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Topic: Article on chessbase about not resigning (Read 2876 times) |
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omar
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Article on chessbase about not resigning
« on: Dec 21st, 2008, 7:21pm » |
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I came across this interesting article on chessbase.com about not allowing resignations. Really, I had nothing to do with it 
http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5057
As most of you know I also discourage resigning (but I don't forbid it). When I watch live games or replay them I like to see games come to a natural conclusion. I appreciate players who don't abandon their army and put up a good fight to the very end. Of course in games without any element of change or hidden information it is tough to recover and one may feel very inclined to resign. And there are times when you just have to leave; so the resign button should always be there. But even in losing positions I like to think that maybe my opponent will blunder or the connection will go bad and I might still have a chance
There is also an article with feedback on this proposal:
http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5060
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Fritzlein
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #1 on: Dec 22nd, 2008, 7:13am » |
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This proposal to forbid resignation in chess is justified almost entirely by reference to the spectators. Yes, there is some feeble attempt to claim that playing every win out to checkmate would also be good for the players themselves, but that's a fairly weak argument: although I'm a mediocre player, I can force checkmate with a king and rook against bare king 100 times out of 100. It's completely mechanical, and no grandmaster is going to get any benefit out of going through the motions. It would be like telling Stephen King to recite the ABC's because it's good for him. And as for the notion that the winning player might blunder, that is true of some positions, but not true of all positions, so a blanket rule will always cover some positions where the chance of error is zero for all practical purposes. Again, think of the insult of asking a novelist to recite the alphabet to prove that he can do it right.
No, the only real argument behind the proposal is the enjoyment and benefit of the spectators. The financial support of chess derives almost entirely from spectators, who are in turn almost entirely chess players to some degree. People who know nothing whatsoever about chess can't enjoy watching chess; it's people like me who know a little who want to see what happens when the very best go at it. We are the ones who are sometimes perplexed by resignations and would like to see a few more moves of "explanation" on the board. Considering the fan base is a powerful argument.
Although spectator enjoyment is a strong justification for not resigning, a non-resignation rule is a horrible idea, because it is totally not enforceable. As many commentators have pointed out, it is possible to lose on purpose in chess. It is even more possible to lose on purpose in Arimaa, either by killing all of one's own rabbits or by pulling an opposing rabbit to goal. Not only is suicidal behavior not preventable by any rules, it serves exactly the opposite purpose that a "no-resignation" rule would intend. Suicide is even more confusing to the beginner, and makes the game even less enjoyable to a spectator than resignation would, because it is sometimes unclear whether or not the bad move was intentional or not. Even if it is ultimately obvious that one side is losing on purpose, any suicidal moves raise the question of where the suicide began, e.g. was losing the elephant a blunder, followed by suicide, or was losing the elephant the first purposely bad move?
I think the policy of discouraging resignation is a good one. Next time I feel like resigning, I will try to remember that I am not just playing for myself, but potentially also playing for spectators. Sometimes I can bear a little personal boredom or humiliation for the common good. But I believe it is counter-productive to write non-resignation into the tournament rules, as has been done for the World Championship and the Postal Mixer. The result of the rules has been many suicides in hopeless positions. We simply can't prevent people from giving up, and the attempt to prevent it results in absurdity. I strongly recommend that any penalty for resignation be removed, and the doomed attempt at enforcing this behavior be replaced with nothing more than appeals to players to play on for the good of the sport. I believe that most of the games that have been played out to the finish have been done so on the good will of the players, not because the players feared losing their entry fees, and that if the counter-productive rule were replaced by exhortation only, we would see just as many games fought to the death as we do now. The only difference would be that suicidal moves that skirt the rules would be replaced with honest resignations.
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Adanac
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #2 on: Dec 22nd, 2008, 8:33am » |
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The decision of whether or not to resign should depend upon the skill level of the two players. New players should always play to the checkmate since anything can happen and the winning player might accidentally walk into a stalemate or give away the queen. On the other hand, asking a grandmaster to play to the end in a hopeless position can become ridiculous:
Here’s a legendary game between Friedrich Samisch and Aron Nimzovitsch.
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1102400
The first time I saw this game, I was just learning chess and I didn’t understand the resignation at all. It was very illuminating for me to play through all of White’s available moves and realize that his position was going to rapidly fall apart no matter what he did. By resigning early, Samisch was able to walk away from the board with his dignity intact and (millions of?) chess students had a great game to study. On the other hand, had he been forced to continue Samisch would have endured a long, drawn-out crushing defeat with no hope of building any active counter-play. Many spectators would have observed the debacle and felt pity for Samisch without fully appreciating the strength of Nimzowitsch’s first 26 moves.
The guidelines I would prefer are these:
1. If an Arimaa goal (or Chess checkmate) is inevitable within the next few moves, play out the game to its natural conclusion. Here, I agree with Omar. There’s no reason for chess masters to resign so many mate-in-one and mate-in-two positions.
2. If the position you’re position is close to hopeless, but there is no forced loss, try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat using all of your ingenuity and every available resource.
3. Having exhausted all attempts at #2 and now facing an even worse material deficit and an utterly hopeless position, (and assuming you’re not in situation #1) simply resign rather than waste the time of both players. I don’t think the Arimaa community is good enough for this situation to occur very often – more on that below.
To reiterate a point that I made a few months ago, however, the Arimaa community has a very small player pool and we have a very limited knowledge of the game. When Fritzlein publishes his book, we’ll be at the chess equivalent of the year 1512 when Damiano published his famous book. Once we add hundreds of thousands of new players, publish dozens more books and learn lots more theory then we can catch up to where chess was in the 19th century (I doubt it will require 300 years though, things evolve much faster these days)! I mentioned the 19th century-era of chess because that’s when early resignations seemed to have become much more commonplace and the best players no longer felt they had anything to gain by dragging out the games. So to keep things in perspective: we’re not even close to being seasoned Grandmasters with nothing more to learn from endgames. If your opponent is annoying you by placing all the pieces in the back rows with no attempted counter-attack, it’s still a good learning experience for both sides. Learning how to force a goal can be very instructive, and learning how to stonewall your opponent in a lopsided game will certainly help build the goal defence skills.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 22nd, 2008, 9:59am by Adanac » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #3 on: Dec 22nd, 2008, 12:22pm » |
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I think we need to make a distinction about the appropriateness of resigning, and the appropriateness of having a rule that prevents resignation. I guess I didn't disentangle the two clearly enough in my former post.
First, I basically agree with Adanac about when one should resign. I agree that the weaker the players are, the more inclined they should be to fight to the end. I agree that Arimaa theory is at a very nascent stage; we don't yet have the equivalent of chess Grandmasters, or even chess International Masters. Because we collectively aren't very good, we should be less inclined to resign, especially in live games where the time pressure makes us play worse. I have been swindled many times when I have had a huge material advantage, and every swindle was a proof that my opponent was correct not to resign. Moreover, I usually play on even when I am way behind in material, as in this game from the 2008 World Championship. And even when loss is inevitable, if the end will be quick it is no great sacrifice to play the few moves until the finale.
That said, I also agree with Adanac that there are some times when resignation is appropriate. In that context it does not make sense to forbid all resignations.
Quite apart from resignation being fitting, however, neither Adanac nor Omar nor anyone on the chessbase forum has addressed the futility of having a rule that can be trivially circumvented by losing on purpose. Even Mehrdad Pahlevanzadeh, who proposed the rule and is pushing it, has no better answer than, "When players are faced with actual game or tournament rules they adapt to them and follow them correctly." He is only speculating about that for chess, since the no-resignation rule has never been tried there, but for Arimaa we don't have to speculate. We know that people lose on purpose to skirt the no-resignation rule, because it has already happened. Do I need to name names and post example games? And when people lose on purpose, it is bad for the spectators, i.e. the very people whom the rule is supposed to benefit.
I'm sure anti-resignation folks can produce plenty of Arimaa games in which resignation was premature. Indeed, my book includes an actual game position where the player who resigned had a forced goal! My purpose in including that example in my book is precisely to discourage people from resigning. But that changes nothing about the futility of trying to put fighting to the death into the rules of a tournament. I would like to hear even one argument on the other side, not claiming that resignation is bad, but claiming that having a rule to prevent resignation will actually have its intended effect. To my mind we already have ample proof that it doesn't work.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 22nd, 2008, 12:25pm by Fritzlein » |
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Adanac
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #4 on: Dec 22nd, 2008, 12:40pm » |
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Good point, Fritzlein. If players are just going to open a path for the opposing rabbits to score, we may as well encourage them to resign instead. I admire a hard-fought battle to the very end, but we can't artificially force a great battle if one of the players has already given up psychologically. I've never agreed with the "Never Resign" rule but it was nice of Omar to include a "Resign" button anyway despite his personal preference otherwise.
And I definitely agree that too many players give up too quickly. It's amazing that bold, daring moves can often turn an Arimaa game around, yet often players will simply "turtle" and accept their fate... 
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| « Last Edit: Dec 22nd, 2008, 12:45pm by Adanac » |
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clauchau
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #5 on: Dec 23rd, 2008, 5:06am » |
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It might be profitable to tournament results, players ranking, evaluation heuristics and research in game theory to take the length of games into account when they are played out. How about evaluating any game state as a number +-q^n between -1 and 1, where q is below and very close to 1 and n is the number of plies it takes to get the game really over - or averaged estimates of such values in case of uncertainties.
In real games, players who want to resign might agree on an estimate of the length n, although I haven't yet figured out any nice protocol in case they can't agree but don't want to fully play the game out either.
q=0.999 looks good to me for Arimaa. For example :
- winning as Gold by forfeit yields the standard +1 score as a result of the game.
- winning blazingly fast as Gold on move 5 (n=9) gives Gold about +0.99 points.
- winning as Gold on move 50 (n=99) on a well fought game gives Gold about +0.91 points.
- winning as Gold on move 500 (n=999) yields about +0.37 points.
- hypothetically winning as Gold on move 5000 (n=9999) practically amounts to drawing because it yields +0.00005 points.
For the MinMax algorithm, it simply means the value of a node is now q times the max value of its children.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 30th, 2008, 5:21am by clauchau » |
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omar
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #6 on: Dec 27th, 2008, 8:48am » |
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Thanks for sharing your views on this topic guys.
For the World Championship and Postal Mixer I really would like to see all the games played out to a natural finish since these are some of our best games with more viewership than a casual game. But Karl's comments have made me think that penalizing a player for resigning is not the right way to achieve this.
I will get rid of the rules which penalize a player for resigning in these events. So a player is welcome to resign at anytime and there is no penalty. But I will introduce the following rules which I think will make the games interesting to the end for the players and spectators.
In the WC, if it can be shown that the winning player missed a forced win in 1, 2, or 3 moves at any point in the game then the losing player gets 50% of the prize money allocated for the winner of that game. The missed win solution must be posted as a game comment within 24 hours of the game end time. The solution can be posted by anyone, not just the losing player. If a player resigns they forfeit the ability to win the prize money if a solution is found.
In the Postal Mixer, if it can be shown that the winning player missed a forced win in 1, 2, or 3 moves at any point in the game then the losing player gets a portion of the winning players registration fee. The amount of this portion is the registration fee divided by the number of games the player signed up for. The missed win solution must be posted as a game comment within 24 hours of the game end time. The solution can be posted by anyone, not just the losing player. If a player resigns they forfeit the ability to win the prize money if a solution is found. To make this work though we may also need the rule that if a missed win solution is not found then the winning player is awarded a portion of the losing players registration fee equal to the registration fee divided by the number of games the losing player signed up for.
These rules will complicates the prize distribution work for me, but I think it is worth it because it makes the games more interesting for players and spectators while encouraging games to be played to a natural finish. Also it can generate more analysis and discussions of our best games and maybe even some puzzles that can be added to the puzzles page.
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #7 on: Dec 27th, 2008, 8:56am » |
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Moved this from the Off Topic section to General Discussion.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #8 on: Dec 27th, 2008, 1:01pm » |
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Once again, Omar, you prove how open-minded you are. I really appreciate the way you listen. That provides a big incentive for me to keep on blathering. That brings me to your latest proposal: it is intriguing but I am pretty sure the incentives do not line up the way you intend them to.
Suppose that in a Postal Mixer game, my opponent misses a forced goal in three, handing me the win. (This almost happened to me against RonWeasley, although it was a goal in five he missed, allowing me a goal in three.) If I go ahead and take the win, I get no reward, but if I pull his rabbit to goal, then I get part of his prize money since he was the winner and he missed a forced goal. Assuming that the prize money is a powerful incentive, then you are using it to reward losing.
Indeed, someone who wins all of his games in the Postal Mixer can get at most all of his entry fee back, whereas someone who intentionally loses all of his Postal Mixer games will get at least his entry fee back, and probably more. I might purposely play to set up remote goal threats for my opponent, hoping that he will win in four when he could have won in three; the more successful I am at losing like this, the more prize money I get, but even when my opponents always find the fastest goals I still get all my money back.
What you are suggesting is a way for the losing player to take money from the winning player. Why did you create this way of hurting the winner? Because you wanted some way to penalize resignation. First you had to give the trailing player something to play for, so that you could take it away again if he resigns. But the crowning irony is that you can't even take it away! People can still suicide their own pieces instead of playing to the death. In fact, the right suicide might even create a goal in three the other player would have trouble spotting. There is nothing in your proposal that makes accelerating a loss any worse than losing slowly, so you are back to the same futility that you had before.
I agree with you on one point: it is worth some bookkeeping overhead to encourage fighting to the death. Indeed, you already created that overhead for the Postal Mixer, i.e. the scoring system. Every additional move that a player made instead of giving up earned them additional prize money. If you are willing to have complexity of prize distribution, why not bring back the old scoring?
Also for the World Championship, there used to be an incentive for the leading player to win as quickly as possible and for the trailing player to survive as long as possible: points in the Spectator Contest. But if you really like the new Spectator Contest format better, and you don't want to go back, then you could instead reward the loser with a penny per move instead of potentially taking half a dollar away from the winner for missing a goal in three that might take a puzzle solver fifteen minutes to find, and which was found only after the fact and only with the help of a computer.
In short, I think you have means to encourage fighting to the death, and we should explore those possibilities, but I don't think you have quite hit on the ideal means yet.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 27th, 2008, 1:07pm by Fritzlein » |
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omar
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #9 on: Dec 27th, 2008, 5:02pm » |
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on Dec 27th, 2008, 1:01pm, Fritzlein wrote:
Suppose that in a Postal Mixer game, my opponent misses a forced goal in three, handing me the win. (This almost happened to me against RonWeasley, although it was a goal in five he missed, allowing me a goal in three.) If I go ahead and take the win, I get no reward, but if I pull his rabbit to goal, then I get part of his prize money since he was the winner and he missed a forced goal. Assuming that the prize money is a powerful incentive, then you are using it to reward losing.
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No I did think about this, you would get rewarded for winning. See my quote below.
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To make this work though we may also need the rule that if a missed win solution is not found then the winning player is awarded a portion of the losing players registration fee equal to the registration fee divided by the number of games the losing player signed up for.
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But I guess I should also add that if both players are shown to have missed a win in 3 or less than the winning player gets the prize.
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I might purposely play to set up remote goal threats for my opponent, hoping that he will win in four when he could have won in three; the more successful I am at losing like this, the more prize money I get, but even when my opponents always find the fastest goals I still get all my money back.
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But you would be running the risk that you opponent might see the win in three and get the prize. I think you missed that there is a prize for the winning player.
I am sure that with this rule in place the players and spectators will analyze the end games very closely and I think that will help us get better.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #10 on: Dec 27th, 2008, 5:41pm » |
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on Dec 27th, 2008, 5:02pm, omar wrote:| But you would be running the risk that you opponent might see the win in three and get the prize. I think you missed that there is a prize for the winning player. |
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The way you stated it, unless I misunderstood, there is no prize for the winning player finding a goal in three, so I am not running any risk within the game. I can only get hurt if my opponent misses the goal during the game, then I fail to find the goal within 24 hours of game end, then the winning player finds it after the 24 hours are up. That risk is miniscule, but in order to reduce it to zero, I can make sure before I submit my suiciding move that I have calculated out a forced win for him. Then either he misses the forced win and I make money for sure, or he finds it, and I have managed to effectively resign, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.
But let's say I misunderstood your rule. Let's say you have worked out a way that the winner and loser have equal chances to take money from each other after the game, so there is no incentive to be the loser so as to gain a post-game advantage. Let's assume the post-game game is fair between two players of equal goal-finding ability. Unfortunately even then the money-taking aspect will be tipped to the advantage of whoever is better at finding forced goals. In that case I would be highly motivated to resign all games which I am way behind on material, because I am bad at finding goals, and I want to make sure the game never gets close enough that a forced goal in three exists. A fair goal-finding game tacked on to the end of a regular game will not be in my favor, so I had better resign to avoid it.
The notion of having prizes for pointing out goals at the end of the game would indeed encourage post-game analysis, as you point out. It would certainly make us better at finding goals if we practiced analyzing in this way. But this has nothing to do with discouraging resignation, does it?
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| « Last Edit: Dec 27th, 2008, 5:51pm by Fritzlein » |
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Adanac
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #11 on: Dec 30th, 2008, 11:07am » |
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on Dec 27th, 2008, 5:41pm, Fritzlein wrote:| The notion of having prizes for pointing out goals at the end of the game would indeed encourage post-game analysis, as you point out. It would certainly make us better at finding goals if we practiced analyzing in this way. But this has nothing to do with discouraging resignation, does it? |
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My first thought, when I read Omar's new proposal, was that we would have more incentive to hone our goal-finding skills. But won't people just use Bomb to find forced goals, thus defeating the entire purpose, not to mention favouring players with commerical programs?
Like many players here I just play for fun, and it won't bother me at all if a new prize distribution system is introduced. But if a losing player finds a goal-in-three where a goal-in-four was actually played by the winning player, there could be some considerable whining and complaining in the forum and game comments! Finding a goal-in-four in a live game means that you'd better search long and hard for a goal-in-three instead before pressing "Send" 
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omar
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #12 on: Dec 30th, 2008, 7:27pm » |
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on Dec 27th, 2008, 5:41pm, Fritzlein wrote:
The way you stated it, unless I misunderstood, there is no prize for the winning player finding a goal in three, so I am not running any risk within the game. |
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Yes, there is no prize for the winning player for finding a goal in there, but there is a prize for the winning player for winning the game.
Quote:| I can only get hurt if my opponent misses the goal during the game, then I fail to find the goal within 24 hours of game end, then the winning player finds it after the 24 hours are up. |
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There is no need for the winning player to find the goal after the game. The winning player gets the prize for having won the game. Maybe I need to reword the rules more clearly.
The basic idea is this. The winning player gets a prize for winning the game. The losing player gets a chance to take away part or all of that prize by showing that the winning player missed a 1, 2, or 3 move forced win. No matter how bad the imbalance is the losing player has a reason to continue to the end because now he is not playing for a chance to win, but a chance for the winning player to miss a forced win in 3 or less. No matter how bad the imbalance is the winning player has no reason to say "just resign, you are wasting my time, you are insulting my intelligence", he has to focus on making sure he does not miss a win in 3 or less.
This kind of rule does not discourage resigning, it encourages not resigning. There is no penalty to discourage me from resigning. But, why should I resign just because I am losing the game, I will test the winning players ability to find forced wins to the end. I don't lose anything for doing that, in fact there is a chance I might gain something. I am encouraged to not resign. The encouragement of post-game analysis is a positive side effect.
Also this rule protects a losing player from a humiliating defeat from a winning player who has decided to keep picking away at pieces instead of finishing of the game.
Also if the losing player commits suicide instead of directly resigning it will be because the losing player knows the winning player missed a win in 3 or less and the losing player will post it after quickly finishing off the game. So suicides will be explained otherwise they won't occur.
Consider the recent Continuous Tournament game between arimaa_master and naveed. Though naveed won the game, he missed a goal in 1 on his way to winning. Had this been a WC finals games naveed would have won $5 if he did not slip up while finishing off the game, but since he did half of that prize would go to arimaa_master. Had this been a Postal Mixer game $5 of naveeds registration fee would have been won by arimaa_master instead of the other way around (assuming both players signed up for 4 games and paid $20 registration fees).
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omar
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #13 on: Dec 31st, 2008, 4:27am » |
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on Dec 30th, 2008, 11:07am, Adanac wrote:
My first thought, when I read Omar's new proposal, was that we would have more incentive to hone our goal-finding skills. But won't people just use Bomb to find forced goals, thus defeating the entire purpose, not to mention favouring players with commerical programs? |
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Yes, you can use Bomb, you can consult a friend, or even the whole Arimaa community. I think what we will see is everyone looking at these games to see who will be the first to find a missed win. But during the game you won't have any help, so the players do have to hone their own goal finding skills.
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Like many players here I just play for fun, and it won't bother me at all if a new prize distribution system is introduced. But if a losing player finds a goal-in-three where a goal-in-four was actually played by the winning player, there could be some considerable whining and complaining in the forum and game comments! Finding a goal-in-four in a live game means that you'd better search long and hard for a goal-in-three instead before pressing "Send" |
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I don't think there would be any complaints. If a position had a line that leads to a forced win in 3 and a different line that leads to a forced win in 4 then it is clear the winning player missed a win in 3; this is precisely the kind of chance the losing player was looking for and the losing player should be rewarded for continuing to play and bringing the game to such a position. Depending on the type of game; postal, regular, blitz, etc. the "win in 3 or less" could be changed to some other value or the amount of reward the losing player takes away from the winning player could be varied.
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RonWeasley
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Re: Article on chessbase about not resigning
« Reply #14 on: Dec 31st, 2008, 6:03am » |
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I agree with Adanac here. In theory I don't mind giving rewards to the losing player for continuing to play well. However, I would like to avoid penalizing the winning player for playing "carefully". Specifically I worry about seeing a complex possibility of a win in three which turns out to be a blunder. I understand that this makes things exciting, but it changes the nature of the game.
Imagine Fritzlein avoiding strategic goal pressure because he wants to avoid potential goals in three. He could turn his games into long piece hunts if he wanted to and this would have the opposite effect of what this rule intends.
For my part, I would tend to ignore this and play my usual plodding style. If I'm winning, I wouldn't want to risk losing by going after an unclear tactical win in 3. If I'm losing, I am content with dragging the game on, even without a prize, just for the sport of it. In the Owl Mixer, if I lose, I like to break the 60 move mark, and that's enough motivation for me without taking something away from the winner.
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