My first chess video. It's two Stockfish 14 chess AI engines playing each other on a chess board that is infinitely expanding outwards, initializing the squares at the edges with middlegames from 30,000 grandmaster games including from Carlsen, Fischer, Kasparov, Spassky, Tal, Karpov, and so on.

I love chess, always have, but chose to stop playing it myself early on when I became passionate about building AI systems, and instead became a fan of watching the game and the humans who play it.

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This is a game of chess played by 2 AI engines each far better at chess than any human on earth.

The question I had is what happens when you let these machines battle it out on an infinite chessboard with infinite pieces.

Each move calculated and performed on an 8x8 subset that in isolation is a totally legal position with 2 kings, but in the big picture is just a tiny subset of a much bigger game.

Where each checkmate destroys the king and the deserted pieces move on in search of another neighboring victim.

In other words, the usual game of chess, but on a much bigger board.

The play is extended arbitrarily outwards, but here we focus on just this subset of about 6,000 squares.

On the bottom is the counter showing the number of kings and checkmate victories.

The boards are initialized with the middle game position for 1 of 30,000 famous Grandmaster games including Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, Gasparo, Spassky, Tal, Karpov, and so on.

The selection of which 8x8 subset to use for computing the next move is made randomly among all the boards that have legal chess positions.

Optimizing the selection process is something that could be formulated as a reinforcement learning problem and would make this metagame of infinite chess very interesting.

In fact, there are fascinating questions here about the generalizability of AI engines far beyond the scale and the constraints of the game they were trained on.

Chess is just a game, But when you start to remove the constraints and increase the scale, it becomes something else.

Something more like the game of life, played on an infinite chessboard.


Speaker 0: This is a game of chess played by 2 AI engines each far better at chess than any human on earth. The question I had is what happens when you let these machines battle it out on an infinite chessboard with infinite pieces. Each move calculated and performed on an 8x8 subset that in isolation is a totally legal position with 2 kings, but in the big picture is just a tiny subset of a much bigger game. Where each checkmate destroys the king and the deserted pieces move on in search of another neighboring victim. Pieces get captured and sacrificed.

In other words, the usual game of chess, but on a much bigger board. The play is extended arbitrarily outwards, but here we focus on just this subset of about 6,000 squares. On the bottom is the counter showing the number of kings and checkmate victories. Let me mention some details. The boards are initialized with the middle game position for 1 of 30,000 famous Grandmaster games including Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, Gasparo, Spassky, Tal, Karpov, and so on.

The selection of which 8x8 subset to use for computing the next move is made randomly among all the boards that have legal chess positions. Optimizing the selection process is something that could be formulated as a reinforcement learning problem and would make this metagame of infinite chess very interesting. In fact, there are fascinating questions here about the generalizability of AI engines far beyond the scale and the constraints of the game they were trained on. Chess is just a game, But when you start to remove the constraints and increase the scale, it becomes something else. Something more like the game of life, played on an infinite chessboard.

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The biggest chess game ever