Generating Creative Chess Puzzles

Xidong Feng, Vivek Veeriah, Marcus Chiam, Michael D Dennis, Federico Barbero, Johan Obando-Ceron, Jiaxin Shi, Satinder Singh, Shaobo Hou, Nenad Tomasev, Tom Zahavy

Keywords: chess puzzle, creativity, generative model

Abstract: While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome some of those shortcomings. The rewards are designed to enhance a puzzle's uniqueness, counter-intuitiveness, diversity, and realism. Our RL approach dramatically increases counter-intuitive puzzle generation by 10x, from 0.22\% (supervised) to 2.5\%, surpassing existing dataset rates (2.1\%) and the best Lichess-trained model (0.4\%). Our puzzles meet novelty and diversity benchmarks, retain aesthetic themes, and are rated by human experts as more creative, enjoyable, and counter-intuitive than composed book puzzles, even approaching classic compositions. Our final outcome is a curated booklet of these novel AI-generated puzzles, which is acknowledged for creativity by three world-renowned experts.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 12121