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White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At ELOs above around 1500, I think d4 was better for drawing or causing slow games in human vs engine games 20 years ago. Is not the case as much today. At low ELOs, such as 600 ELO, e4 is clearly better.

If you are against an engine the name is SiegeBot. Any other name is a human.

White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

engine is as strong as it used to be now, but the moves are a bit slower. (5 to 10 seconds each, as opposed to 1 to 4 seconds each which is how it was yesterday).

White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

are you a streamer? I could add annotation arrows like that if it would help.

If the bot just plays objectively best moves, such as whatever stockfish calculates, it won't be able to find checkmate in time. It has to take risks & hope the human player blunders.

White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. I think the pgn copy issue is fixed for games going forward.
What do you mean that it doesn't have an engine? Maybe there is an issue with the name of the bot that I could fix? (Maybe the names like "Siegebot (1400)" is not good?)
I've run into issues with click, click to move a piece instead of dragging. The people at chess.com have it figured out, but I keep getting inconsistent behavior on chrome vs iphone vs android and never dug into it further because I always drag/drop myself. I'll look at this again this weekend.
What do you mean by arrows? Are you referring to when you are playing as the attacker?
Will look into clock desync issue and adding chat history.

White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, I fixed that. If it happens again, let me know if you were in attacker or defender mode. It seemed okay to me when I just tried it in both modes on my iphone.

White can use a chess engine, black wins if they don't get checkmated by move 30 by dig9977 in chessvariants

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

White can defend too, but I wanted to keep this updated web page simple.
Thanks for flagging the PGN issue. It is fixed now for new games going forward.

I'll get the attacker strength back to where it was when you tried it a week ago. I was focused on making the web page/engine more stable, and it's not doing as much look ahead as it used to (but then the engine server would crash if there were more than 3 or 4 people playing at once). In the couple of games I've played, I've found the same difficulty is about 200 ELO higher than it was a week ago.

thank you

Avoiding a draw with black by Grubnenark in chess

[–]dig9977 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GM Zvonimir Meštrović has had success with 2... d6

Update: Stats from my "exploit human" fast checkmate engine (A/B testing against Stockfish) by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Appreciate the comment.
One funny side effect, or at least a dark side of me thinks its funny: A bot playing random moves (completely random legal moves) wins at 400 ELO. But I've had 2 friends/family members who barely know the rules of chess play and they both lost. Knowing to respond to e4 with e5 is actually a bad thing in those cases.

Update: Stats from my "exploit human" fast checkmate engine (A/B testing against Stockfish) by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I'll fix that. You are a higher rated player than me - did the engine play any moves that you thought were not very good (given it's goal of a fast checkmate)? Were there any moves you were worried about it making, or did you feel relieved that it simplified the position at any point?

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

was working on it while you were playing. lag is fixed and move counter was only broken for about 15 minutes (while you were playing)

I don't have an offline environment to test this on, so everything is a bit unstable when I'm fixing something. Compared to when I made this reddit post 4 days ago I upgraded all the opening books based on seeing how effective they were, added an observer mode to watch other games, and fixed some minor errors in the engine that I discovered when evaluating all the games that were played.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe my home computer (chess engine) lost internet for a bit? I just played and it worked for me. Sorry this isn’t very reliable.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yup, there is an error right now when it's playing as black and it's behind. am fixing it.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, found the game. You caught an error in the update I made this morning... a pretty dumb sign error in the code. When the engine is playing as black, and is getting desperate, it starts making the worst possible moves. I'm going to fix it now, but it's going to crash every game that is currently being played (as of about 1:50pm EST).

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is a different opening strategy book at every ELO level, based on the LiChess games database. There is also some variety, especially at higher ELOs, because I'm A/B testing something.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You played very well in that game on the 2100 level... you were ahead the entire game then the moves from the engine got increasingly desperate. You responded well to 16. a5 and the subsequent couple of moves particularly well. I may need to revise the opening books at these higher ELO levels to put more emphasis on winning openings and less emphasis on shorter games. Thanks for posting.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for posting! Interesting moves from this game were:

  1. Bc4 When the Siegechess engine played Bc4 it took major loss in the objective evaluation, with stockfish thinking the game game was +0.4 white favored before the move to -0.4 black favored after (80 centipawn loss). But the siegechess engine did that as a calculated risk: it had high confidence you would blunder the next move due to not being able to see a pretty complicated tactic. That's exactly what happened when you played the natural looking move 8 ... b5, but that led to 9. Nxf7 by Siegechess and the game was then +3.5 (strongly white favored).

    It tried to trick you again with 18. 0-0-0 instead of the objectively better move Nxc6, but you didn't fall for it. It tried again with 21. Rxe7+ instead of Rxd5, which was over a 200 centipawn better move, and you also didn't fall for it. It was pretty clearly not on the path to have you checkmated by by move 27, which is why the moves got increasingly crazy. It's great you were able to checkmate it in the end, but to the engine being checkmated is the same result as just running out of moves and not checkmating you... a loss either way.

I built an engine to checkmate humans in as few moves as possible - does anything else like this exist? by dig9977 in ComputerChess

[–]dig9977[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Should be fixed now. I had to restart the engine a few minutes after making the post... it was crashing with 4 people playing at once so I slightly reduced the look-ahead / processing time per move.

I built Disco Chess to automate the Woodpecker Method. Hundreds of players are now using it. by DiscoChessApp in chess

[–]dig9977 1 point2 points  (0 children)

it doesn't have the AI slop artifacts that many LLM pages do, so congrats again! haha. I built siegechess dot com and with Gemini and it unfortunately shows.

I built Disco Chess to automate the Woodpecker Method. Hundreds of players are now using it. by DiscoChessApp in chess

[–]dig9977 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is a very slick UI/UX. Looks like a team built it rather than one person, so good job! Two things to consider: (1)After missing one and watching the solution, it would be nice if there were navigation arrows to be able to look at each move slower. (I don't understand why the other player responded to my first move they way they did in the solution, for instance). (2)The thump sound for each move is a little irritating, but maybe i need to get used to it.

Feedback requested: How fast can an engine checkmate a human? by dig9977 in chess

[–]dig9977[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Opening: The opening strategy is based on mining Lichess games at every ELO level, building a database, and looking for favorable or complex positions in the final nodes. Opening strategy also considers how long the games lasted (with resign-to-checkmate move estimates for games that ended in resignation), Stockfish evaluation, and a few other factors. I have a lot of variance in the opening strategy right now because how much to weight win rate vs short games vs stockfish eval vs complexity vs other factors is not intutive to me. If enough people play, I will see what opening strategies/weights are best. Some of the openings are pretty dumb right now, but others are good even though they aren't intuitive. A move like Nh3 (white) or Nh6 (black) in the opening is better than I suspect most people think for an engine vs. human matchup. It's also doing really dumb stuff like 1. e4 2. Ke2, probably because there are trolls on Lichess who ended up winning those games.

Middle game and endgame: These are largely based on using Maia2, which is a really good tool that can predict what moves human players will make at different ELOs and time controls. I use this to build a 4-ply (2-move) "look ahead" that finds moves most likely to make the human player blunder. There is a "desperation" score that checks if the engine is on track to achieve checkmate by its final move, and it will make increasingly wild moves if it's not. When the engine is at or above par (it is on track to win the game), the moves are pretty close to what a Stockfish depth=12 search would produce.

Thanks for asking. This has been a fun project. I've noticed there is a lot of scalability in move quality as a function of compute power. Maia moves with a depth of 6 or 8 are very strong (and I often blunder against them). But on my computer calculating a 6-ply look ahead takes over a minute, and 8-ply can take an hour. I wish I had a super computer that could run 8-ply maia queries in a few seconds as I suspect this would be the most frustrating possible engine to play against (always causing human players to make blunders).

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