Measuring the Non-Transitivity in Chess

It has long been believed that Chess is the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Studying Chess can productively provide valid knowledge about complex systems. Although remarkable progress has been made on solving Chess, the geometrical landscape of Chess in the strategy space is still mysterious. Judging on AI-generated strategies, researchers hypothesised that the strategy space of Chess possesses a spinning top geometry, with the upright axis representing the transitive dimension (e.g., A beats B, B beats C, A beats C), and the radial axis representing the non-transitive dimension (e.g., A beats B, B beats C, C beats A). However, it is unclear whether such a hypothesis holds for real-world strategies. In this paper, we quantify the non-transitivity in Chess through real-world data from human players. Specifically, we performed two ways of non-transitivity quantifications -- Nash Clustering and counting the number of Rock-Paper-Scissor cycles -- on over one billion match data from Lichess and FICS. Our findings positively indicate that the strategy space occupied by real-world Chess strategies demonstrates a spinning top geometry, and more importantly, there exists a strong connection between the degree of non-transitivity and the progression of a Chess player's rating. In particular, high degrees of non-transitivity tend to prevent human players from making progress on their Elo rating, whereas progressions are easier to make at the level of ratings where the degree of non-transitivity is lower. Additionally, we also investigate the implication of the degree of non-transitivity for population-based training methods. By considering fixed-memory Fictitious Play as a proxy, we reach the conclusion that maintaining large-size and diverse populations of strategies is imperative to training effective AI agents in solving Chess types of games.