Chess Engines, Centaur Chess and an idea for a new kind of tournament
Engines have had an enormous impact on chess - can we find ways to incorporate them into OTB play fairly?
For any of my "Science of Chess" readers who may be here, this is something a little different for my first post of 2025. I'll be back to my usual writing about the cognitive science of chess soon, but I thought it might be a fun change of pace to share an idea with you that I've been kicking around for a while. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and hope you enjoy reading!
Introduction to a possibly bad idea
As a university professor, I've found myself on the receiving end of a lot of messaging regarding how I could (or maybe should) find ways to incorporate AI into my teaching. To be blunt, I can think of few things I would like to do less. Without getting up on my soapbox for too long, I put a lot of value on hands-on lab work, open discussion, and working on your own thinking and writing without LLMs by your side. Your mileage may vary, but yeah - I'm a bit of an AI skeptic.
NDPatzer very much doesn't want his classroom to look like this. Illustration Andrzej Olas/Svensk biblioteksförening, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Or am I?
Not entirely, of course, because I play chess and routinely use chess engines to support my analysis, my opening training, and to enrich my experience while watching events like the recent World Rapid and Blitz Championships. As I've watched my colleagues wrestle with how to deal with the accessibility of various forms of AI, I've frequently been struck by how chess engines have become an integral part of the chess community. The kinds of existential issues academics are having right now played out 30 years or so ago for chess players, with a lot of time since then to figure out how to use engines rather than fret about their presence.
Chess players have been worried about AI since this guy made his debut. The Mechanical Turk was a false alarm, but a portent of things to come! Public Domain Image
How can we work (and play) meaningfully with AI?
One thing the academy shares with the chess community with regard to AI, however, is the ever-present worry about cheating. What if someone uses a chess engine (or LLMs) when they aren't supposed to? How do we deal with the reality that incentivizing good grades or tournament wins enough inevitably means someone will try to find a way to guarantee success by using these tools unfairly?
I've been prepping my Spring course and thinking through the academic version of these concerns as I go: How do you write an assignment that de-emphasizes AI use as much as possible? I take a few different approaches to this, one of which is the old "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy. If I think students are going to use AI, either let them do so or require them to do so. Writing my assessments with that in mind means I have to work out how to make an assignment interesting and useful by accepting that it will be completed by a combination of human and machine effort. Where can we go in the classroom if that's the context for coursework?
Should we just welcome our new robot overlords? Bovee and Thill, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Advanced Chess as an approach to human-machine play
Like I said above, chess has been ahead of the academy for a long time with regard to these issues and this idea is no exception. As computers like Deep Blue began to demonstrate that they could outpace the strongest human players, those human competitors started to think about whether and how chess engines could enrich human play rather than stand in opposition to it. Specifically, Kasparov proposed a version of the game he called "Advanced Chess" (sometimes referred to as "Centaur Chess") in which each human player could consult directly with the machine of their choice throughout the game. If you follow that wiki link, you'll read that this idea had been floating around the sci-fi literature for some time before Kasparov's proposal in the 90's, but the core idea is intriguing regardless: What does chess look like if machines are allowed to participate? Advanced Chess tournaments have been held by a number of different organizations ever since and continue to explore the nature of the game when a human-machine hybrid takes the place of human competitors.
Eros Riccio, Advanced Chess Champion - By Cinmad - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27934082
There are a wide range of opinions about how exciting Advanced Chess tournaments are to watch (and to play in). On one hand, it makes it possible for almost anyone to have a fighting chance against anyone else, so long as they're armed with a fairly strong engine. On the other hand, pitting computer line against computer line can also seem dissatisfying to some compared to the drama of human minds searching for the strongest moves while time ticks away. In my reading about Advanced Chess, my overall impression of it is that I wouldn't really enjoy playing this way. I like coming up with my own moves, after all! Sure, it's occasionally crushing to miss something obvious and lose, but that's offset by the joy of finding something creative, or daring, or just plain accurate and winning. Using an engine against an opponent who is also using an engine would take that experience away from me, I think, so I'm not excited to tie my chess playing to an engine so directly.
A (possibly) new idea: Advanced Chess on a budget?
But here's where I want to make a proposal for a different kind of human-machine OTB (or online) chess that I think could be a lot of fun. I'll preface this by saying that its entirely possible that this is something people have thought of and/or implemented before, but I wasn't able to find examples anywhere. Please let me know if I've overlooked something, though! That said, here is the idea.
Step 1: Increase the points available for wins/draws
Typically, a game of chess in a tournament is a battle for a single point that is up for grabs between the two players. A win gets you the point, while a draw means the players share a half-point each. The first modification I want to make to tournament play is to change that single point to 10 points, for reasons that will become clear in a moment. A win could mean getting all 10 of those points, while a draw could mean splitting that pot up into 5 points each.
Step 2: Allow players to spend points on engine consultation
Here's where the second part of the idea comes into play, however. During the game, either player may "spend" their share of the 10-point pot on consultation with an engine. Let's say asking for the strongest move in a given position costs you two points - this means if you ask for help once and win the game, you only get 8 points instead of 10. Ask twice and win, now you only get 6 points - pretty close to what you'd get from a humans-only draw! Besides asking for the best move, you could also potentially opt to get weaker information during your consultation at a lower cost: Maybe asking for the eval bar value (Is it +3.8, -1.2 or 0.0?) only costs a single point and asking who has the advantage (but not by how much!) only costs a half-point. The idea is to permit limited use of an engine at the player's discretion, but at a cost! Ultimately, the goal is to create a variant in which players' decision-making would incorporate analysis of the position and the cost-benefit of whether to use the engine and how to do so.
My thinking is that this format would allow players to make use of engines in crucial situations, but disincentivize extensive use due to the dilution of your tournament points. A player who can win consistently without the engine will rack up more valuable wins than a player who needs to get bailed out more often! Ideally, this folds AI into the game without completely compromising the human element.
There are a lot of things to figure out about how to make this work in practice, but I'd love to give it a try sometime. What do you think about this kind of Centaur Chess? I'll be honest, this is absolutely a half-baked idea on my part and there are a bunch of parameters to work out. The specific costs of different kinds of engine consultation probably need to be titrated carefully and there are likely other neat ways to think about using information from an engine during play. If you've read this far, let me know what you think, suggest your modifications of the framework I'm proposing, and if by some chance you try it out, let me know how it goes!