Since yesterday there is a video on YouTube showing the "greatest game of chess" that we have never seen, as defined by its creator, Lex Fridman, a lover of chess and also of artificial intelligence. To make this infinite game possible, Fridman has revealed how he has managed to use two artificial intelligence engines in this mission.
Specifically, this game programmed two artificial intelligence engines that play as rivals. And the board is not a conventional one, but it is infinite. It increases from an initial board with the 32 pieces of both players. The video showing how it works is less than 3 minutes long, but it shows that the play could last forever.
According to Fridman, both AI engines are "much better at playing than any human being on Earth." Each move is calculated for sets of 8x8 squares with their own two kings—one for White, one for Black. Remember that a square on a chessboard refers to each square on the board. The boards that are there form a subset in a larger game. When a checkmate occurs, that is, when a king is eliminated, the other loose pieces “advance in search of another victim”.
A tool that is a "powerful open source chess engine"
After knowing the part of the organization of the board, we are going to know more about how the artificial intelligence engines capable of playing this game work. Fridman uses two Stockfish 14. Stockfish Chess reports on its website that it is a "powerful open source chess engine" and claims that it has managed to stand out in competitions in its category on several occasions.
The Stockfish project started with the open source Glaurung engine, authored by Tord Romstad. In November 2008, Marco Costalba forked Glaurung 2.1 and introduced Stockfish 1.0. Stockfish is free and distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3).
Essentially, "this means that you are free to do almost exactly what you want with the program, including distributing it to your friends, making it available for download from your website, selling it (either by itself or as part of some larger software), or use it as a starting point for your own software project", they explain from their website.
The only limitation is that whoever distributes Stockfish in any way must include the full source code, or a link to where the source code can be found, in order to generate the exact binary you are distributing. If someone makes any changes to the source code, those changes must also be made available under the GPL.
The Stockfish software that Fridman uses for the two opponents in this potentially infinite game has won several chess engine tournaments, including the TCEC 21 Superfinal, the TCEC 9 Cup, and the Computer Chess Championship for Fischer Random Chess (Chess960). .
Kasparov believes we should embrace artificial intelligence
Do not forget that in 1996 Gary Kasparov, one of the great geniuses in the history of chess, played against a machine named Deep Blue.... and that he lost. Something unheard of, especially if we take into account that it was the last century. Kasparov has insisted on several occasions that we have to welcome Artificial Intelligence with open arms.
Artificial intelligence has also managed to outperform human champions of Go and 'Starcraft II'. He has even been able to defeat a professional pilot in a simulation of airplane battles. You can even be superior in the game of curling.