Chess is a seemingly simple game, but one that hides incredible complexity. In the standard game, the starting positions of the pieces are fixed so top players rely on memorizing a plethora of opening moves, which can sometimes result in boring, predictable games. It’s also the case that playing as white, and therefore going first, offers an advantage.
In the 1990s, former chess world champion Bobby Fischer proposed another way to play chess to encourage more creative play.
This form of the game – dubbed Chess960 – keeps the pawns in the same position but randomizes where the pieces at the back of the board – the knights, bishops, rooks, king and queen – are placed at the start while keeping the rest of the rules the same. It is named after the 960 starting positions that result from mixing it up at the back.
It was thought that Chess960 could allow for more permutations that would make the game fairer for both players. Yet research by physicist Marc Barthelemy at Paris-Saclay University suggests it’s not as simple as this.
Initial advantage
He used the open-source chess program called Stockfish to analyze each of the 960 starting positions and developed a statistical method to measure decision-making complexity by calculating how much “information” a player needs to identify the best moves.
He found that the standard game can be unfair, as players with black pieces who go second have to keep up with the moves from the player with white.
Yet regardless of starting positions at the back, Barthelemy discovered that white still has an advantage in almost all – 99.6% – of the 960 positions. He also found that the standard set-up – rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook – is nothing special and is presumably an historical accident possibly as the starting positions are easy to remember, being visually symmetrical.
“Standard chess, despite centuries of cultural evolution, does not occupy an exceptional location in this landscape: it exhibits a typical initial advantage and moderate total complexity, while displaying above-average asymmetry in decision difficulty,” writes Barthelemy.
For a more fair and balanced match, Barthelemy suggests playing position #198, which has the starting positions as queen, knight, bishop, rook, king, bishop, knight and rook.
