The other day I discussed possible modifications to the rules of Chess to make it have less draws. Now a related question: What can be done to make Chess more resistant to computers over humans? (thread)

It must be acknowledged up front that with the current state of technology this is essentially hopeless. With the fall of Chess, Arimaa, and Go, we should assume that current deep learning techniques will easily crush any board game with no hidden information and no randomness

But we can still have the goals of changing the rules such that the game feels more positional and less tactical to human players, and somewhat more well-definedly try to make a game which does a better job of favoring neural network over deep learning engines

One thing which is clear from Stockfish's latest win is that there are some positions in which neural networks can't possibly do better than faster evaluations because the fast eval quite simply exhausted the entire game tree

Nobody ever talks about board evaluation for Mancala because that game has so few game states that even an engine which only recognizes final win and losses states can basically finish it. The same applies for all other board games

So we should expect more positional variants to be longer and slower. The old saying 'The pawn is the soul of Chess' is very true. The slowness of pawns are what gives Chess most of its positional nature (although they aren't as slow as Go's stones, which don't move at all)

The simplest way to increase the role of pawns in Chess is to simply add more pawns. Throwing them down in the opening position clogs things up a lot, but you can also give each side a number of spare pawns, and say that every time a pawn is moved off the home row another is \\

left behind until all the pawns are used up. If you're willing to make this really extreme you can start with one side having lots of extra pawns and the other side having a smaller amount of extra material power and give draw odds to the side with the extra pawns, giving them \\

the task of forming a blockade against the extra material, which is a task which computers still sometimes screw up to this day.

Going in the other direction, the rules can be changed to make all the pieces slower: pawns move as before, but the other pieces can't move more than two squares in a turn, and the king can't move diagonally.

This might be a bit of a long and slow game, but would certainly involve lots of long term strategic planning.

Going outside of Chess there's hope for humans yet. Computers will probably stay inferior at this Poker variant for the next few years https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1212468802291687426