Former world champion Vladimir Kramnik has together with the AlphaZero team explored nine chess variants with the AlphaZero self-reinforcing learning system. These variants are implemented in this program.
☛ No-castling: castling is disallowed throughout the game.
☛ No-castling (10): castling is disallowed for the first 10 moves (20 plies).
☛ Pawn-one-square: pawns can only move one square ahead.
☛ Stalemate-is-win: forcing stalemate is a win rather than a draw.
☛ Torpedo: pawns can move by one or two steps
anywhere on the board. En passant can occur anywhere on the board.
☛ Semi-torpedo: pawns can move by two steps both from the 2nd and the 3rd rank.
☛ Pawn-back: pawns can move backwards by one step, but only from the third and sixth rank respectively. Pawn moves do not count towards the 50 move rule.
☛ Pawn-sideways: pawns can also step to the sides. Capture is unchanged; diagonally forward. Sideway pawn moves do not count towards the 50 move rule.
☛ Self-capture: it is possible to capture one’s own pieces.
In addition, these variants have been implemented:
☛ Standard Chess (Fide-chess).
☛ Medieval Chess (according to the rules in the “Book of Games” (1283), a book commissioned by
Alfonso X of Castile).
☛ Shatranj (Arabic and ancient Persian chess).
References
King, D. (2020). ‘AlphaZero – Torpedo Chess’. PowerPlayChess | YouTube. (here)
Doggers, P. (2020). ‘New AlphaZero Paper Explores Chess Variants’. Chess.com. (here)
Friedel, F. (2020). ‘AlphaZero/Kramnik: More variants’. ChessBase.com. (here)
‘Shatranj’. Wikipedia article. (here)
☛ You can download my free AlphaZero Variants program here (updated 2022-04-24), but you must own the software Zillions of Games to be able to run it. (I recommend the download version.)
☛ Don’t miss my other chess variants.
© M. Winther (October 2020).
