shōgi

Japanese shō (将) meant a general or commander; gi (棋) meant a board game with pieces. Shogi means 'the game of generals.' The game descended from Indian chaturanga, the ancestor of chess, through the Silk Road transmission that produced Persian shatranj, Arabic chess, and eventually European chess. A Japanese variant appears in records from the 12th century; the modern rules with the captured-piece reuse rule were established by the 16th century.

The captured-piece rule — in shogi, a captured opponent's piece becomes your piece and can be dropped back on the board — fundamentally changes the game's character. There are no draws in shogi (pieces never disappear permanently), the material balance can shift suddenly, and defense is vastly more difficult because attacks can materialize from pieces held in hand. This makes shogi tactically richer and harder to draw than chess.

The professional shogi system in Japan developed in the Edo period under Tokugawa patronage. Three families — the Ohashi, Ito, and Itahashi houses — held hereditary monopolies on professional shogi instruction. After the Meiji Restoration, the Japan Shogi Association formalized professional competition. Today there are nine professional ranks, and the best players are national celebrities.

Artificial intelligence mastered shogi before chess: the computer program Bonkrasu defeated the top human player in 2017. AlphaZero — DeepMind's general AI — achieved superhuman shogi, chess, and Go performance from self-play in 2017. The generals' game became one of the benchmarks of machine intelligence.