Artificial Stupidity in Chess

You may remember some time ago I discussed an algorithm for Spider Solitaire that is not very good: it simply outputs random moves. It turns out somebody did a much better job in the game of chess. Some dude designed no less than 30 Artificial Stupidities and organised a Tournament of Fools, and published a number of papers in SIGBOVIK. Ideas for weird algorithms include color preference (e.g. White prefers to play pieces onto light squares), random moves, blindfold algorithms (simulating a novice trying to play blindfold), algorithms based on mathematical constants like π and e, single player (pretending opponent will pass) and linear interpolation between Stockfish and some other lousy algorithm (e.g. choose Stockfish’s best move with probability p, lousy move with probability 1-p. But my favourite algorithm was the Mechanical 68,79,82,75 that proved a forced win for Black after 1 d2-d4?? a7xd4!! checkmate 🙂

You can watch all the fun in the video below:

I’m not sure if these ideas will be applicable to Spider Solitaire. Color Preference is easy since we can prefer to move red cards or black cards, and single-player is even easier given the nature of the game, but I am not aware of any equivalent of Stockfish. Mathematical constants should be easy but probably not very interesting. It may be possible to simulate a blindfold (human) player who struggles to remember every card, but I’m, not sure how to do that yet. And I don’t know of a (sensible) variant of Spider Solitaire where all the red cards are replaced with chess pieces. Since Western chess has Black vs White, it may be more appropriate to use Xiangqi, which has Red vs Black pieces. Perhaps something to think about for next time.

Thanks to my good friend Tristrom Cooke for the heads up.