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Andrew W posted an update
I love this website about tiny chess bots.
https://sebastian.itch.io/tiny-chess-bots
The rules of the competition are basically the code can have no more than 1024 tokens of code.
As a programmer myself, I know this is tiny… about 3 pages of double spaced text. About one million of these bots would fit into 4GB of RAM on your PC.
Now I played the winner, Boychesser (ELO 2772) and it killed me. I put it up against all the chess.com bots. It played 3 games as white against the 3200 ELO engine and it drew twice and won once! It did, however, get slaughtered by Stockfish 15.And the key author of this bot is an Australian computer science student who taught himself how to code! Not only that, his bot also won TCEC 4k the baby sibling of the computer chess competition that Stockfish et al enter.
What you might find particularly interesting (including you Nelson if you read this as I hope you do), is that it worked out its own piece ratings based off playing itself for thousands of games. A few things to take note of: piece values change between mid and end game, particularly pawns. King side pawns are worth more than Queen side. Bishops are worth more than knights. Rooks are not much better than either except in end game.
Now I think this is something anyone who has played much chess instinctively knows. The ratings of 1, 3, 3, 5, 9 are completely arbitrary. I think these are much more representative of the true value of pieces and would be worth considering when looking at exchanges. And Nelson, I would love to see you take on Boychesser in one of your videos! Being as good as chess.com engine in 3 pages is pretty impressive! Forgot to mention it easily dispatched Magnus Carlsen bot but I dont think these bots are as good as the people they represent.
Piece Values (Boychesser):
Pawn (king-half): 1320 | 1824 (middlegame | endgame)
Pawn (non king-half): 744 | 1800 (middlegame | endgame)
Knight: 4152 | 4560 (middlegame | endgame)
Bishop: 4848 | 5376 (middlegame | endgame)
Rook: 5640 | 9408 (middlegame | endgame)
Queen: 14736 | 17736 (middlegame | endgame)
sebastian.itch.io
Tiny Chess Bots by Sebastian Lague
A selection of tiny chess bots, from beginner to grandmaster level. Can you defeat them all?
2 Comments-
PS. I have no affiliation with anything I mentioned
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Also since they are so simple I think it might be constructive to look at their code as to how they function. Boychesser cheats a little in that it uses a neural network so is a bit incomprehensible to read but many of the others do not and still achieve respectable ELOs. All code is open source I think and it is easy to understand the code, even with no coding experience by giving it to chatgpt or similar and asking it to explain. I might follow this up soon.
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