having no moves counts as a loss, and checks and checkmates work the same way they do in normal chess, even if the coin restriction would technically prevent the attacking pieces from capturing the king. (You can just imagine that any move that would capture a king is allowed to ignore the coin.)

You are right that there's little that can be done about the influence of computers in correspondence chess, but the topic here is draw reduction, which is a completely different issue. You can either change the start position (i.e. chess960 or mandated openings), or change the rules. For me the only interesting rule changes are those that reduce draws with the least effects in most positions, keeping it as close as possible to normal chess. If you want a very different chess, shogi is the best option in my opinion.

[jefk]

mr Kaufman, you wrote:

don't understand your remark about removing f2 pawn (you wrote f3 but I assume that was a typo); that is obviously way too much to produce equal chances, it's not even likely that White can draw with perfect play. Perhaps I misunderstand you here, as I think every player over 1800 elo would know that. White's opening advantage is about 1/5 of a pawn.

yes i meant the f2 pawn, thx for the correction.
Indeed the opening advantage is not much more than 1/5 pawn or so,
but it's not only material which counts in chess. When you remove
the f2 pawn, White can easier get an open line , the f line,
which after castling is an advantage because of the rook on f1.
That's why there are several gambits sacrificing this f2 pawn btw.
But whether removing the f2 (or maybe c3 or possibly d3) pawn
indeed leads to equal chances, is a matter of research, we
can play some hundreds of games with this modified initial position,
and look at the result. I don't believe Black will get a significant
advantage, but i'll intend to do some more testing later.

PS your suggestion of 3/4 point for the player confronted
with the 3 move repetition draw attempt sounds logical,
so i'll include that in my list of modifications for the
new 'Chess Renewed' variant. (with the f2 empty square rule
pending, ie depending on further research.

[jefk]

most simple and practical idea is maybe to apply
the suggested (minor) changes as 3/4 points (*) for stalemate etc
only for Black; in that we can compensate for the disadvantage
of playing with Black, and thus we kill two birds with one stone.
In other words, if Black can cause stalemate, he gets 3/4 point,
and White only 1/4 point (same for one piece ending and
*possibly* the 3 (or 5) move repetition draw rule (*).
At least the application of opening theory would be preserved,
but have to investigate this a bit further, as we wouldn't
like to give Black a fundamental advantage, would we.
(*) which is why i wrote the word 'possibly' above.

[Cornfed]

These are nibbling around the edges...and still at the mercy of the use of ever faster and better engines....not to mention endgame tablebases.
No, the truth is "Correspondence" Chess is essentially dead.
For one, call it 'Computer Assisted Turn Based Chess' or some such so as not to pollute the history of Correspondence Chess...maybe putting that asterisk by anything played in the past 10-20 yrs and go on with whatever nibbling (or otherwise, even more drastic changes, since we can conclude it is in no way the traditional game when non-humans often suggest and/or confirm moves played) and go on.

[jefk]

Cornfed,
guess you have a point here,
yet i wouldn't dismiss correspondence chess just like that,
if we think of it as collective opening analysis (or so)
then it's still valuable, certainly for the human chess players.
(In the New in Chess magazine GM Erwin L'Ami sometimes
is talking about correspondence chess games, where they
often dare 'novelties' not tried earlier before by GM's
(with Chessbase, and before the NNue area, master
level chess players looked at statistics, for good reasons;
nowadays you also can look at engine eval (backsolved in
openinglines) although that's not all there is, because
'sharpness' (or b/w unbalancedness) also plays a role.

PS yes as competitive game correspondence chess may
well have been reduced almost to a matter of hardware
and software (updates). Known already since Dutch
billionaire Van Oosterom became WC, not only helped by
hardware, but also a GM (Jeroen Piket)...

[lkaufman]

most simple and practical idea is maybe to apply
the suggested (minor) changes as 3/4 points (*) for stalemate etc
only for Black; in that we can compensate for the disadvantage
of playing with Black, and thus we kill two birds with one stone.
In other words, if Black can cause stalemate, he gets 3/4 point,
and White only 1/4 point (same for one piece ending and
*possibly* the 3 (or 5) move repetition draw rule (*).
At least the application of opening theory would be preserved,
but have to investigate this a bit further, as we wouldn't
like to give Black a fundamental advantage, would we.
(*) which is why i wrote the word 'possibly' above.

This might be "fair", but it won't help much with draw reduction, because White should normally be the one with the better side of the stalemate/bare king/repetition, so if we only give him half a point in those cases we're not helping with the normal case, only the rarer case where White has gone badly wrong. Giving Black larger scores than White for the same situations would be okay, but complicated.
Regarding removing a pawn from White, I did a lot of studies (some will be in my soon to be published book "Chess Board Options") that show that the removal of a non-edge White pawn (b2,c2,d2, or e2) is at least close to fair if White gets draw odds (Armageddon). I would still choose Black even with the draw odds, but it's close. Removing f2 or g2 is even worse for White, due to problems getting castled. Probably c2 is the best pawn to remove for this Armageddon play. But note that if you do this then you don't need any of the above rule-changes; it's one or the other. With the above rule changes Black's advantage would be easily winning (well, at least 3/4 winning) with any non-edge White pawn removed.

[Ferdy]

I tried to simulate with latest stockfish on the Arno Nickel rule for 3/4 points for stalemate and 1 piece ahead vs bare king, still the draw ratio is high. The major problem is the repetition draw result.

One idea is for tournament like round-robin, the players that played into a repetition can be assigned a score of 0. Then also apply the Arno Nickel rule. It would at least discourage players from making repetition quickly. Opening preparation is somewhat compromised.

[peter]

I tried to simulate with latest stockfish on the Arno Nickel rule for 3/4 points for stalemate and 1 piece ahead vs bare king, still the draw ratio is high.

SF-code wasn't changed according to change of rule, was it?

[lkaufman]

I tried to simulate with latest stockfish on the Arno Nickel rule for 3/4 points for stalemate and 1 piece ahead vs bare king, still the draw ratio is high. The major problem is the repetition draw result.

One idea is for tournament like round-robin, the players that played into a repetition can be assigned a score of 0. Then also apply the Arno Nickel rule. It would at least discourage players from making repetition quickly. Opening preparation is somewhat compromised.

Yes, repetition has to be addressed to make a major reduction in the draw percentage. Arno Nickel and I are now in agreement that in addition to the stalemate and minor vs. king rule, repetition should also be scored as 1/4 for the repeater and 3/4 for the opponent. Based on some tests with Komodo I estimate that the three rules together will roughly double the win percentage in high level engine vs engine play. Of course at long time limits and many threads even doubling the win percentage will still leave most of the games drawn.

[Ferdy]

I tried to simulate with latest stockfish on the Arno Nickel rule for 3/4 points for stalemate and 1 piece ahead vs bare king, still the draw ratio is high.

SF-code wasn't changed according to change of rule, was it?

I made a couple of revisions like not returning 0 in stalemate, and king+minor vs king is not 0 or king+pawn vs king is not 0 and this will also lead to stalemate if bare king is in good position.