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Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I ma

Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.

hyperbolablabla 24d ago
Wouldn't be that hard in my case
- world2vec 24d ago
  Same. Probably a few if-then statements would be enough to beat me :'(
  - k1kingy 24d ago
    I could hard code it to play the fried-liver and I'd still probably trip myself up occasionally.
  - alasano 24d ago
    Beaten by rand() chess
herbstein 24d ago
Depending on your feelings on being spoiled on the general techniques, and an approach to implement them, Sebastian Lague made a great two-part series on building a chess engine. It's specific enough that you have an idea of the techniques involved, without dwelling enough with the details to make implementing your own futile. https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk
fileeditview 24d ago
I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time. The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch. From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)
- not-so-darkstar 24d ago
  To me, the most interesting part is the architecture of the engine. How you encode a position or a move, how you design the move generator, etc. Something as simple as encoding the 64-square board in a 64-bit number leads to a rabbit hole that can last years. After that point, the "AI" part is already solved and you just need to implement it (alpha-beta + all the heuristics). Most of the recent chess engines simply implement a neural network (by copying Stockfish) and suddenly are at 3000 elo with no effort! Such a waste.
monster_truck 24d ago
Naive monte carlo on a phone from 10 years ago is likely enough unless you're quite good at chess
tsoj 24d ago
Join the Stockfish discord server! There is a very active community who builds their own chess engines there. (If you ever end up going for it, don't use AI it takes away a lot of the fun)
thrance 24d ago
It's a fun project, start here: https://chessprogramming.org https://chessprogramming.org

Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.

hyperbolablabla 24d ago

Wouldn't be that hard in my case

world2vec 24d ago
Same. Probably a few if-then statements would be enough to beat me :'(
- k1kingy 24d ago
  I could hard code it to play the fried-liver and I'd still probably trip myself up occasionally.
- alasano 24d ago
  Beaten by rand() chess

herbstein 24d ago

Depending on your feelings on being spoiled on the general techniques, and an approach to implement them, Sebastian Lague made a great two-part series on building a chess engine. It's specific enough that you have an idea of the techniques involved, without dwelling enough with the details to make implementing your own futile. https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk

fileeditview 24d ago

I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time. The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch. From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)

not-so-darkstar 24d ago
To me, the most interesting part is the architecture of the engine. How you encode a position or a move, how you design the move generator, etc. Something as simple as encoding the 64-square board in a 64-bit number leads to a rabbit hole that can last years. After that point, the "AI" part is already solved and you just need to implement it (alpha-beta + all the heuristics). Most of the recent chess engines simply implement a neural network (by copying Stockfish) and suddenly are at 3000 elo with no effort! Such a waste.

monster_truck 24d ago

Naive monte carlo on a phone from 10 years ago is likely enough unless you're quite good at chess

tsoj 24d ago

Join the Stockfish discord server! There is a very active community who builds their own chess engines there. (If you ever end up going for it, don't use AI it takes away a lot of the fun)

thrance 24d ago

It's a fun project, start here: https://chessprogramming.org https://chessprogramming.org