Could an AI figure out the rules of chess from games?

@Hagredion said in #20:

Listening to what exactly?

"You can't do that, you've moved into check from the bishop." "Oh, sorry." - and countless other themes. Players in casual settings, which Capablanca's family presumably was, do talk during play.

I have no knowledge of neural networks and AI, but am following this topic with interest and hope. I would like to think that humanity has something which AI can never emulate. But I don't know.

@Toscani said in #22:

github.com/zjeffer/chess-deep-rl

Is this neural network not told the rules of the game but has to work them out itself? I see nothing in that summary which suggests that.

@petri999 said in #2:

You dont need AI to do. Relatively simple algorithm could do it. Obviously neural net with supervised learning would learn it far less than a million games. With that amount games it could learn somehow emulate human play.

Those aren't the same thing though. If you can play the most human move 99.9% of the time but on the other 0.1% you make an illegal move, then you haven't learned the rules of chess.

@Hagredion said in #20:

Listening to what exactly?
If there was any conversation going on I mean. But more generally I meant that surely he wasn't "just observing" the movement of pieces.

@Brian-E said in #23:

Is this neural network not told the rules of the game but has to work them out itself? I see nothing in that summary which suggests that.
As far as I understood, it's an engine that predicts next best move, meaning it already knows all the legal moves.

@SquareTableKnight said in #26:

If there was any conversation going on I mean. But more generally I meant that surely he wasn't "just observing" the movement of pieces.

What kind of conversation? Most people don't talk during the game and if they do they most certainly don't explain the rules. For example if one of them castled it's not like he said: "I can castle because I've haven't yet moved either my king or my rook, the king isn't in check and the king does not pass through any square that is attacked by an opponent's piece." Same with en passant and the other rules. Now I don't know if the story of how Capablanca learned chess as told in the books is true or anecdotal, but the whole points was that young Capablanca learned chess just by observing the game without any assistance by his dad whatsoever. That was the whole point. Had his dad discussed the rules during the game or even just given him hints here and there then the whole thing of Capablanca learning the rules just by watching game wouldn't have been that impressive and hardly worth mentioning.

@Hagredion said in #28:

[...] Had his dad discussed the rules during the game or even just given him hints here and there then the whole thing of Capablanca learning the rules just by watching game wouldn't have been that impressive and hardly worth mentioning.

Stories get exaggerated in the retelling even if they are not entirely anecdotal. And stories about clever offspring definitely get exaggerated by their proud parents. "Who's a clever boy, knowing the rules when we didn't even tell you?"

See my posting #21 above for the type of conversation which might well occur during a casual game in a private household and which the young José probably overheard.

@Brian-E said in #29:

Stories get exaggerated in the retelling even if they are not entirely anecdotal. And stories about clever offspring definitely get exaggerated by their proud parents. "Who's a clever boy, knowing the rules when we didn't even tell you?"

See my posting #21 above for the type of conversation which might well occur during a casual game in a private household and which the young José probably overheard.

We are not talking about some random boy but about Capablanca who many considered the biggest natural talent to ever play the game. Now I went to check your post #21 and the only example you gave there is the following: "You can't do that, you've moved into check from the bishop." Well you should ask yourself what is more likely that a super-talent like Capablanca simply noticed that both players constantly only ever move the bishops diagonally and made the logical conclusion that the piece only moves diagonally or that by some miraculous stroke of luck he was present at the exactly moment when one of them made an illegal move, which is a rare occurrence in slow games. The first option is infinitely more likely.