I think the humor of a duck and ‘quacktics’ masks the fact that this variant offers serious depth and complexity of an entirely new sort. Eric is our intrepid explorer.
In Malaysia, there's a concept of "Pantang dipuji" which literally translated to "Forbidden to praise". It is used whenever something bad immediately happens to the person / thing that you just praised.
10:55 it looks like at the end of the game the duck gets put on where your last piece took from, because it's the only square that's guaranteed to be open
@@Blaxpoon That's exactly what gravitated me toward checking the variant out haha. It only gets better with new terminology being added like "duckmate", "duckzwang", and "quacktics" to name a few.
@@Wick291, and why was he moving his king in the first place? Yep, because that same knight was going to check him. Eric just thought the bot would protect the knight with the duck. Still a mistake though. A funny one =)
@@a_wild_Kirillian I thought it was kind of cool that the move only got locked in after the duck was placed. Just another reason the duck was so important.
The idea of being able to promote a pawn to an additional duck opens so many fascinating possibilities! It could just become a second duck in general causing both players to need to place both/all ducks every turn, or it could be a special duck that only be controlled by the player whose pawn it came from (but they still have to move it every turn) ... How fun to think about!
10:56 It’s probably a programming optimization. They make a final legal duck move at the end of the game after the king is taken, to complete the turn, instead of making you do it. And the only space on the board guaranteed to be available for the duck is the space you just moved from.
I tried the duck engine on my powerful computer a few days ago, it seems like it takes a lot longer to search to high depth because there are like 40x more legal moves in every position. so even after running it for a few minutes on 48 threads, it only got up to around depth 20 or so, whereas normal stockfish would reach that on 1 thread in 1 second. also there is no duck nnue yet, which could maybe increase the strength by a lot (more than 1000 elo for some other variants like crazyhouse)
Life is like a hurricane, here in Duck Chess OP knights and no stalemate, it's a duck Mess Might want to sac this, But watch out for Quacktics! Duck Chess - a woo-OO! Everybody's out here playing Duck Chess - a woo-OO! Tales of duckmate, play bad and good Luck Chess! B-b-b Bishop's out to take you So you play your duck to D2. Now you start a counter-a-quack Duck Chess - a woo-OO! Everybody's out here playing Duck Chess - a woo-OO! Tales of duckmate, play bad and good Luck Chess! a woo-OO!
Duck chess engines are always going to struggle, due to the much higher branching factor. In normal chess there are 20 starting movies, but in duck chess there are 32 duck moves to go with each so there are 640 starting movies. While normal chess has 400 possible positions after 1 move for each side, duck chess has 409,600. Normal chess has around 160,000 possible positions after 2 movies, duck chess has about 167,772,160,000. Then considering that this AI seems limited to 1 second, it's not hard to see why it can't find 2-move combinations.
Dear Eric, thank you for your valuable content! Thank you for the Stafford gambit!! A small win of mine follows dedicated to you!! 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nxe5 Nc6 4. Nxc6 dxc6 5. f3 Bc5 6. g3 h5 7. g4 hxg4 8. fxg4 Nxg4 9. h3 Qh4+ 10. Ke2 Qf2+ 11. Kd3 Ne5+ 12. Kc3 Qd4+ 13. Kb3 Be6+ 14. Bc4 Qxc4# 0-1 Many people do web-chess nowadays, however I'm always amazed by your ethos. Greetings from Greece! With respect. Sairh
The thing is Duck chess support is absolutely new development in FairyStockfish. Telling the truth it is not in the latest release just in the duck git branch. Not to mention it has no nnue still (all the other variants on pychess has it). And the last thing regarding AI level strength, the engine is rather handicapped on the site to let humans win :) It uses 1s per move max and limited in depth as well :) But I think it will be much stronger later for sure.
Absolutely, knowing how Stockfish is programmed I figured Eric only managed to beat level 8 because it’s either buggy or handicapped. Hope this great vid spurs on some upgrades, excited to see Duck Chess reaching a wider audience!
Building a minimax engine purpose made for duck might be the thing to do, meaning the distinction between moves and duckmoves are built in from the ground. I want to start a duck engine working group.
@@cocccix on pychess site Fairy-Stockfish lvl8 play is limited to 1s and max 22 depth per move. But the actual depth depends on worker CPU/memory/threads and position as well. Also the duck move is a separate ply in Fairy, so in reality it is rather low atm. All in all Duck play is very experimental in Fairy (not merged to main branch yet) so there is lots of room for development regarding playing strength. It will be much stronger when first nnue nets will be available.
I explained the rules of Duck Chess to the ChatGPT AI and asked for a poem about it. Here's whar it came up with. A game of chess with lots of quack The rubber duck on its back It blocks the square, it's on its track And opens up new tactics to attack The knights jump over with grace The pawns move forward with pace But king and rook, they must concede For they cannot proceed The rubber duck, it's the key It changes the whole game, you see It forces us to think anew And come up with tactics that are true The king can castle, left or right But through the duck, he cannot sight He must find a way around Or he'll be lost, he'll be found The queen, she's powerful, that's for sure But through the duck, she cannot roar She must find another path Or she'll be trapped, in her wrath The rubber duck, it's the star It changes the game, it's where you are It forces us to think and strategize And come up with tactics that will surprise A game of chess with lots of quack The rubber duck on its back It makes "Duck Chess" something new And a game that's lots of fun for you!
im honestly getting really scared abt chat GPT, just with a bit more work it could replicate a human pretty believably. some of my friends use it for homework and they’ve been getting 100s.
Congrats, Eric -- king of the duckness! I wonder if the engine would be any stronger with more time. Seems unlikely though, since it never got into time trouble.
I want to start a duck engine working group. Reinforcement learning would probably work, but I think it would be more fun to make a regular minimax engine understand the distinction between moves and duck moves, instead of just adding duck move pairs to the game tree. Arasan chess might be a good starting engine code base.
although Zchess was not a strong engine, I liked how it could learn by building a log of moves/lines not to follow and discover horizon effect mistakes it made. something like that can be a crude beginning for a self-learning AI
You can undo moves. You have to click the move back arrow once, it will move two back, so you click the forward arrow and that will put you in the beging of your turn.
wonder how hard the regular mates will be, like king and queen mate or king and rook mate. Even the impossible mates could be acheive with the duck, the with just a bishop. would like duckends video.
I just tried this and it is so much harder to play duck chess than to laugh at obvious blunders from the side lines lol. I'm like a GM in duck chess commentary and keep hanging pieces to the simplest duck blunders
@@scran7346 Duck Chess follows most of the rules of regular chess. However, there are some slight differences, listed below: -Players make a standard chess move, followed by moving the duck to an empty square on the board. The duck always moves. -The duck blocks the square where it's placed, making it impossible for other pieces to move to or through it. -Knights can jump over the duck. -There are no checks or checkmates-players capture the enemy king to win. -Kings can move to attacked squares. They can also castle through attacked squares. -Players can also win a game by getting stalemated. Stalemates happen only when there are no legal moves (all of a player's pieces are blocked by other pieces or the duck).
Oooo! Nice to see an alternative for Duck chess outside of Green pawn! Great speed run on the AI too! It's probably the world record. Can't' believe you got black 7/9 games though!
I think part of why it played relatively badly is that it moved way too quickly i.e. basically spent no time calculating on any move. Level 8 had more than 3 minutes at the end of a 2+2 game. Maybe pychess doesn't have enough resources to run bots for extended periods of time or it just doesn't have any time management configured. It also almost assuredly didn't calculate during Eric's thinking time (which modern engines can do if set up correctly). Since pychess doesn't seem to have a custom bots mechanism, you'd probably have to properly set up the engine locally on your PC to actually play against the strongest Duck Chess AI (or I guess have somebody else do it for you). Also seems like some people have written their own Duck Chess AIs which might be stronger than Fairy Stockfish, which is a relatively generic engine that can play a bunch of variants (it's also used for all the variants on Lichess), so maybe not as optimized for Duck Chess specifically (though I'm sure they had to add some special handling for it).
There are some strong engines on a talkchess thread, though they do take some setup. I'm 20xx in duck chess and have yet to get a win against DuckSlayer. I wasn't able to set up TJDuckChess but supposedly it is stronger than DuckSlayer.
The idea of a duck chess stalemate is interesting. You would need to have no legal moves and checks don't exist, so the king would need to be smothered by his own pieces. I think the simplest possible duck stalemate would be: black King on h8, black pawns on h7, g6, f7. black bishop on g8, black rook on g7 White pieces (or duck) on f6, g5, and h6. This would be stalemate without even considering the duck.
I recall someone on an engine development forum mentioning that creating an AI for duck chess is far more difficult to accomplish than in regular chess due to: 1, an extremely larger amount of ramifications in any given position considering the duck can occupy any free square, essentially multiplying the number of possible moves by the number of free squares on the board 2, discarding branches that arise from losing positions (which is the most important optimization aspect of chess engines) is not as straight-forward, because the complexity of the game makes it very difficult to evaluate any given position. And as strange as it may seem, it might be possible that we will never have a duck chess AI strong enough to defeat top players.
> And as strange as it may seem, it might be possible that we will never have a duck chess AI strong enough to defeat top players. Possible but then it would almost assuredly only be because not enough people and time was spent on it. Given the progress of AIs over the decades, I would never trust any claims that "it's not possible to make an AI that does this thing as well as a human", at least definitely not for anything like chess with clear and fixed rules. I wouldn't be surprised if it were already possible to write a neural network based AI that can beat Eric if you have some people experienced with it and enough hardware to do some proper training.
I'm 99% sure the AI isn't blundering its queen but rather just values the knight more than the queen and would gladly make that trade. Would be interesting if the knight was actually stronger than a queen.
The knight is really strong, but I still think the queen is the strongest piece, because it has a lot of range and you can only ever block 1 out of 8 of it’s possible directions. It’s way more mobile than the knight and controls way more squares even considering the duck
So StockDuck is still not at the level of humans? Interesting :D I wonder how long it will take for it to get there, I suppose we have the computing power already, probably just a matter of actually making a better engine.
Hi Eric Do you think that the main weakness of the Duck Chess engine is that it does not seem well versed in Quacktics? I've just started playing Duck Chess but have beaten it (on level 2) by capturing it's black Knight on f6 by my Queen on f3 where it's Knight was only "defended" by it's Queen on d8. I don't think it realises that, in Duck Chess a piece can only be defended by a Knight or a pawn or another piece adjacent to it. For this reason it seems to give away "free pieces" quite a lot. If this is the case then it could be a relatively easy fix to the bot, to make it much stronger.
I think for duck chess values should be adjusted to pawn = 1.5 // bishop and rook = 3 // knight = 4 // queen = 5 or something similar otherwise engines will missevaluate every situation because every piece that moves linear can be duck blocked very easily and queen is still valuable but can be traded for a knight in some situations and still be alright
@@Otzkar Oh sorry I didn't click the timestamp and assumed you meant the game that ended in a stalemate-like position at 15:53. I'm a little confused about your question now, because in the position at 7:20 there are tens of legal moves. en passant is illegal because the duck is blocking, but every other move is legal.
At 12:46 correct me if I'm wrong but he could've captured the bishop with his queen and moved the duck to protect his knight while checking the king and giving discovered protection to the queen from the Bishop on b2
Yeah, duck can't be taken so you can use it to disconnect pieces like that really well. Makes defending pretty different from what I've seen but I'm no expert
At 22:04 (Level 6 wen you looked for mate, you had it I think. Can't you move the rook to d6 and force a duck mate? If the rook it taken or any other non king move, they have to move the duck and lose to bishop takes king.. If they move the king there is no square it can't be taken.
Think that loses a rook because you have to move the duck away from e7 after moving the rook to d6, and even if you defend against the a3 bishop with the duck, the pawn will take your rook and the duck moves back to e7 to defend from your bishop
I was playing duck chess with my friend and when i knew I will lose I moved my king next to his king and thanks to his premove I captured king with king
This is so interesting! Duckfish is strong but still can’t quite handle all the quacktics. Kasparov vs Deep Blue all over again
duck punsss :D
Imagine the complex quacktics developed with the help of a super strong engine!
Quacksparov vs Duck Blue
@@potato4dawin1 Hmm, duck duck blue perhaps?
15:52
I like how Rosen says "Normally, this would be stalemate." As if in normal chess there would be a duck preventing Kh2
Underated comment 😂
I think the humor of a duck and ‘quacktics’ masks the fact that this variant offers serious depth and complexity of an entirely new sort. Eric is our intrepid explorer.
17:21 " I can tell it's getting stronger with every level" - Instantly blunders a queen
The AI is indeed getting smarter. At level 5, it started to understand the concept of comedic timing.
@@arasmith9076 lol
In Malaysia, there's a concept of "Pantang dipuji" which literally translated to "Forbidden to praise". It is used whenever something bad immediately happens to the person / thing that you just praised.
@@GreenOrochi89 We call that "jinxing it," which I believe is named after some sort of shamanistic practice?
10:55 it looks like at the end of the game the duck gets put on where your last piece took from, because it's the only square that's guaranteed to be open
Indeed. And it's probably programmed with playing full "coordinates" each move, so it needs a chess move and a duck move, even in duck mate positions.
I love the part of the video where Eric says "It's duckin' time" and then beats all of the bots. Truly inspirational.
And ducks all over the chess
i'm so tired of this stupid "joke" please stop
edit: i suppose the majority says it's still funny but god i hate it so much
@@parzingtheasian your kinda ducked, man
Im not tho, I loved that joke
@@PeterParker-vi2nl how are you not tired of this it's literally everywhere
I once saw Hikaru say Duckchess will never catch on. I disagree. This is my favorite variant.
I especially like the fact it has a duck
@@Blaxpoon That's exactly what gravitated me toward checking the variant out haha. It only gets better with new terminology being added like "duckmate", "duckzwang", and "quacktics" to name a few.
Magnus called it boring. Cant disagree but its fun for a little
@@Blaxpoon -How 'bout Remarkable Rookies?-
-That chess variant has Half-Duck-
I actually didn;t know what duck chess was until watching this and then searching it. looks very fun!!
21:10
Eric: "I think it just blundered"
While not taking the completely free knight.
he couldnt take the knight cuz he had already moved his king
@@Wick291, and why was he moving his king in the first place? Yep, because that same knight was going to check him.
Eric just thought the bot would protect the knight with the duck. Still a mistake though. A funny one =)
@@a_wild_Kirillian yeah but unfortunately, once he made the move he couldn't undo which is just bullshit haha
@@Wick291, it's not though. You just don't undo your moves in chess, that's pretty reasonable. Even if inconvenient at times.
@@a_wild_Kirillian I thought it was kind of cool that the move only got locked in after the duck was placed. Just another reason the duck was so important.
17:30 "This better not be some deep duck sacrifice." Excuse me, but i believe you mean quackrifice.
You should be able to promote pawn to duck. Imagine getting connect four with ducks. You'll have all your ducks in a row, if you will. = )
The idea of being able to promote a pawn to an additional duck opens so many fascinating possibilities! It could just become a second duck in general causing both players to need to place both/all ducks every turn, or it could be a special duck that only be controlled by the player whose pawn it came from (but they still have to move it every turn) ... How fun to think about!
10:56 It’s probably a programming optimization. They make a final legal duck move at the end of the game after the king is taken, to complete the turn, instead of making you do it. And the only space on the board guaranteed to be available for the duck is the space you just moved from.
I tried the duck engine on my powerful computer a few days ago, it seems like it takes a lot longer to search to high depth because there are like 40x more legal moves in every position. so even after running it for a few minutes on 48 threads, it only got up to around depth 20 or so, whereas normal stockfish would reach that on 1 thread in 1 second. also there is no duck nnue yet, which could maybe increase the strength by a lot (more than 1000 elo for some other variants like crazyhouse)
Life is like a hurricane, here in Duck Chess
OP knights and no stalemate, it's a duck Mess
Might want to sac this,
But watch out for Quacktics!
Duck Chess - a woo-OO!
Everybody's out here playing
Duck Chess - a woo-OO!
Tales of duckmate, play bad and good
Luck Chess!
B-b-b Bishop's out to take you
So you play your duck to D2.
Now you start a counter-a-quack
Duck Chess - a woo-OO!
Everybody's out here playing
Duck Chess - a woo-OO!
Tales of duckmate, play bad and good
Luck Chess! a woo-OO!
” Jobs fill your pockets, but duck chess fill your soul.” - Jaime Lyn
Duck chess engines are always going to struggle, due to the much higher branching factor. In normal chess there are 20 starting movies, but in duck chess there are 32 duck moves to go with each so there are 640 starting movies. While normal chess has 400 possible positions after 1 move for each side, duck chess has 409,600. Normal chess has around 160,000 possible positions after 2 movies, duck chess has about 167,772,160,000. Then considering that this AI seems limited to 1 second, it's not hard to see why it can't find 2-move combinations.
Dear Eric,
thank you for your valuable content! Thank you for the Stafford gambit!! A small win of mine follows dedicated to you!!
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nxe5 Nc6 4. Nxc6 dxc6 5. f3 Bc5 6. g3 h5 7. g4 hxg4 8.
fxg4 Nxg4 9. h3 Qh4+ 10. Ke2 Qf2+ 11. Kd3 Ne5+ 12. Kc3 Qd4+ 13. Kb3 Be6+ 14. Bc4
Qxc4# 0-1
Many people do web-chess nowadays, however I'm always amazed by your ethos. Greetings from Greece! With respect. Sairh
The thing is Duck chess support is absolutely new development in FairyStockfish. Telling the truth it is not in the latest release just in the duck git branch. Not to mention it has no nnue still (all the other variants on pychess has it). And the last thing regarding AI level strength, the engine is rather handicapped on the site to let humans win :) It uses 1s per move max and limited in depth as well :) But I think it will be much stronger later for sure.
Google should get the AlphaGo AI to play Duck chess. Maybe they could call it DuckDuckGo... wait...
Absolutely, knowing how Stockfish is programmed I figured Eric only managed to beat level 8 because it’s either buggy or handicapped. Hope this great vid spurs on some upgrades, excited to see Duck Chess reaching a wider audience!
Building a minimax engine purpose made for duck might be the thing to do, meaning the distinction between moves and duckmoves are built in from the ground. I want to start a duck engine working group.
Do you know the max depth avaliable for this engine?
@@cocccix on pychess site Fairy-Stockfish lvl8 play is limited to 1s and max 22 depth per move. But the actual depth depends on worker CPU/memory/threads and position as well. Also the duck move is a separate ply in Fairy, so in reality it is rather low atm. All in all Duck play is very experimental in Fairy (not merged to main branch yet) so there is lots of room for development regarding playing strength. It will be much stronger when first nnue nets will be available.
I expected the AI to have better Quacktics
Love when Eric corrects himself after saying tactics, then says quacktics lol
I like how level zero always starts out stronger than it seems.
I explained the rules of Duck Chess to the ChatGPT AI and asked for a poem about it. Here's whar it came up with.
A game of chess with lots of quack
The rubber duck on its back
It blocks the square, it's on its track
And opens up new tactics to attack
The knights jump over with grace
The pawns move forward with pace
But king and rook, they must concede
For they cannot proceed
The rubber duck, it's the key
It changes the whole game, you see
It forces us to think anew
And come up with tactics that are true
The king can castle, left or right
But through the duck, he cannot sight
He must find a way around
Or he'll be lost, he'll be found
The queen, she's powerful, that's for sure
But through the duck, she cannot roar
She must find another path
Or she'll be trapped, in her wrath
The rubber duck, it's the star
It changes the game, it's where you are
It forces us to think and strategize
And come up with tactics that will surprise
A game of chess with lots of quack
The rubber duck on its back
It makes "Duck Chess" something new
And a game that's lots of fun for you!
It's kind of scary how good this is
im honestly getting really scared abt chat GPT, just with a bit more work it could replicate a human pretty believably. some of my friends use it for homework and they’ve been getting 100s.
interesting
that's honestly an amazing poem - especially "or he'll be lost, he'll be found"
He attacc
He protecc
But most importantly
The ducc quacc
15:26 new endgame technique: king and duck vs king 🐤
This proves Eric is the strongest Duckchess player in the world
Congrats, Eric -- king of the duckness! I wonder if the engine would be any stronger with more time. Seems unlikely though, since it never got into time trouble.
Not necessarily - if time usage is proportional to time remaining, then it might still use more time (and thus go deeper) if given a longer format.
Well played Eric. Duckfish Level 8 would probably beat a lot of GMs (Naroditsky included) 😎😉
I want to start a duck engine working group. Reinforcement learning would probably work, but I think it would be more fun to make a regular minimax engine understand the distinction between moves and duck moves, instead of just adding duck move pairs to the game tree. Arasan chess might be a good starting engine code base.
although Zchess was not a strong engine, I liked how it could learn by building a log of moves/lines not to follow and discover horizon effect mistakes it made. something like that can be a crude beginning for a self-learning AI
The duck on the thumbnail is so adorable!
26:02 "Hey, I'm white!" - Eric Rosen (for office?) 2023
Just kidding, I was wondering if the "random" color would ever give you the white pieces.
You can undo moves. You have to click the move back arrow once, it will move two back, so you click the forward arrow and that will put you in the beging of your turn.
And it does not respond to the keyboard, so you have to manually click the arrows with the cursor.
10:55 Probably for technical reasons, to complete the move.
21:10 Eric forgot that queens can go backwards :)
After watching level 0 I'm wondering how good level 8 is going to be, if we get there....
wonder how hard the regular mates will be, like king and queen mate or king and rook mate. Even the impossible mates could be acheive with the duck, the with just a bishop. would like duckends video.
Its interesting the game where he has an extra rook and knight but just needs a king and duck to win.
I can't wait for the duck to make quacking noises
Yeeees more pychess please! Shogun is fun for example. The website has faaaaar too few players for how good it is
I just tried this and it is so much harder to play duck chess than to laugh at obvious blunders from the side lines lol. I'm like a GM in duck chess commentary and keep hanging pieces to the simplest duck blunders
I don't understand the rules of it and eric didn't explain. What's the rules?
@@scran7346 Duck Chess follows most of the rules of regular chess. However, there are some slight differences, listed below:
-Players make a standard chess move, followed by moving the duck to an empty square on the board.
The duck always moves.
-The duck blocks the square where it's placed, making it impossible for other pieces to move to or through it.
-Knights can jump over the duck.
-There are no checks or checkmates-players capture the enemy king to win.
-Kings can move to attacked squares. They can also castle through attacked squares.
-Players can also win a game by getting stalemated. Stalemates happen only when there are no legal moves (all of a player's pieces are blocked by other pieces or the duck).
17:30 - “this better not be some deep duck sacrifice” … or quackrifice, if you will
Even the level zero bot was up 40 seconds from when it started.
Oooo! Nice to see an alternative for Duck chess outside of Green pawn!
Great speed run on the AI too! It's probably the world record. Can't' believe you got black 7/9 games though!
13:30 couldnt he put duck at f7? King is dead for sure
I think part of why it played relatively badly is that it moved way too quickly i.e. basically spent no time calculating on any move. Level 8 had more than 3 minutes at the end of a 2+2 game. Maybe pychess doesn't have enough resources to run bots for extended periods of time or it just doesn't have any time management configured. It also almost assuredly didn't calculate during Eric's thinking time (which modern engines can do if set up correctly). Since pychess doesn't seem to have a custom bots mechanism, you'd probably have to properly set up the engine locally on your PC to actually play against the strongest Duck Chess AI (or I guess have somebody else do it for you). Also seems like some people have written their own Duck Chess AIs which might be stronger than Fairy Stockfish, which is a relatively generic engine that can play a bunch of variants (it's also used for all the variants on Lichess), so maybe not as optimized for Duck Chess specifically (though I'm sure they had to add some special handling for it).
In the first hour of your video release, the number of players on pychess tripled! :)
THE FINAL QUACKDOWN
Cutting edge content
There are some strong engines on a talkchess thread, though they do take some setup. I'm 20xx in duck chess and have yet to get a win against DuckSlayer. I wasn't able to set up TJDuckChess but supposedly it is stronger than DuckSlayer.
The idea of a duck chess stalemate is interesting. You would need to have no legal moves and checks don't exist, so the king would need to be smothered by his own pieces. I think the simplest possible duck stalemate would be:
black King on h8,
black pawns on h7, g6, f7.
black bishop on g8,
black rook on g7
White pieces (or duck) on f6, g5, and h6.
This would be stalemate without even considering the duck.
Rosen vs. Pychess level 12 will probably be the next Kasparov vs. Deep Blue.
Waiting for a deep quack dominating human being
Pychess is an awesome site that has so many cool variants to try out. My favourites are Chak (Mayan chess), Shogun, Orda and Shako
Yes yes yes
I recall someone on an engine development forum mentioning that creating an AI for duck chess is far more difficult to accomplish than in regular chess due to:
1, an extremely larger amount of ramifications in any given position considering the duck can occupy any free square, essentially multiplying the number of possible moves by the number of free squares on the board
2, discarding branches that arise from losing positions (which is the most important optimization aspect of chess engines) is not as straight-forward, because the complexity of the game makes it very difficult to evaluate any given position.
And as strange as it may seem, it might be possible that we will never have a duck chess AI strong enough to defeat top players.
> And as strange as it may seem, it might be possible that we will never have a duck chess AI strong enough to defeat top players.
Possible but then it would almost assuredly only be because not enough people and time was spent on it. Given the progress of AIs over the decades, I would never trust any claims that "it's not possible to make an AI that does this thing as well as a human", at least definitely not for anything like chess with clear and fixed rules. I wouldn't be surprised if it were already possible to write a neural network based AI that can beat Eric if you have some people experienced with it and enough hardware to do some proper training.
We humans choose Eric Rosen as our champion to face off against the computers!
21:09 Qxe7
10:55 it puts duck on g2 because "gg", 5000iq
I'm 99% sure the AI isn't blundering its queen but rather just values the knight more than the queen and would gladly make that trade. Would be interesting if the knight was actually stronger than a queen.
The knight is really strong, but I still think the queen is the strongest piece, because it has a lot of range and you can only ever block 1 out of 8 of it’s possible directions. It’s way more mobile than the knight and controls way more squares even considering the duck
Now I know how to mate with king and duck, one of the last endgame I was missing, thanks!
Well done, DuckGM Rosen
I love watching Erik playing duck chess
Duckfish just couldn't handle all the quacktics and quackfrices.
That thumbnail is one of the greatest things I've ever seen
I think Eric is world champion in duck chess
So StockDuck is still not at the level of humans? Interesting :D I wonder how long it will take for it to get there, I suppose we have the computing power already, probably just a matter of actually making a better engine.
"Never too late for Castle" IM Eric Rosen 2023
3.51 level 0 Black move 26
Qe3,h2
I think is a nice clean finish
Quackcellent
I actually didn't know about that site, thank you =)
The AI wants to go from Stockfish to Duckfish, but couldn't change all the letters... so we got Suckfish. 🙃
The mechanical turkey
I have absolutely no idea what I watched here but it was fun. I wish I could understand what was going on lol.
Hi Eric
Do you think that the main weakness of the Duck Chess engine is that it does not seem well versed in Quacktics?
I've just started playing Duck Chess but have beaten it (on level 2) by capturing it's black Knight on f6 by my Queen on f3 where it's Knight was only "defended" by it's Queen on d8.
I don't think it realises that, in Duck Chess a piece can only be defended by a Knight or a pawn or another piece adjacent to it.
For this reason it seems to give away "free pieces" quite a lot.
If this is the case then it could be a relatively easy fix to the bot, to make it much stronger.
29:45 damn, half a year already? 2023 is going by so fast.
“Tactics or quacktics “😂😂
everyone is watching in the future
2:42 - why isn't Qx duck blocking saving the queen?
Because the duck is already there (between the rook and the queen), and you have to move it (can't keep it in the same place.)
How the duck is he already so fast at this, what a beast
Eric "Hey, I'm White!" Rosen
I think for duck chess values should be adjusted to pawn = 1.5 // bishop and rook = 3 // knight = 4 // queen = 5 or something similar otherwise engines will missevaluate every situation because every piece that moves linear can be duck blocked very easily and queen is still valuable but can be traded for a knight in some situations and still be alright
Why did the game at 7:20 not end in a draw? There are no legal moves
this is duck chess not chess
in duck chess you're allowed to move your king onto an attacked square, so there are legal moves.
@@Pleeze yeah but en passant is not possible in that position
@@elitemagikarp4822 the joke was that en passant is forced
@@Otzkar Oh sorry I didn't click the timestamp and assumed you meant the game that ended in a stalemate-like position at 15:53.
I'm a little confused about your question now, because in the position at 7:20 there are tens of legal moves.
en passant is illegal because the duck is blocking, but every other move is legal.
Omg they actually did it
if it didn't play instantly Eric would have no chance I think
Cant you trap bishop at 17:47 with b5, duck b3?
Possibly but they would get your c pawn and an attack on your queen if the duck defends against the e4 bishop, might be worth it but not really sure
At 12:46 correct me if I'm wrong but he could've captured the bishop with his queen and moved the duck to protect his knight while checking the king and giving discovered protection to the queen from the Bishop on b2
Think the duck would be placed back onto the diagonal after the queen is taken by the king
@@kingjobo1320 Is that possible if its already guarded by the Bishop?
Yeah, duck can't be taken so you can use it to disconnect pieces like that really well.
Makes defending pretty different from what I've seen but I'm no expert
@@kingjobo1320 right fair enough I just thought it wouldn't work as you have to move the duck after your move but what you say does make sense
3:56 Was Qf8 duck h7 Checkmate?
"I'll probably post this on TH-cam. If you are watching in the future and I didn't post it, then the duck rippped a hole in the space/time continuum.
I would panic at the speed of the bots
Yo they even have the Chinese xiangqi variant
Anyone know the general rating of each duck A.I. level? I've beat'em all too.
the fact that the engine moves so fast makes me think its cheating
21:09 Why Kh8 instead of Qxe7?
It seems very fun to try
8:09 isnt qg8 forced duck mate?
King would take the queen and then protect itself from from the rook by with duck g7
At 22:04 (Level 6 wen you looked for mate, you had it I think. Can't you move the rook to d6 and force a duck mate? If the rook it taken or any other non king move, they have to move the duck and lose to bishop takes king.. If they move the king there is no square it can't be taken.
Think that loses a rook because you have to move the duck away from e7 after moving the rook to d6, and even if you defend against the a3 bishop with the duck, the pawn will take your rook and the duck moves back to e7 to defend from your bishop
After watching five "speedruns" on Naroditsky's channel, I'm not used to them ending faster than the half-life decay of uranium anymore
When you said there was a quacktic I laughed. Also nice ai thumbnails
At 10:32: is Rf2,Dg1#?
I was playing duck chess with my friend and when i knew I will lose I moved my king next to his king and thanks to his premove I captured king with king
I feel like the engine should be called Stockduck
😂 ducks say quack😂
They do
Isn't Duck mate just a Date?
16:00 duckzwang