Abstract
State-of-the-art reinforcement learning agents are capable of outperforming human experts at games like chess, Go and StarCraft II. These agents do not simply take advantage of their digital hardware in being able to react and calculate faster than humans, but employ better strategies that lead to more victories. Interpreting these strategies would give human players valuable insight into how to improve their play. In this preliminary work, we propose a symbolic sub-policy model for playing chess. Inspired by chess tactics, our model attempts to incorporate domain knowledge to improve interpretability. We adapt patterns learned by an inductive logic programming system called PAL to derive our model. We contribute a divergence metric to evaluate our model against a random baseline, and find a set of tactics that is able to suggest moves of similar playing strength to a human beginner. Finally, we propose a computational evaluation scheme for the model by augmenting an off-the-shelf engine with it.
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Publication details
- Journal
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Krishnan, A., & Martens, C. (2026). Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics
MLA 9
Krishnan, Abhijeet, and Chris Martens. "Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics.
Chicago (author–date)
Krishnan, Abhijeet, and Chris Martens. 2026. "Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics.
Harvard
Krishnan, A. and Martens, C. (2026) 'Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics.
Vancouver
Krishnan A, Martens C. Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics
IEEE
A. Krishnan, and C. Martens, "Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/towards-the-automatic-synthesis-of-interpretable-chess-tactics.