Classical chess ranks 562nd of 960 starting positions after 460,800 games
chess960v2.comI don’t even know what to do about LLM authored articles. Do the prompt engineers hitting enter understand it’s difficult to read and off putting? Could HN use a secondary AI tag/flag?
Sadly I think it’ll be just a dead, poorly written internet moving forward.
Maybe the article is interesting. I don’t know. It’s exhausting to read.
I agree but I'm not sure if I'm biased given the nonstop negative comments about AI texts, on top of every text having the same style (which would be equivalent to a human writing every page on the Internet).
Would we think this was poorly written if we read just this one text 20 years ago? I don't know the answer.
"Good" or "bad" writing cannot be decided in vacuum: it is decided by the culture examining it.
One example strongly tied to culture is cliched writing.
Things become cliche as they are get overused; no amount of cleverness in the cliche itself can overcome this. Claude's writing has rapidly become cliche because it uses the same pool of stock phrases and words. People pick up on this and have the same reaction as they do to any other cliche piece.
Let's take two works generally seen as good: if Lord of the Rings or Foundation released today, they would probably be panned as cliche because they created those tropes in the first place, which future authors copied or built upon. So yes, most would not think this is poorly written 20 years ago because this style didn't exist yet and it wasn't cliche.
Claude vibe-writing isn't "bad" because it is grammatically or structurally bad. It's bad because it's overused and signals to the reader - whether intentional or not - certain things about how much the prompter values the written piece.
It’s definitely structurally bad. If you run normal Claude output against various readability metrics they generally come out terrible. I had one pin a particularly bad piece of Claude output at needing 24 years of schooling.
Totally agree. I saw the idea of “Internet Kessler syndrome” recently and I can’t stop thinking about how it captures this.
If you want to read something interesting and edifying about chess960, the classical starting position, and other interesting starting positions, might I recommend instead this wonderful paper? https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14319
Interesting topic but they couldn't be bothered to spend time writing about it, shame.
If black and white had different permutations of the back row, you could find more balanced starting positions. Adopt more flexible starting conditions in the computer chess age.
That is what this is. White and Black get different back ranks. Every one of the 960 setups plays every other one, with both colors. So 921,600 games, and each single game is a double random position.
Classical is 562nd of 960 by score so far. The article did not make that clear, which is on me.
"The caveats, which are the honest place to start" UGH
but every setup plays against every other one and earns an "honest" score. /scream
AI written, and makes no sense it how the piece flows.
Yep, it was really hard to get my brain to focus on what was actually trying to be conveyed, and I'm a 2000 rated chess player
Stockfish 15.1
> Then every setup plays against every other one and earns an honest score.
...as opposed to a dishonest score?
Claude slop
Author here. Yes, the article was written by an LLM. My English is not good enough for that text and I did not want to spend a week on it.
The reason is simple. I built this because I wanted the answer for myself. I still don't know if it is useful to anyone else. So I put my effort into running the tournament and almost none into writing about it. Clearly that shows.
The tournament is real. Stockfish 15.1 with NNUE turned off, same time control and same hardware for every game. 460,800 games played, 921,600 total. No model touched the numbers.
Write bad English in Goggle Docs a accept most of the orthography and grammar correction. Avoid the magical button that uses fake pixel dust to "polish" the text because the text smells like AI after that.