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We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool. There are t

We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool. There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life! We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best parts of chess apps into the real world?” So we did! A camera passes a feed of the board through our machine learning model which interprets the state of the board and passes it off to Stockfish to display move suggestions in real time. We didn’t quite get to recording the state over time in PGN but we hope to continue this project and add that soon! Would love to know what you think. We’re working on enhancing other board games with computer vision as well; if you want to help us beta test sign up at https://boardboss.com https://boardboss.com Also I live tweeted about our progress during the hackathon so if you’re interested in how the sausage is made you can check out the blow-by-blow here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179424684502388736.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179424684502388736.html

psuter 7y ago
Congrats! We tried something similar a few years ago (also at the TC Disrupt Hackathon [1]), but had to take a lot of shortcuts to get to something working. I'm impressed you had the time to train a proper model (we went with old school CV hacks). Looking forward to seeing what BoardBoss could become. These days I've been wanting a CV app to track backgammon games. Those dice can be pretty tiny though :) [1] https://devpost.com/software/chesseye https://devpost.com/software/chesseye
- yeldarb 7y ago
  Thanks! ML tools have definitely come a long way in the past few years! We used CreateML for our first pass which is great for prototyping; you just give it your training data and hit go. Unfortunately it’s not particularly transparent or tweakable. If it doesn’t do the job well enough you you’re out of luck and have to switch to another tool completely. Edit: cool project!
- rocauc 7y ago
  Great minds! Love that you deployed to a Pi – I’ve thought about the same to complement or replace smartphones. Can you shed some insight into your ML process? One thing we did to simplify the vision problem is capture images from the same perspective (hence our tripod). We labeled 2894 objects across 292 images. We had 12 objects to detect: each piece for black and white. We struggled with occlusion, especially if a pawn is behind a queen.
  - psuter 7y ago
    I described some of the process in a previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567549 There is also a presentation we had prepared for an informal talk: https://github.com/chesseye/chesseye/blob/master/presentation/slides/slides.pdf https://github.com/chesseye/chesseye/blob/master/presentatio... Hope this helps! I always enjoy talking about these things, so feel free to reach out if you want to discuss it more.

psuter 7y ago

Congrats! We tried something similar a few years ago (also at the TC Disrupt Hackathon [1]), but had to take a lot of shortcuts to get to something working. I'm impressed you had the time to train a proper model (we went with old school CV hacks). Looking forward to seeing what BoardBoss could become. These days I've been wanting a CV app to track backgammon games. Those dice can be pretty tiny though :) [1] https://devpost.com/software/chesseye https://devpost.com/software/chesseye

yeldarb 7y ago
Thanks! ML tools have definitely come a long way in the past few years! We used CreateML for our first pass which is great for prototyping; you just give it your training data and hit go. Unfortunately it’s not particularly transparent or tweakable. If it doesn’t do the job well enough you you’re out of luck and have to switch to another tool completely. Edit: cool project!
rocauc 7y ago
Great minds! Love that you deployed to a Pi – I’ve thought about the same to complement or replace smartphones. Can you shed some insight into your ML process? One thing we did to simplify the vision problem is capture images from the same perspective (hence our tripod). We labeled 2894 objects across 292 images. We had 12 objects to detect: each piece for black and white. We struggled with occlusion, especially if a pawn is behind a queen.
- psuter 7y ago
  I described some of the process in a previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567549 There is also a presentation we had prepared for an informal talk: https://github.com/chesseye/chesseye/blob/master/presentation/slides/slides.pdf https://github.com/chesseye/chesseye/blob/master/presentatio... Hope this helps! I always enjoy talking about these things, so feel free to reach out if you want to discuss it more.