The paper presents a symbolic sub‑policy model for chess that incorporates domain knowledge to improve interpretability. By adapting patterns learned through inductive logic programming (PAL), the authors evaluate the model using a divergence metric against a random baseline and show that it can suggest moves comparable to a human beginner. They also propose a computational evaluation scheme that augments an existing engine with their model.
The paper proposes a method that mimics human cognition to train reinforcement learning agents to generate explainable strategies and policies as executable procedures derived from sequences of gameplay actions. It demonstrates automatic learning of such programs for chess and a grid‑based environment, showing that the resulting strategies produce effective actions and can be learned from gameplay data.
As part of learning to play complex games, human players develop develop abstractions for concepts and strategies of gameplay consistent with game rules to improve their performance. These concepts ar...
arXiv:2607. 27574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged in large language models as a lightweight alternative for dynamically changing a model's behavior at inference time.
The paper introduces an automatic metric for evaluating chess explanations based on chess-engine evaluations and finds that current language models perform poorly, relying on surface-level observations. It presents BinProp, a training-free method that helps models discover reusable chess concepts, significantly improving explainability across multiple models. BinProp also generalizes to other board games such as Go, draughts, and shogi without extra tuning.
arXiv:2607. 00190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in reinforcement learning have produced superhuman agents across a wide range of competitive games.
The paper presents a systematic mapping of recent chess research involving humans, engines, neural and reinforcement‑learning systems, large language models (LLMs), and hybrid approaches. It identifies 84 core study families and classifies them by agent type, strategic‑reasoning stages, and evaluation dimensions, highlighting a strong focus on situation assessment, evaluation, and action selection while noting gaps in planning, explanation, metacognition, and human–AI collaboration. The study also distinguishes hybrid systems by integration timing and cautions that improved human performance in evaluations does not automatically imply human–AI synergy.
arXiv:2610.03695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern chess engines are silent experts: they play at a superhuman level, but do not offer explanations for their play. On the other hand, language mod...
The paper introduces a text-based, multi-agent version of the board game Clue to test multi-step deductive reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Six LLM-based agents (GPT‑4o‑mini and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash) play turn‑based games, and a tool‑augmented approach uses a structured possibility matrix to convert implicit game state into explicit remaining possibilities, thereby offloading memory and deductive constraints from the agents. The study compares this tool‑augmented method against a baseline to assess its impact on reasoning quality and task success in a strategic reasoning environment.
arXiv:2603. 20510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models often lack grounded reasoning capabilities in specialized domains where training data is scarce but bespoke systems excel.
arXiv:2608. 04240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Superhuman game engines in domains like chess have made expert-level evaluations easily accessible, yet they communicate what is true without the natural-language explanations that make such expertise educationally useful to experts and non-experts alike.
arXiv:2607. 21195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chess is a two player strategic game that is embedded in classical AI culture as it was once the frontier for intelligent behaviour.
The paper introduces a method for creating reactive character behaviors in continuous games as compact, human‑readable programs. It searches over a domain‑specific language that uses reactive geometric decisions and higher‑order constructs to discretize continuous behavior space, while eliminating redundant program forms through synthesis antipatterns. The approach, called agentic sketching, combines bottom‑up symbolic enumeration with top‑down guidance from a coding agent, and outperforms either technique alone on a benchmark of 14 continuous games.