In old-school chess AIs, zugzwang is also of interest because it can break null-move pruning[0], which is a way to prune the search tree. "Null move" just means "skip your turn", and the assumption that skipping your turn is always worse than the optimal move. But in zugzwang positions, that assumption is wrong, so you have to avoid doing null-move pruning.
Stockfish's heuristic for "risk of zugzwang" is basically "only kings and pawns left over", alongside logic for "is null-move pruning even useful right now" [1]:
Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.
More relevant to a business site, this is the situation many large corporations find themselves in. Say you're Google and you own an immensely profitable monopoly. The very best thing you can do is nothing; anything you do risks upsetting the delicate competitive equilibrium that you're winning. If you're an executive, how do you do nothing? You can't very well hire thousands of employees to do nothing and pay them to do it. But if you don't have thousands of employees, and your job is doing nothing, how do you justify the millions that they're paying you?
The strategy many executives use is to set different parts of their organization at odds with each other, so that they each create busywork that other employees must do. Everybody is fully utilized, and yet in the big picture nothing changes. Oftentimes they will create big strategic initiatives that are tangential to the golden goose, spending billions on boondoggles that don't actually do anything, because the whole point is to do nothing while seeming like you need thousands of people to do it. And the whole reason for that is because most people are very bad at sitting still, and so if you didn't pay them a whole lot to do nothing useful, the useful stuff they'd be doing would be trying to compete with and unseat you. (You can also see this in the billion dollar paydays that entrepreneurs get when they mount a credible threat of unseating the giant incumbent.)
If you would lose even if you didn't move, that is not zugzwang. Zugzwang is when, because you must move per the rules of the game, you lose. I don't really see that dynamic in foreign policy. Any country has the option of maintaining its current policy. Whether or not it's wise, the option exists.
Geopolitically, the no-action move is rarely unavailable. The motivation to do something rash like start a war out of the blue is often down to the decision of a single person. That leader may have political reasons to do it but they aren’t being forced to do it, as they would in a turn-based game.
Capitalism DOES do this all the time, but bankruptcy is the safeguard against this among private companies in a capitalist system. If your outputs are not more valuable than your inputs over a long enough period of time, you will be bankrupt.
There is no such safeguard among publicly run, financed, incented, funded, etc companies or organizations. Their outputs can remain less valuable than their inputs over an indefinite period of time.
That’s a bit cynical to view every corporate action through that lens. There’s certainly the innovator’s dilemma, and plenty of busy work, but to your Google example, plenty of tasks and developments are needed to keep the thing running.
Detect and counter black hat SEO, build or acquire a new product you can spread ads to (Maps, YouTube), create a chatbot that can eventually get ads if search is supplanted. These things support or maintain that monopoly/equilibrium you’re talking about.
>Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.
This isn't the case at all.
Obama HAD a deal with Iran that Trump tanked in his first term. Israel did not have to respond to a terrorist attack with genocide. Trump could have said No to Netanyahu who clearly threatened to attack Iran with or without us, it turns out we could indeed put pressure on them not to attack, but TACO.
Everything that's happening in the middle east is a series of blunders by fools.
And on the flip side, Iran could choose not to pursue a nuke and violate the NPT. Hamas could choose not to kill 800-some civilians and take 250 hostages, etc.
Iran has said that it's working on nuclear energy, not a bomb. Their pope-level religious leader said it was haram to have nuclear weapons. I know you can't necessarily trust Iran's word, but can you trust Israel's?
There is ZERO serious questioning that Iran was working on developing nuclear weapons. It is abundantly clear that they were. How actively and to what extent in recent years is a matter of some debate but in general they absolutely have had a serious weapons program.
I've never received any answer to the question "what legitimate non-military use is there for a 60%-plus enriched uranium?"
The nuclear reactors can provide free electricity out of 2-5% enriched uranium, the naval propulsion (like for ... nuclear icebreakers for the Straits of Hormuz, I dunno?) needs 8-10% enriched.
It doesn't matter what they say, or what their leaders say -- there is only one use for 60%+ enriched uranium known to the science, and it's military (the atomic bomb).
Fast neutron reactors / breeder reactors need I'm not exactly sure but something like 20% but they can use very highly enriched. Naval reactors can use very highly enriched for longer fuel service life, it's not necessary but they can and it has benefits.
The US and Russia in slightly better days were burning off their excessive amounts of stockpiled enriched uranium and plutonium in fast neutron reactors just to get rid of it as part of a mutual drawdown of stockpiles – not at all necessary but can definitely be used.
Small amounts for research reactors, medical isotope production and the like is an argument.
Those are the possible uses but it's just thinly veiled BS when a country like Iran has 60% enriched uranium for civilian power projects. The only actual reason to stockpile it like that is so you can spout nonsense about its purpose while only being a short distance away from enriching it to weapons grade.
why would Iran not make a nuke when America keeps bombing countries that don't have nukes, and avoids bombing countries that have nukes (most notably North Korea)? They have all the incentives to have a nuke so they'll stop getting bombed. Obama negotiated to avoid this but Trump ripped it up and bombed them, so they're definitely not going to trust any agreements with the west ever again. From their perspective, their only path to not getting bombed to shit involves having several nukes. It's quite rational for them to do that.
I chose not to up- or downvote your reply. I disagree that the comment above adds nothing to the conversation. It adds historical context that otherwise may not be apparent to the current generation who must grow up and deal with the problems that ignoring the past has created and will continue to create.
I'm a bit older than a lot of y'all and I grew up reading stories on the founding of Israel, the true stories of the holocaust written by those who witnessed and experienced the horrors first-hand, etc. All of these books that I read were written from the Israeli perspective for an American or western audience in order to inform people who had no concept of the depths of depravity that a modern industrialized society could allow themselves to be dragged into.
The information and the stories related steered my own opinions and feelings towards supporting Israel in the wars and other significant events that have happened during my own lifetime - 1967 Six Day War, 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1978 Camp David Accords, 1982 Israeli intervention in Lebanon, 1983 US Marine Barracks bombing and the fallout from that, and all the bullshit conflicts since.
I was able to follow these things as a kid and later a teen into adulthood because my parents maintained a book club subscription that was regularly improved by addition of new, current books on many subjects. As kids we were encouraged to select books for the collection and to read them when they were delivered.
Knowledge is power. By ignoring the historical context you are effectively censoring events that did happen and whose repercussions still resonate in the region.
You should not cherry-pick your own version of history. That is effectively propaganda, a tool used by authoritarians to indoctrinate. The original books that I read were written from the Israeli perspective in order to gain international influence. There were no novels or historical biographies of Arab leaders or of the region that were written in the context of providing historical background information that would help someone in the west understand the situation from the Arab perspective. To get that you needed to read newspapers and magazines, which I also did. Over time I began to understand just how complex everything is in the region and how constant support, especially from the United States, paid for the Israeli side of every conflict and situation.
For anyone to support Israel's current leadership in what can only be described as a genocide on the same level employed against Jews by the Nazis or the US Cavalry against Native American tribes is wrong.
Perhaps you should read a book about genocide and the origin of the term. I recommend the excellent book:
Samantha Power: A Problem from Hell - America and the Age of Genocide[0]
Sadat and Begin showed a path forward if other players had the courage to follow. Too bad that it took thousands of deaths on all sides and nearly 50 years and huge financial incentives and arms deals to bring others into agreement that living as neighbors in the same region requires some level of cooperation in order to guarantee mutual survival. Unfortunately the current players simply picked a common enemy and focused their efforts on destroying that enemy so that they could control the resources of the region.
I hope you agree that this comment has added something useful to the conversation.
The Arab States post-1948 genocide of indigenous middle eastern Jews has been far more complete than Israel's genocide of Muslims. There are almost zero indigenous middle eastern Jews left in the Arab states, vs two million Muslims living in Israel (20% of Israel's population).
>I hope you agree that this comment has added something useful to the conversation.
No. It's a distraction. If every time the middle east is discussed people have to argue about the last century or two millennia of conflict, nothing at all will actually be discussed. If every time someone uses the term genocide, there has to be a whole thread about "well actually" and some wildly expanded context, nothing will ever be discussed. People, in their attempts to be more morally correct going around nitpicking somebody's language are not assisting in understanding.
Your context adds nothing to what was being discussed. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with it, I'm just saying it's not helpful to expand every mention to the entire damn history of a thing.
Sure, people should know more history, but every thread devolving into a group of people insisting this point or that can't be made without mentioning a whole pile of history... nothing at all will ever get discussed.
The metaphoric meaning of being under “Zugzwang” in German is very similar to “forcing someone’s hand”, from the perspective of the one whose hand is being forced. It means being forced to act, as opposed to not taking action.
While normal Go allows passing one's turn, and thus has no zugzwang,
there is a No Pass Go variant [1] that forbids passing, where the
first player in zugzwang loses the game.
In MTG control decks and a subset of that, prison decks are the prime and extreme example of that. Especially something like Lantern Control. It's not about winning, it's about trapping your opponent _not able to_ win.
Interestingly, many people will refer to zugzwang when one player only has losing moves and would love to skip their turn altogether, but that's not zugzwang. As a non-example of zugzwang, consider the position with White having a Kb6 and Rc6, and Black just has Kb8. When White moves 1. Rc5, killing a move, Black has no choice but to move 1...Ka8 followed by 2. Rc8#. However, Black is not in zugzwang, because the position is not mutually bad for either player. As a true example of zugzwang, consider the example where White has a Kf5, pawn on e4, Black has a Kd4 and pawn on e5. Now this position is zugzwang because whichever player has to make the next move loses defense of their pawn and with it, the game. For instance, if it's White to move, the game could continue 1. Kf6 Ke4 2. Kg5 Kf3 3. Kf5 e4 and Black will simply march his e-pawn to the 1st rank, promote to a Queen, and checkmate shortly after.
"There are three types of chess positions: either none, one, or both of the players would be at a disadvantage if it were their turn to move. The great majority of positions are of the first type. In chess literature, most writers call positions of the second type zugzwang, and the third type reciprocal zugzwang or mutual zugzwang. "
The Wikipedia article goes on to say that other authors describe the second type as a "squeeze" -- I think Kemp uses that term -- and only the mutual or reciprocal kind as a true "zugzwang". I can't remember if it was GM Edmar Mednis or IM Rafael Klovsky who told me many years ago that it's only the mutual scenario that qualifies as a "true" zugzwang, but I'm pretty sure it was one or both of them. Either way, the subject has divided chess authors almost since inception of the term in the first place. You can see the Wikipedia article on Immortal Zugzwang, for instance, which is one of the earliest famous examples of "zugzwang" and is featured in Nimzovitch's classic treatise "My System", and at the same time, many other famous players like IM Andy Soltis and others disagreed with the use of the term for that game.
A great article with some really beautiful examples of zugzwang is: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/zugzwang.html. There's a very nice discussion at the end as well of a disagreement along just these lines as to what truly constitutes zugzwang, between Hooper and Myers.
A president fundamentally has to try and please two competing groups, the rich lobbyists and the general population. Whatever he does for one, the other will dislike. Nowadays, the rich disliking you as a politician has much more weight, the population has no teeth compared to them.
I wonder if there's any relation to the strategy of the Gish gallop or Flood the Zone where you overwhelm your opponent with arguments that they have to engage in. Technically, you don't have to engage in the arguments, but the sheer volume can make it seem like you're losing if you don't.
Go is a turn based game without this feature (or bug?) because you aren't forced to move, you can instead pass. Both players passing in a row implies neither player thinks they can improve their position and the game ends.
I think zugzwang makes chess endgames richer - the fewer ways you can make a draw, the better, in my opinion. Maybe that's less appealing in go because games can go on for so much longer? At least in 19x19.
It's kind of an illusion when you think about it. "Whose turn it is" is an inseparable part of the game state. If any move makes the game state worse this turn, then the game state was already bad before this turn.
You can infer the game state from way before a zugzwang is played out on the board, and if you're on the losing side of the eventual zugzwang, it's normal to resign.
But if you were allowed to pass your turn, and both players see the draw coming because of a forced repetition, they'll just call it a draw before it even plays out. So the game would play out differently from the same position, if that rule existed. Essentially changing the way you would evaluate any given position.
I recently happened upon a comment (not on HN) that seemed to treat 'zugzwang' as a synonym for 'deadlock'. Possibly because 'zugzwang' sounds really cool and makes your inner voice sound intelligent to your inner ear.
More accurately, it’s being forced to move a specific piece despite disadvantages, because not moving it would result in an even worse outcome — as opposed to moving a different piece that you’d otherwise prefer to move. So it means being forced to move that first piece instead of not moving it (instead of moving a different piece).
And that’s the generalized meaning in German, being forced to act with respect to a specific thing, where you’d normally prefer to keep it in its current state.
You run out of time on your clock. If you press your clock without moving, the opponent will alert the referee to sort you out. And if you play without a clock, your opponent will get annoyed at you taking forever to move.
It's more like a situation where you should avoid doing anything. A player in zugzwang who does anything, loses. In chess, it's a position where a player would skip their turn if that option was available, but the rules forbid it, so they're forced to make a move that hurts them.
[edit: Edited to make it clearer that there are cases where only one player is in zugzwang]
Differences being Zugzwang explicitly doesn’t allow a non-move, and I guess assumes a zero sum game? Whereas a Xanatos Gabmit is flexible enough to accommodate both non-moves, and a non-zero-sum setting.
Either way, for your opponent, all roads lead to ruin.
In old-school chess AIs, zugzwang is also of interest because it can break null-move pruning[0], which is a way to prune the search tree. "Null move" just means "skip your turn", and the assumption that skipping your turn is always worse than the optimal move. But in zugzwang positions, that assumption is wrong, so you have to avoid doing null-move pruning.
Stockfish's heuristic for "risk of zugzwang" is basically "only kings and pawns left over", alongside logic for "is null-move pruning even useful right now" [1]:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-move_heuristic[1]: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/1a882ef...
Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.
More relevant to a business site, this is the situation many large corporations find themselves in. Say you're Google and you own an immensely profitable monopoly. The very best thing you can do is nothing; anything you do risks upsetting the delicate competitive equilibrium that you're winning. If you're an executive, how do you do nothing? You can't very well hire thousands of employees to do nothing and pay them to do it. But if you don't have thousands of employees, and your job is doing nothing, how do you justify the millions that they're paying you?
The strategy many executives use is to set different parts of their organization at odds with each other, so that they each create busywork that other employees must do. Everybody is fully utilized, and yet in the big picture nothing changes. Oftentimes they will create big strategic initiatives that are tangential to the golden goose, spending billions on boondoggles that don't actually do anything, because the whole point is to do nothing while seeming like you need thousands of people to do it. And the whole reason for that is because most people are very bad at sitting still, and so if you didn't pay them a whole lot to do nothing useful, the useful stuff they'd be doing would be trying to compete with and unseat you. (You can also see this in the billion dollar paydays that entrepreneurs get when they mount a credible threat of unseating the giant incumbent.)
If you would lose even if you didn't move, that is not zugzwang. Zugzwang is when, because you must move per the rules of the game, you lose. I don't really see that dynamic in foreign policy. Any country has the option of maintaining its current policy. Whether or not it's wise, the option exists.
Geopolitically, the no-action move is rarely unavailable. The motivation to do something rash like start a war out of the blue is often down to the decision of a single person. That leader may have political reasons to do it but they aren’t being forced to do it, as they would in a turn-based game.
Two teams, one digs holes, the other one fills holes. Maybe an advice by Keynes during the Great Depression.
people mock communism for this, but capitalism also does it all the time
Capitalism DOES do this all the time, but bankruptcy is the safeguard against this among private companies in a capitalist system. If your outputs are not more valuable than your inputs over a long enough period of time, you will be bankrupt.
There is no such safeguard among publicly run, financed, incented, funded, etc companies or organizations. Their outputs can remain less valuable than their inputs over an indefinite period of time.
That’s a bit cynical to view every corporate action through that lens. There’s certainly the innovator’s dilemma, and plenty of busy work, but to your Google example, plenty of tasks and developments are needed to keep the thing running.
Detect and counter black hat SEO, build or acquire a new product you can spread ads to (Maps, YouTube), create a chatbot that can eventually get ads if search is supplanted. These things support or maintain that monopoly/equilibrium you’re talking about.
>Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.
This isn't the case at all.
Obama HAD a deal with Iran that Trump tanked in his first term. Israel did not have to respond to a terrorist attack with genocide. Trump could have said No to Netanyahu who clearly threatened to attack Iran with or without us, it turns out we could indeed put pressure on them not to attack, but TACO.
Everything that's happening in the middle east is a series of blunders by fools.
And on the flip side, Iran could choose not to pursue a nuke and violate the NPT. Hamas could choose not to kill 800-some civilians and take 250 hostages, etc.
That nuke they are apparently working has been just around the corner for over 30 years according to Israeli propaganda.
> And on the flip side, Iran could choose not to pursue a nuke and violate the NPT.
Because MAD is the only way to scare away the world's bully.
Iran has said that it's working on nuclear energy, not a bomb. Their pope-level religious leader said it was haram to have nuclear weapons. I know you can't necessarily trust Iran's word, but can you trust Israel's?
There is ZERO serious questioning that Iran was working on developing nuclear weapons. It is abundantly clear that they were. How actively and to what extent in recent years is a matter of some debate but in general they absolutely have had a serious weapons program.
I'd be very interested in the sources for your ZERO ?
I've never received any answer to the question "what legitimate non-military use is there for a 60%-plus enriched uranium?"
The nuclear reactors can provide free electricity out of 2-5% enriched uranium, the naval propulsion (like for ... nuclear icebreakers for the Straits of Hormuz, I dunno?) needs 8-10% enriched.
It doesn't matter what they say, or what their leaders say -- there is only one use for 60%+ enriched uranium known to the science, and it's military (the atomic bomb).
Fast neutron reactors / breeder reactors need I'm not exactly sure but something like 20% but they can use very highly enriched. Naval reactors can use very highly enriched for longer fuel service life, it's not necessary but they can and it has benefits.
The US and Russia in slightly better days were burning off their excessive amounts of stockpiled enriched uranium and plutonium in fast neutron reactors just to get rid of it as part of a mutual drawdown of stockpiles – not at all necessary but can definitely be used.
Small amounts for research reactors, medical isotope production and the like is an argument.
Those are the possible uses but it's just thinly veiled BS when a country like Iran has 60% enriched uranium for civilian power projects. The only actual reason to stockpile it like that is so you can spout nonsense about its purpose while only being a short distance away from enriching it to weapons grade.
Certainly, I was only talking about one side of the conflict, the errors in our own house.
why would Iran not make a nuke when America keeps bombing countries that don't have nukes, and avoids bombing countries that have nukes (most notably North Korea)? They have all the incentives to have a nuke so they'll stop getting bombed. Obama negotiated to avoid this but Trump ripped it up and bombed them, so they're definitely not going to trust any agreements with the west ever again. From their perspective, their only path to not getting bombed to shit involves having several nukes. It's quite rational for them to do that.
Small correction: Israel has been doing a genocide continually since 1948 - it didn't start in 2023.
Stop. "No, but actually it's this!" oneupsmanship does not add to the conversation.
I chose not to up- or downvote your reply. I disagree that the comment above adds nothing to the conversation. It adds historical context that otherwise may not be apparent to the current generation who must grow up and deal with the problems that ignoring the past has created and will continue to create.
I'm a bit older than a lot of y'all and I grew up reading stories on the founding of Israel, the true stories of the holocaust written by those who witnessed and experienced the horrors first-hand, etc. All of these books that I read were written from the Israeli perspective for an American or western audience in order to inform people who had no concept of the depths of depravity that a modern industrialized society could allow themselves to be dragged into.
The information and the stories related steered my own opinions and feelings towards supporting Israel in the wars and other significant events that have happened during my own lifetime - 1967 Six Day War, 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1978 Camp David Accords, 1982 Israeli intervention in Lebanon, 1983 US Marine Barracks bombing and the fallout from that, and all the bullshit conflicts since.
I was able to follow these things as a kid and later a teen into adulthood because my parents maintained a book club subscription that was regularly improved by addition of new, current books on many subjects. As kids we were encouraged to select books for the collection and to read them when they were delivered.
Knowledge is power. By ignoring the historical context you are effectively censoring events that did happen and whose repercussions still resonate in the region.
You should not cherry-pick your own version of history. That is effectively propaganda, a tool used by authoritarians to indoctrinate. The original books that I read were written from the Israeli perspective in order to gain international influence. There were no novels or historical biographies of Arab leaders or of the region that were written in the context of providing historical background information that would help someone in the west understand the situation from the Arab perspective. To get that you needed to read newspapers and magazines, which I also did. Over time I began to understand just how complex everything is in the region and how constant support, especially from the United States, paid for the Israeli side of every conflict and situation.
For anyone to support Israel's current leadership in what can only be described as a genocide on the same level employed against Jews by the Nazis or the US Cavalry against Native American tribes is wrong.
Perhaps you should read a book about genocide and the origin of the term. I recommend the excellent book:
Samantha Power: A Problem from Hell - America and the Age of Genocide[0]
Sadat and Begin showed a path forward if other players had the courage to follow. Too bad that it took thousands of deaths on all sides and nearly 50 years and huge financial incentives and arms deals to bring others into agreement that living as neighbors in the same region requires some level of cooperation in order to guarantee mutual survival. Unfortunately the current players simply picked a common enemy and focused their efforts on destroying that enemy so that they could control the resources of the region.
I hope you agree that this comment has added something useful to the conversation.
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368731._A_Problem_from_H...
The Arab States post-1948 genocide of indigenous middle eastern Jews has been far more complete than Israel's genocide of Muslims. There are almost zero indigenous middle eastern Jews left in the Arab states, vs two million Muslims living in Israel (20% of Israel's population).
>I hope you agree that this comment has added something useful to the conversation.
No. It's a distraction. If every time the middle east is discussed people have to argue about the last century or two millennia of conflict, nothing at all will actually be discussed. If every time someone uses the term genocide, there has to be a whole thread about "well actually" and some wildly expanded context, nothing will ever be discussed. People, in their attempts to be more morally correct going around nitpicking somebody's language are not assisting in understanding.
Your context adds nothing to what was being discussed. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with it, I'm just saying it's not helpful to expand every mention to the entire damn history of a thing.
Sure, people should know more history, but every thread devolving into a group of people insisting this point or that can't be made without mentioning a whole pile of history... nothing at all will ever get discussed.
The metaphoric meaning of being under “Zugzwang” in German is very similar to “forcing someone’s hand”, from the perspective of the one whose hand is being forced. It means being forced to act, as opposed to not taking action.
Yeah, and I find it pretty interesting that the meanings are not 100% congruent.
They are congruent in the sense of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988365.
While normal Go allows passing one's turn, and thus has no zugzwang, there is a No Pass Go variant [1] that forbids passing, where the first player in zugzwang loses the game.
[1] https://senseis.xmp.net/?NoPassGo
"... and a player without a legal play loses..."
That's more like stalemate, not zugzwang.
Edit: Pardon my idiocy. Stalemate is obviously not a loss in chess. So I guess that no-pass go is like neither of these things.
In zugzwang you have legal moves - just none are good for you and all lead to a loss given perfect play.
In MTG control decks and a subset of that, prison decks are the prime and extreme example of that. Especially something like Lantern Control. It's not about winning, it's about trapping your opponent _not able to_ win.
Interestingly, many people will refer to zugzwang when one player only has losing moves and would love to skip their turn altogether, but that's not zugzwang. As a non-example of zugzwang, consider the position with White having a Kb6 and Rc6, and Black just has Kb8. When White moves 1. Rc5, killing a move, Black has no choice but to move 1...Ka8 followed by 2. Rc8#. However, Black is not in zugzwang, because the position is not mutually bad for either player. As a true example of zugzwang, consider the example where White has a Kf5, pawn on e4, Black has a Kd4 and pawn on e5. Now this position is zugzwang because whichever player has to make the next move loses defense of their pawn and with it, the game. For instance, if it's White to move, the game could continue 1. Kf6 Ke4 2. Kg5 Kf3 3. Kf5 e4 and Black will simply march his e-pawn to the 1st rank, promote to a Queen, and checkmate shortly after.
Wikipedia disagrees:
"There are three types of chess positions: either none, one, or both of the players would be at a disadvantage if it were their turn to move. The great majority of positions are of the first type. In chess literature, most writers call positions of the second type zugzwang, and the third type reciprocal zugzwang or mutual zugzwang. "
You're talking about mutual zugzwang
The Wikipedia article goes on to say that other authors describe the second type as a "squeeze" -- I think Kemp uses that term -- and only the mutual or reciprocal kind as a true "zugzwang". I can't remember if it was GM Edmar Mednis or IM Rafael Klovsky who told me many years ago that it's only the mutual scenario that qualifies as a "true" zugzwang, but I'm pretty sure it was one or both of them. Either way, the subject has divided chess authors almost since inception of the term in the first place. You can see the Wikipedia article on Immortal Zugzwang, for instance, which is one of the earliest famous examples of "zugzwang" and is featured in Nimzovitch's classic treatise "My System", and at the same time, many other famous players like IM Andy Soltis and others disagreed with the use of the term for that game.
A great article with some really beautiful examples of zugzwang is: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/zugzwang.html. There's a very nice discussion at the end as well of a disagreement along just these lines as to what truly constitutes zugzwang, between Hooper and Myers.
Would it be a fair analogy that the president is in a constant state of Zugzwang - ever subsequent move he makes only ends up making things worse.
A president fundamentally has to try and please two competing groups, the rich lobbyists and the general population. Whatever he does for one, the other will dislike. Nowadays, the rich disliking you as a politician has much more weight, the population has no teeth compared to them.
Zwischenzug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug) is also a good one and is equivalent to intermezzo as an "in-between move"
i feel like Musk does it on a daily basis with all the heavy artillery he has on the board
I wonder if there's any relation to the strategy of the Gish gallop or Flood the Zone where you overwhelm your opponent with arguments that they have to engage in. Technically, you don't have to engage in the arguments, but the sheer volume can make it seem like you're losing if you don't.
Go is a turn based game without this feature (or bug?) because you aren't forced to move, you can instead pass. Both players passing in a row implies neither player thinks they can improve their position and the game ends.
I think zugzwang makes chess endgames richer - the fewer ways you can make a draw, the better, in my opinion. Maybe that's less appealing in go because games can go on for so much longer? At least in 19x19.
It's kind of an illusion when you think about it. "Whose turn it is" is an inseparable part of the game state. If any move makes the game state worse this turn, then the game state was already bad before this turn.
You can infer the game state from way before a zugzwang is played out on the board, and if you're on the losing side of the eventual zugzwang, it's normal to resign.
But if you were allowed to pass your turn, and both players see the draw coming because of a forced repetition, they'll just call it a draw before it even plays out. So the game would play out differently from the same position, if that rule existed. Essentially changing the way you would evaluate any given position.
It's not necessarily an illusion. If chess is solved and it turns out white wins with perfect play, black's first move is zugzwang.
Source? Because I'm pretty sure it's not closed and Wikipedia seems to agree with me:
"No complete solution for chess in either of the two senses is known, nor is it expected that chess will be solved in the near future (if ever)".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess
If chess is solved and white wins, black is always in Zugzwang. We might not know.
I recently happened upon a comment (not on HN) that seemed to treat 'zugzwang' as a synonym for 'deadlock'. Possibly because 'zugzwang' sounds really cool and makes your inner voice sound intelligent to your inner ear.
The difference to a deadlock is that a deadlock is a inability to move, the zugzwang is an obligation to move.
An obligation to move to your disadvantage.
The disadvantage is the fact that you're obligated to move. The outcome of the move is not determined though.
“Any legal move will worsen their position”, so the outcome of your move is determined to be inherently negative.
More accurately, it’s being forced to move a specific piece despite disadvantages, because not moving it would result in an even worse outcome — as opposed to moving a different piece that you’d otherwise prefer to move. So it means being forced to move that first piece instead of not moving it (instead of moving a different piece).
And that’s the generalized meaning in German, being forced to act with respect to a specific thing, where you’d normally prefer to keep it in its current state.
What happens if you don't move in chess? Honest question.
You run out of time on your clock. If you press your clock without moving, the opponent will alert the referee to sort you out. And if you play without a clock, your opponent will get annoyed at you taking forever to move.
The word has it's use outside the chess world though and there it is as I wrote it.
Do corporations get drawn to AI from a compulsion to make a move addressing it?
"Fear of missing out"
Sounds like a quagmire.
It's more like a situation where you should avoid doing anything. A player in zugzwang who does anything, loses. In chess, it's a position where a player would skip their turn if that option was available, but the rules forbid it, so they're forced to make a move that hurts them.
[edit: Edited to make it clearer that there are cases where only one player is in zugzwang]
"Sometimes the best way to win is to not play at all"
The only way to win is not to play.
Not playing is a losing move.
Unless the game is global thermonuclear war.
I've led the horse to water.
This is an article about chess.
How about a nice game of chess?
One of the pieces in chess looks like a horse. Checkmate.
Sounds a bit like a Xanatos Gambit
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit
Differences being Zugzwang explicitly doesn’t allow a non-move, and I guess assumes a zero sum game? Whereas a Xanatos Gabmit is flexible enough to accommodate both non-moves, and a non-zero-sum setting.
Either way, for your opponent, all roads lead to ruin.