A new type of chess tournament (opens in new tab)

This is part 2 of a paper I wrote for Ken Forbus’ Qualitative Reasoning course, adapted for this blog. You can find a printable version of the paper here and part 1 here. In the previous post I discussed the history of chess engines and why they don’t “think” like we think. Trading interpretability for computation cycles ultimately led to the engines we have today, fairly alien in nature and perhaps less pedagogically useful because of it. At the time, though, the goal was to beat human grand...