Comment on xkcd #3045: AlphaMove

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zabadoh@ani.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

The writer played multiple games of chess against some conventional chess programs or AIs, and used a simplified algorithm to determine their own moves:

For each move:

  1. They generated a list of all possible moves in the current position, and the moves were recorded in standard algebraic chess notation
  2. They sorted the list of moves in alphabetic order
  3. They used the move that was in the center of the sort order, but I have no idea what they did if the number of possible moves was even

This algorithm for choosing chess moves did not result in optimal play, and lost against the standard chess programs/AIs.

The illustrated position has the algorithm generating a blunder or useless move (Ne2) that allows a checkmate victory for Black with the following move (… b4++), i.e. “Black Bishop moves to b4, checkmate”

The writer named their algorithm “AlphaMove” as a take on Google’s famous chess playing AI from 2017 named “AlphaZero”.

Except in the writer’s case, the “Alpha” in their algorithm’s name is short for “alphabetic”, which makes the expanded name “Alphabetic(-sort)Move”.

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