Show HN: Noctie – A chess AI that predicts your rating

[MereGurudev]

I built over the last two years a human-like neural network chess engine that tries to predict your rating from a single game. It automatically adapts to your play and tries to play like a human at your level would play, giving you a balanced game.

At the core I’m using an AlphaZero / Leela Chess Zero style neural network that I have trained on 1 billion human games from the lichess.org open database. Around this network I have built a chess engine in Rust with algorithms that use the outputs from the NN to produce human-like moves at a given rating from beginner to world champion, as well as predicting the level of the opponents play.

I want to develop this into kind of an AI coach that you can spar certain positions against and get feedback suited for your level. Happy for any suggestions!

[lairv]

Wow I played a single game but the prediction was very good, it predicted 1636 on lichess while my best elo was ~1600 (though I haven't played for about a year)

But what's even more impressive is that the game felt great to play, I didn't get this feeling that the AI would pick on every of my smallest mistakes like you have with Stockfish. I know there has been several research work [0,1] recently to improve the human-ness of chess AIs, but it's even more impressive that you are able to do it "online", in the course of a single game, bravo. I'd be interested in a blog post with details on the underlying algorithm

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.01855

[1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=fJY2iCssvIs

[bazillion]

I asked GM Minh Le (twitch.tv/gmminhle) to try it out, and he got a 2046 FIDE rating with 2306 lichess rating, after beating the bot. His actual FIDE rating is 2542 standard (https://ratings.fide.com/profile/12401153). His feedback was:

-Why does the bot get +20 seconds every move and you get +5 seconds?

-It seems like you have to wait a few seconds before making a move before the bot gets stuck

You can check out the VOD of him playing noctie on his channel if you want to see the full thing.

[porphyra]

I think these tools, much like IQ tests, are not that useful when you are super good and get almost every move perfect. It was fairly accurate for me who is around 1900 lichess.

[MereGurudev]

Hey, that's really cool, will check it out! The backend was experiencing some issues leading to laggy play by Noctie, I hope it's working better now.

[sireat]

Superb effort!

It was a bit unsettling to play because as a human you were expecting to get crushed any moment but somehow I salvaged a draw on move 116. I've played thousands of games versus computer opponents (and tens of thousands versus humans).

Rating estimates were off by 200 points, probably because I was too cautious. Real FIDE 2300 - estimate 2100. Maybe I am getting too old :)

If the engine really becomes more human like it will be a big step forward.

EDIT: 2nd game (after registering) was broken UI wise - could not move pawns 2 spots and many legal moves were not allowed, so I had to resign

[FartyMcFarter]

The AI makes plenty of blunders (confirmed with Stockfish analysis), which makes sense in order to get a better estimate of the opponent's rating.

As I was playing I felt like I had a definite advantage, which I did as it turns out. But because I was playing a computer I kept second-guessing myself as I didn't yet know it was programmed to blunder. I then managed to resign in a drawn pawn endgame - I wonder if this was used as signal to estimate my rating.

It got my lichess rating right within 300 points after just one game.

[MereGurudev]

Thanks for sharing your experience! It's a very interesting point about how you adapt your play based on the preconception about how computers play. The AI isn't programmed to blunder per se, it's more that I have tried to emulate a human intuition & thinking process – which is prone to blunders. So it never intentionally makes a mistake to test you, or to even the game out, it just tries to emulate your level of play.

[FartyMcFarter]

Thanks for the info, this is a great project!

[coolness]

The computer seems to move very slowly, and gets much more time for each move than me. Is this intended, or is it because everyone on HN is trying it out? Might be some sort of client - backend synch issue.

edit: the computer now flagged on my screen, but I did not get any message of a result

[underyx]

It was fine for me until I had forced mate in two. It took 3 minutes to make the penultimate move and I'm still waiting for it to make the last move. In some way, this delivers perfectly on the promise of an AI emulating human players at my level.

[MereGurudev]

It seems one of my services has hit a quota, trying to find out which..

[blux]

Same here, computer flagged, nothing happens.

[mirzap]

Same happened to me. It seems quite buggy.

[desmosxxx]

Very cool but noctie seems to be timing out now - worked fine for me the first two times.

Does noctie treat the opening any differently when factoring in ratings. I had two very different estimes - higher one (2100) was from an opening line i knew and lower one (1500) I left the opening more quickly but I don't think I played a much worse middle game. I'm closer to 1500. [edit: from your other comment it does look like it takes the opening into account - I'm guessing as some sort of calibration - if you create an account does it use the results from previous games instead?]

Also curios if this could theoretically be applied to historical games as well or does it require noctie to be a participant. I'd love to see an analysis of how player strength has increased over time. [edit: from your other comment it looks like it does require play]

[MereGurudev]

Thanks! Yes, the traffic from here exposed a few issues & bottlenecks in the backend infrastructure. I have resolved most of them and it seems to be running OK now (?).

To answer your questions: Noctie takes every move into account. Especially in short games or very one-sided games, a lot of the rating estimate will come from your opening play. If you play a bad opening, Noctie adapts and you will get an easier game, which may lead to simpler positions where you have less risk of making a mistake that would lower your rating. So what opening you play definitely has a big impact when trying to judge the rating from one game only.

If you create an account and log in, Noctie will accumulate information from several games to give a more balanced difficulty and more accurate rating estimate (and show how it changes over time).

Noctie's involvement isn't strictly required for the rating estimate although it creates good conditions for it by making the game balanced, not dominated by time trouble or trying to flag the opponent, etc.

[desmosxxx]

Awesome work & thank you for the replies!

[c22]

I played e4 then Noctie ran out its clock. After that I used my queen to gobble up all of my opponent's pieces, then I used the queen to take all of my own pieces.

[MereGurudev]

Perfect break entertainment

[hellcow]

This estimated my lichess rating very closely. Really impressive!

[carl_dr]

Yep, same here. And the game seemed well balanced to my skill level until I blundered, at which point it beat me in short order - just as happens on Lichess!

[fizzynut]

I had to click the "back" and "forward" buttons 10+ times during the game for the ai to "play" a move while my clock got significantly lower. Highly frustrating. Seemed related to how fast I played a move.

[MereGurudev]

OK, sorry for that, the part with back/forward is very useful info for debugging though. Do you mind sharing what browser / setup you're using?

[fizzynut]

Win/Chrome, the clocks for both sides would be frozen if the bug happened then I had to press back, I often had to "redo" my move manually.

[jdthedisciple]

I played a few moves and it seems the AI just stopped playing?

This happened twice now (at move 3 the second time).

I'm not sure it should take that long especially in opening moves.

Is it doing very deep analysis? Am I up against depth 40 stockfish calculations here?

[MereGurudev]

Hey, sorry to hear that, the moves should usually be played very fast in the opening, and only up to 5–10 seconds in tactical situations, so I think you might have encountered a bug. Noctie does almost no calculation, just like a human, BTW.

Was this in the rate-me page or as a logged in user? You can mail me with the e-mail in my profile if you'd like to help debug!

[FartyMcFarter]

I ran into the same bug after doing a pre-move FWIW. Someone else also mentioned that the bug might be related to the speed of making moves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719934

[T0Bi]

Had the same problem as well. Actually, I wasn't able to finish a single game since it always got stuck (took more than a minute to play a move) after a while.

I'm using Chrome on Android and was only using the rate me page.

[jdthedisciple]

This was in the rate me page.

Yea it definitely took way more than 10 seconds.

Nice peoject tho! I'm interested in how it'd rate me.

[earthscienceman]

Another very positive comment here with a few grips. I love the way you used shadowing and color to create a board with a lot of depth. Interacting with the board is very very nice.

My only major grip with it is the color scheme. As is often the case, you seem to want to add your own 'flavor' to the UI by having this almost post-apocalyptic color vibe... and as usually happens, it makes it more difficult to distinguish for people accustomed to the standard high contrast board.

Another grip, the click to move that is standard would be very nice to implement. Dragging to move as the only option is an oversight.

[MereGurudev]

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

[EZ-Cheeze]

https://noctie.ai/walkthrough/public_55e0d2f7-d18e-42aa-a969...

both the machine and i played with elan (reckless abandon), rarely thinking more than a few seconds per move

crazy game that convinced me to sign up

i love that it ostensibly tried to stalemate me at the end, that's what i'd do too and often draw back when i played chess

i stopped because F** zero-sum games

but against noctie i'm not releasing stress hormones into someone's brain so i can like chess again

[EZ-Cheeze]

https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/eCxDBoc6S?tab=review

chess.com analysis

accuracy 75.4 vs 70.6 so it did a measurably good job matching performance

there is something very lifelike and appealing about an AI that blunders at the same rate as you

best chess engine, good job

[lupire]

On mobile Firefox the zoom is shaky and halfway through the game it zoomed in and didn't zoom back out so I couldn't see the whole board for the rest of the game.

The promotion menu disappears so I couldn't promote.

It also draws wrong if I preemove a recapture and then change to a new move. More generally, it allows infinite premoves and crashes.

Also, the clock is distracting, especially because the proportional font keeps moving the digits. Besides that, pretty good. And the colors are mushy and low contrast.

[hexwab]

I played a game, got my estimated rating (pretty accurate!), and a modal dialog box offering me the choice of "enter my email to create a account" or "forget me and play again". Immediately my heart sank. It's 2022, I have enough accounts on enough websites to last a lifetime and am super-sick of the whole "we've sent you an email, be sure to click the link to verify" dance.

Most importantly, what I actually wanted to do was get the game out and analyse it. But now the text was no longer selectable so I had to go grubbing around in devtools.

Turns out the "forget me and play again" button just dismissed the popup and didn't actually start a new game but I had no way of knowing this short of playing another test game in another tab.

Suggestions: (a) don't use modal dialog boxes! Let me create an account in the middle of a game if I want. Let me copy and paste the moves at any time, including after the game is over. Don't have a button to "play again" if it's not actually going to play again.

(b) asking for email addresses annoys the hell out of people. Let me play again without forgetting who I am. If I want my identity to persist across browser sessions then sure, let me create a username and password. If I want to be sure I don't forget the password, sure, let me tie it to an email address. But it should be step three, not step one. Otherwise people will just never come back.

(c) "excited", "Thanks for the game", the eyebrows? It's a bot, it's not capable of excitement or gratitude or facial expressions. Pretending it is seems, well, patronizing. It's reminiscent of chess.com with its cutesy bots (and persistent nagging).

[catchmeifyoucan]

+ 1 to this, I dropped my email, but I really don't want to go and verify it. I'm curious to know what I get after I login, because it's not immediately clear.

Another option is to consider 3rd party OAuth like Google.

[MereGurudev]

Good suggestions, thanks.

[myaccount9786]

I wish against 1.e4 it wouldn't always play 1...c5. Right now, it's less of a test of "what is your chess rating" and more of "how much sicilian theory do you know".

Its prediction was about 300 points low compared to actual lichess rating (1800). But online chess is very different; you see a lot of unsound openings that an engine wouldn't ever play.

[garyrob]

An 1800 Lichess rating maps to 1420 FIDE or 1270 USCF. Not sure what standard is used by Noctie. (https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/)

[myaccount9786]

Sure maybe the translation is wrong, but I'm saying there's bias in the test due to the fact it only plays sicilian to 1.e4. What about 1.e6 or 1.e5? Hard to estimate fide or lichess rating if you don't test those.

According to https://lichess.org/analysis#1, for blitz and rapid games played on lichess with 1.e4, 1...e5 is 33%, 1...c5 is 25% and 1...e6 is 10%. And 35% is some other nonsense.

Computer chess tournaments solve this problem by requiring the computers to play specific openings.

[MereGurudev]

I think you were just unlucky with the opening! When I'm testing it's about 60/40 1...e5 vs 1...c5. The first opening moves should be quite close to what a 1600 FIDE player plays in online blitz.

[myaccount9786]

Oh haha N=2 here, so you are probably right. Survivorship bias on my part.

I posted these stats in another thread:

According to https://lichess.org/analysis#1, for blitz and rapid games played on lichess with 1.e4, 1...e5 is 33%, 1...c5 is 25% and 1...e6 is 10%. And 35% is some other nonsense.

[myaccount9786]

Does it use the frequencies from the lichess database? That would be pretty cool if it did!

[knaik94]

The two main issues I found is that doing any premoves breaks the AI every time. Earlier, I thought it was an issue with traffic but after playing a few games, I realized it's not. The AI just stops responding to a premove, it doesn't register as me having moved but the clock remains frozen.

The other issue is that the AI weighs weak openings way very heavily for both elo and responses. I enjoy chess960 and am weak on my openings, my elo is estimated to be between 1000 and 1400 standard otb 10+5, and my lichess puzzle elo is 1600. Noctie gave me an elo of 500ish even when I won. The response moves weren't challenging and it felt like the game went directly to endgame after a series of aggressive exchanges. Look forward to seeing where this goes.

[parspo]

I had fun. The AI stopped responding and I was able to capture all of its pieces in the confusion:

https://i.imgur.com/g6R1FM5.png

I didn't even know the rules of chess allowed for that, so I've actually learned quite a bit!

[jpalomaki]

Same problem, but I did enjoy the game.

This feels like a great thing for beginners.

[infomaniac]

Very accurate! Just 10 points off my chess.com rating.

Although, there was an unfortunate bug... I couldn't promote a pawn, and that severely impacted the endgame. I'm on mobile Brave, and attempting to promote presumably tried to bring up some modal, but instead it just glitched.

[kennyfrc]

This looks great! I’ve played a couple of games in the Open Sicilian and the French Tarrasch and there wasn’t a moment that I felt like I was playing against a computer. It plays some cheezy lines which I would expect from a lichess player.

On the user side - I think the review area would benefit from principle-based analysis similar to what is seen in chess.com. I am guessing that for it to happen, there needs to be a separate analysis engine that can detect positional motifs. I think chess.com did a decent job with that (better and more actionable than decodechess in my opinion).

On the tech side - I’m curious how this project differs from existing neural nets trained for lc0 such as bad gyal and maia?

[MereGurudev]

Thanks a lot, and happy to hear about your experience! Yes, the review mode is quite basic at this point but I hope to add more features soon, including some that are unique when compared to chess.com.

On the tech side, what Maia is doing I think is similar to our NN component. It turns out to get realistic play (include randomness, avoid too many one-move blunders, same level of tactical play as positional play, realistic endgame play, etc.) you have to do quite a lot on top of that – much more than I initially thought. I have tested the AI over the last year with friends of different strengths to try to make the gameplay more realistic and engaging. I also think the automatic adaptation to your level of play, and predicting the rating, is unique. Bad gyal AFAIK uses a different training method where Stockfish evaluations is involved, but I haven't really tested it enough to know how it stands vs. Maia.

[rabidbathtap]

This is fun. No idea what my actual rating is but I may have found a bug: I won with checkmate playing white and a rating of 828 as anon. 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. e3 e6 4. Be2 c5 5. Bd2 cxd4 6. Nxd4 Nc6 7. Nf3 e5 8. Bb5 e4 9. Ne5 Bd7 10. Nxc6 bxc6 11. Be2 Rb8 12. Nc3 Rxb2 13. Na4 Rb8 14. Nc5 Qb6 15. Nxd7 Nxd7 16. O-O Nc5 17. Bc3 Na4 18. Be5 Rb7 19. Rb1 Nb2 20. Rxb2 Qxb2 21. Bxb2 Rxb2 22. a4 Bc5 23. Bg4 d4 24. exd4 Bxd4 25. Qxd4 Rxc2 26. Qd7+ Kf8 27. Qd8#

Played a few games and variation was between 828 and 1251, and in all but the 828 I received a good drubbing.

[xipho]

Was exactly correct for me, predicted Lichess within 10 points. Also agree with another poster who said they were waiting to get crushed, but managed a draw. Like it "pushed" just enough.

[maegul]

Just adding to the positive feedback here ... I was literally thinking about, as a newcomer to chess, how bad the learning experience is with online chess engines and how surely something could be done to make the engines work with you at your level to help you learn.

So far, this seems to fit the bill very well! I hope this is a success and will definitely consider supporting it with a paid account. Well done!

[alexeiz]

I appreciate that Noctie didn't beat me right away as most computers do. It gave me some chances. I blew it in the end anyway, but it was fun to play.

[Quarrelsome]

Any idea why it thinks I'm so bad?

https://imgur.com/a/d0WES5H

Its way off (I range around 1200-1700 ELO depending on sober I wanna be when I play). I do play relatively eccentrically with a penchant for sacrifices and a insatiable desire for tempo and exploration of lines I am unfamiliar with but its still way off with its initial assessment.

[MereGurudev]

If the opening is rated as sufficiently bad, it would adjust its play accordingly and perhaps not challenge you sufficiently to be able to change its rating estimate. I.e. if you get a very easy, tactical game after that, the game might not be testing your abilities enough to revise the estimate from one game.

[lovehashbrowns]

Reaaaaaaally fun implementation! I enjoyed this much more than usual AIs I tend to play against as an extreme casual of the game. It put my lichess at 900, which is likely 100-200 points above what I'd really be. I'm gonna keep using this because it seems the difficulty is at the right spot for what I wanna do with chess.

[tzs]

One or two possible bugs/annoyances.

1. It got down to my White King on b3, my Knight on h6 vs its King on h2 and its Pawn on g5, with it to move.

It had around 6:50 on the clock and I had 3:36.

It spent nearly 3.5 minutes on the move so its clock was around 3:20 when it moved (Kh3)...and then it got so much increment back that it ended up somewhere round 6:55.

Here's the game score in case it helps [1]. The score does not show the one take-back I used. If that's relevant it was on move 27, right after the first Rook trade.I completely overlooked that the Bishop on c4 was hitting my Rook on f1 and moved the Knight to c3 intending to then move the Rook to c1. Oops...took that back to instead move the Rook first and then the Knight.

2. The game continued 46. Kc3 g4 47. Nxg4 and draw due to insufficient mating material on both sides. I then got the modal dialog telling me my rating estimate (17something FIDE, 20something Lichess) [2]. With that modal up I could not select the game score to copy it, and it sounded like all the options to dismiss the model would likely take me to somewhere new.

I ended up taking a screen shot, opening the screen shot in Preview on my Mac, and selecting the text in the screen shot and copying that.

If the modal at the end indeed cannot be dismissed without going somewhere else, it would be nice to provide a way to copy the game score before leaving.

[1] 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 e5 5. Nxc6 bxc6 6. Bd3 Nf6 7. 0-0 Bc5 8. Qe2 0-0 9. Nc3 d6 10. Bg5 h6 11. Bxf6 Qxf6 12. Kh1 a5 13. a4 Be6 14. f3 Rab8 15. b3 Bd4 16. Qe1 Rfc8 17. Rd1 d5 18. Nb1 c5 19. c3 c4 20. cxd4 cxd3 21. dxe5 Qxe5 22. Rxd3 dxe4 23. Qxe4 Qxe4 24. fxe4 Bxb3 25. Rd4 Rc4 26. Rxc4 Bxc4 27. Rc1 Be6 28. Nc3 Rb4 29. Kg1 Kh7 30. Kf2 Kg6 31. Ke3 Kf6 32. Ra1 Ke5 33. Rb1 Bb3 34. Rb2 Bxa4 35. Rxb4 axb4 36. Nxa4 f5 37. exf5 Kxf5 38. Kd4 b3 39. Kc3 Kf4 40. Kxb3 Ke3 41. Nc3 Kf2 42. Nd1+ Kxg2 43. Ne3+ Kxh2 44. Nf5 g5 45. Nxh6 Kh3 46. Kc3 g4 47. Nxg4

[2] Seems plausible. I haven't played tournament chess in ~30 years. When I did my USCF rating had a high of 1611 and was mid 1500s when I stopped, so 17something FIDE seems a bit high. On the other hand I have done a ton of tactical puzzles in the last few years, so it is possible I'm better than I was 30 years ago (except I've forgotten everything I knew about openings). My Lichess puzzle rating is around 2100. I haven't played any online games with humans so don't have an online rating anywhere.

[lepapillon]

I like the board UI and it's a cool project idea. Did you find any good resources on programming the board representation and identifying legal moves? There doesn't seem to be a standard library or algo reference that I've seen for such a common problem.

[MereGurudev]

Thanks! For board representation and legal move generation I use chess.js in the frontend, and shakmaty in the Rust engine.

[yesenadam]

I played two games. The first I played badly, lost and it said I was FIDE 2350. The second I pinned and won its queen early on, won the game, and it said FIDE 1400. (I think I'm actually around 2000-2100ish)

[porkbrain]

Well, that's flattering, got estimated 2173 FIDE.

Unfortunately, wildly off, I was ~1800 FIDE even when I used to play. Will try a few more games to see whether that was a fluke or whether I should consider getting into chess again.

All in all, great submission, thank you

[entropie]

> 638

> Equivalent lichess.org rating: 965

I like chess, I know i'am not good but it was nice to beat a AI once ;)

[thorncorona]

Very cool!

FYI this sequence of moves leads to the AI timing out:

1. e4 c5 2. c3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. cxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 6. Bd3 Bg7 7. Nf3 O-O 8. O-O Nc6 9. d5 Ne5 10. Nxe5 dxe5 11. b4 a6 12. a4 Qb6 13. Rb1 Ng4 14. h3 Nf6 15. a5 Qc7 16. Bb2 Bd7 17. Na4 Bxa4 18. Qxa4

[jkaptur]

Really cool! As a novice, it definitely felt approachable and fun to play against.

[incomingpain]

I estimate your FIDE rating to:

1176

Ouch, I did beat the AI.

I've played probably 10,000 anonymous games. My chess puzzle rating is currently around 2100, peak of 2400. Playing against stockfish 4 I can generally win every game. Stockfish 5 is hard.

When I do rated games, I will crush each person in placements and usually get to 2200 or so before I lose the ?

The last time I did a rating run. I won each game and placed at 1977. Then I went on a losing streak of 20 games down to 1300. I am playing 1300s which play like stockfish 5 or harder. These 1300s are playing ridiculously strong compared to stockfish 4.

I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

[cjonas]

On lichess? I been hovering in at 1300+-50 for the last year... I can barely beat stockfish 2. I've found stockfish at these lower levels doesn't play like humans at all. It will play a near perfect game for 25 moves and then all of a sudden make a horrible and senseless move. If your style is slow and defensive I think you probably fair better. My style is hyper aggressive and stockfish crushes me :)

[incomingpain]

>On lichess? I been hovering in at 1300+-50 for the last year... I can barely beat stockfish 2.

Yes.

Stockfish 2 is pretty easy, play solid and it eventually does something ridiculous to earn its lower rating. The trick, you have to see the mistake. Basically punches itself in the face, you have to survive until it does this. Make sure everything is defended.

Stockfish 3 is when it starts playing reasonably and only makes a mistake when you've put enough pressure on it.

Stockfish 4 you have to play against it. You need to see depth of about 3-4 moves for both of you and you should beat it every time.

Stockfish 5 is hard, it's seemingly giving you tricks, but if you look at the trick its a crazy computer line where they manage to barely hold on or in most cases you shouldn't have taken what it was giving.

>I've found stockfish at these lower levels doesn't play like humans at all. It will play a near perfect game for 25 moves and then all of a sudden make a horrible and senseless move. If your style is slow and defensive I think you probably fair better. My style is hyper aggressive and stockfish crushes me :)

From my experience stockfish never plays like a human. I do recall there are some bots on lichess which were machine learning to play like a human.

Alas I'm 1100 rated according to op.

[myaccount9786]

Just want to point out the obvious: if you are staying at 1300 for over 1y, you are not improving and likely not understanding why you are losing. I would recommend you study rather than banging your head against the wall by playing more games.

Opening theory and tactics are a good place to start.

An easy step is make sure you know a few common openings and have at least one response prepared to each. But also a good understanding of principles. Opening principles are more important, you can wing it if you don't know the theory. There are thousands of videos on YouTube about these topics.

And obviously just don't hang pieces and take your opponent's hung pieces. At 1300 on lichess, your opponent will make a bunch of tactical mistakes which you can just take if you see them, after you can just win if you play solidly for the rest of the game. The way to study here is with puzzles.

Sorry to patronize. I have played thousands of 1300's on lichess and improved after I sat down and studied. But I can tell you, if you're actually 1300 you are not strong enough in some of these areas.

P.S. I don't believe the comment above yours. The dude went from 2200 to 1300??

[cjonas]

I think your just trying to be helpful, but ya it did come off as pretty patronizing. You've also assumed incorrectly that "getting better" is the most important thing when playing chess...

I play chess because I find it fun, relaxing and a great way to blow off stress. Studying opening and caring too much about rating ruins that. Rated play is awesome because I always get paired with someone of similar skill. I do feel I'm improving slowly, even if my rating does change much. I like to mix things up and often play strategies I know are bad because it leads to fun and novel positions.

And yes, I understand that I'm not a "strong" player. It's pretty obvious when lichess tells me directly I'm in the bottom ~30% lol.

[myaccount9786]

Why complain about not getting better than 1300 then? My point is there are a lot of different levers to pull to get better and imo it's interesting to learn more tactics.

The game does become more interesting as you get better. At least up to 1850 in my personal experience. At <=1400 level the game is more like gambling imo, hoping opponent will fall into trap or miss a move.

[cjonas]

Nothing in my post was complaining about not getting better. You must have misinterpreted what I said.

It seems like as you increase in rating, chess would become more about who can memorize the most lines or how well you have studied the opening theory. That personally sounds miserable to me.

I actually enjoy the fact that lower rated matches allow many fun lines that are "objectively bad" to be completely viable. Of course, I hope my game will continue to improve, but I'm careful not to take it too seriously.

There's a saying in skiing that I like to apply to all my hobbies:

The best skier on the mountain is the one who's having the most fun :)

[incomingpain]

>P.S. I don't believe the comment above yours. The dude went from 2200 to 1300??

Like I could provide links to my games. I'm not a liar. I estimate I am a 1800-2000 player.

The thing I don't seem to know, it would seem to me when I play against a 1300 who never makes a blunder or mistake. It then happens 20 games straight. They certainly play various inaccuracies, and I hold myself as well as I do compared to stockfish 5.

In 1 game I was up 2 pieces and the computer didnt think they made a mistake nor blunder. >90% accuracy as a 1300...

I guess, I'm missing some fundamental thing.

[myaccount9786]

I don't believe anyone could be 2200 and fall to 1300 because I am 1800 and I crush 1300s 99% of the time. And 2200s will crush me 99% of the time. How that decline happens?

So you're saying that you could crush me but are getting beat by 1300s who anyone at 1800 could crush easily? F to doubt.

Edit: for example https://www.318chess.com/elo.html. there is a statistical analysis of lichess data as well but it went down a few years ago.

[dreamer7]

I had a fun game. Was disappointed that the AI blundered a piece fairly early in the game. Overall, I felt I was not being pushed at all.

[FartyMcFarter]

I pitted Stockfish 14 NNUE against it (only giving stockfish a few seconds per move), it reported a FIDE rating of 2661 (lichess 2891).

[sirfreedom]

Wow, my predicted Lichess rating (playing just one game where I made a stupid blunder) was eerily accurate (~50 pt difference)

[register]

Ok, I am getting near GM estimation after I played some Scotch game theory that I know. To me it is extremely inaccurate

[segmondy]

Started timing out or not moving, once it was definite I would win. Not sure if logic search bug or scaling issues.

[MereGurudev]

It seems to be working again. It looks like something wasn't working out with my cloud autoscaling setup..

[tacitusarc]

It's very flatteringly, said I was about 1950 FIDE, 2200 lichess. I'm closer to maybe 1300-1400.

[alexmolas]

Super interesting! It would be nice to be able to warmup the initial score by importing your lichess games.

[thornewolf]

The AI seemed to have gotten stuck during my game with it. After waiting a few minutes I opted to resign.

[MereGurudev]

Sorry for the bad experience, Noctie got stuck for a while due to a bottleneck in my cloud setup

[nilslindemann]

I need to wait longer than five seconds per move, otherwise the clock stops.

[robertlagrant]

Mine has issues connecting to firestore. I can make as many moves as I like though, which is nice :D

[register]

How does the prediction work? My estimation is probably 20% higher than my real rating

[FartyMcFarter]

Same here, it also overestimated my rating by about 300 points. To be fair it was just one game, so that's already pretty impressive.

Nitpick: "20% higher" doesn't work when talking about Elo ratings, since it's a system based on rating differences between players (i.e. subtraction).

In particular, if two players are ranked x and y respectively, that's equivalent to them being ranked x+k and y+k for any value of k. On the other hand, multiplying ratings by a constant has no meaning.

[fancymcpoopoo]

it wouldn't let me promote my pawn... super annoying

[auxbuss]

Yes, this is the biggest problem. Otherwise it's a great project. But until this is fixed, not worth playing, sadly.

[foldingmoney]

yeah won't allow promotion on either mobile or desktop

[darepublic]

Good idea, was gonna share it with my friends but it's not working.

[MereGurudev]

Sorry, it seems to be very slow right now due to some quota issue :( I'm debugging right now.

[zug_zug]

This is awesome. I've wanted something like this for a long time

[fabiospampinato]

fwiw I got kind of different results, first time around 1800 fide, second time around 1900 fide, third time, the only time I managed to win, around 1500 fide.

[danem]

Yeah, I've noticed that resigning earlier in the game results in higher ratings for me. Perhaps it's because I stop playing as accurately once I have a crushing position?

[yqsk]

It guessed my lichess almost rating exactly. Impressive!

[MereGurudev]

Thanks!

[saberience]

Noctie never made a single move in my game.

[MereGurudev]

Sorry for the bad experience, I had a service outage for a while

[MarvinYork]

1670 FIDE :D I wish...

[mda]

2050 Fide, I wish.. It tends to over estimate maybe. Or needs more data.

[jhsinger27]

cant be better than chess.com ratings!