[salamo]

I built something like this. It works as long as you're not too high-rated: chessmate.ai. Once players get higher rated it is more difficult to predict their moves because you need to model their search process, not just their intuitive move choice. It's also possible to train on one player's games only so that it is more personalized.

It uses a similar approach to Maia but with a different neural network, so it had a bit better move matching performance. And on top of that it has an expectation maximization algorithm so that the bot will try to exploit your mistakes.

[primitivesuave]

Really nice work! The tabs other than "play" don't seem to be working, but I was able to try some novelty openings and it certainly felt like it was responding with human moves. It would be great to have the ability to go back/forth moves to try out different variations.

I'm curious how you combined Stockfish with your own model - but no worries if you're keeping the secret sauce a secret. All the best to you in building out this app!

[salamo]

I'm happy you enjoyed it! There are definitely a few rough edges, yes.

Since the whole thing is executed in the browser (including the model) there aren't a ton of secrets for me to keep. Essentially it is expectation maximization: the bot tries to find the move with the highest value. What is "value"? Essentially, it is the dot product between the probability distribution coming out of the model and the centipawn evaluations from Stockfish.

In other words if the model thinks you will blunder with high probability, it will try to steer you towards making that mistake.

[primitivesuave]

Thank you for the explanation! I completely understand the rough edges, I have some rough ideas out there myself. Would it be alright if I add a link to your site to our chess club's list of online resources?

I can also make a note of it privately and check back in with you in the future. I found it pretty remarkable that it played a human-like response to some niche openings - I actually ended up checking against Stockfish and it played different moves, which is pretty neat.

[salamo]

Sure, go ahead!

[pgt]

Hello! I built a Chess AI also named Chessmate in high school (2005) that made it into a Minecraft mod 10 years later: http://petrustheron.com/posts/chessmate.html

Java source code here: https://github.com/theronic/chessmate