Show HN: Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters

[Tdxt]

Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face.

While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it.

Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath, visibly different choices each time.

playchessgate.com: browser, no signup. The kids never got their Christmas present.

[vunderba]

Nice job. Did you ever play the Chessmaster series back in the 90s? It was probably one of the earlier chess game examples where you could play against simulated historical opponents, including Nimzowitsch, Fischer, Lasker, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessmaster

[Tdxt]

Yes i did, :) that was a wonderful program, never quite understood why they stopped developing. The nice thing about the chessgate personalities ist you can adapt the playing strength to your level but the style remains consistent.

[vunderba]

Agreed! I’d love to see a new version of Chessmaster. Most of my nostalgia is for the 5000 and 6000 series, and they’re notoriously irritating to run on modern machines unless you go through the trouble of setting up a Win9x VM.

[Tdxt]

Well if I find the right Partner, I ll do my best to create a successor :) and the playchessgate personalities can find a home there.

[sahar_builds]

No way! Masters need to start playing with each other.

[Tdxt]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-ydNWKr870htOHI5pP2HogMqIKo... well set up some tournaments then this is the beta windows version