Week 9

 This week I played another variant of chess. The variant is called Automate. In Automate, both players take turn setting up their pieces. After they both finish setting up their pieces, a computer program plays the game for them. Each player must first decide where to play six pawns. Except for the king, each piece is assigned a point value. A player can not add pieces to the board such that their combined value exceeds 35. During set up, both players can see where the other player places their pieces and the player's remaining points. Pawns can either go on the 2nd or 3rd rank and no more than 2 can be in a file. The other pieces must be placed on the 1st or 2nd ranks. A player can have more than one queen, bishop, rook, or horse.

My tactic when playing was to create pawn structures and put pieces like bishops and queens in spaces where they had open lines of attack. I tried to put as many queens on the board as possible. Once the computer program started taking over, I became aware that it may not make the best moves (some AIs that I have played against don't make wise moves). Also, it went through the turns so quick that I did not know how to follow. I only was able to follow who was winning when the opponent had many more pieces than I had. I did not follow whether good moves were made for either me or the opponent. However, a record is made of all the moves that were made. This record can be accessed to replay the game at your own pace as it unfolded on the board. In the end, I had only my king and I lost.

This variant of this game seemed to give me as much agency as a normal game of chess. This is probably because I don't feel that skilled enough at the normal game to not attribute the majority of my successful game play as due to chance. This variant of the game seems like it offers a different kind of replayability. There is three players, or minds, in this variant. The third mind, the AI, is conceivably unlimited in its analysis of the board. Since we know how to train AIs to build chess champions, the AI should make the game replayable because each time it is played the AI is expected to make very smart moves.