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Chess.com vs. Lichess

siddhesh.substack.com

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Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#11

Post by dragontamer »

stouset wrote: post #8
dragontamer wrote: post #3

For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC. It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC). SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faste…

Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people. So no, it is just just some Javascript program. And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free.…

Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance.

Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.

And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#12

Post by stouset »

bottled_poe wrote: post #7
willbw wrote: post #6

It seems pointless to discuss chess.com without mentioning the paid features like game analysis which are much more user-friendly than Lichess.

Agreed. The post-game analysis on chess.com will make you a better player faster. It automatically turns your key game moments into chess puzzles.

Lichess does this as well, and it's completely free. It's the "Learn From Your Mistakes" button visible after you've performed computer analysis of your game.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#14

Post by thom »

dragontamer wrote: post #3

For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC. It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC). SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faste…

What do you use for a database? I seem to remember the person behind Caissabase inhabits these parts but that hasn’t been updated in a while. I have ChessBase but find myself in Linux most of the time and haven’t copied the database over because ChessBase’s UI causes me great pain.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#15

Post by thom »

dragontamer wrote: post #11
stouset wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people. So no, it is just just some Javascript program. And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free.…

Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance. Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds. And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and…

PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#16

Post by samdg »

A feature I was surprised not to see in the "Cleaner page UI during chess games" section: Lichess has a zen mode that maximally simplifies the UI.

It removes the chat, navigation menu, move history notation. You're left with the board, clocks, resign/draw/takeback actions, and move replay.

You can activate it by pressing "Z" during a game, and there's a menu option too.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#17

Post by dragontamer »

thom wrote: post #15
dragontamer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance. Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds. And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and…

PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.

No. Magic Bitboards are what you use if you don't have PEXT available. EDIT: I expect the WASM version to use magic-bitboards (which is just a "magical" multiply instruction + a lookup).

Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not.

Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version).

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Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future)

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In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote.

Even if there's some auto-vectorization that WASM can do, its really hard to beat handcrafted assembly / intrinsics (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...)

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#18

Post by ArchieMaclean »

dragontamer wrote: post #3

For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC. It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC). SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faste…

Lichess has a 'fishnet' of donated servers [0] that allow you to analyse using Stockfish on proper hardware. You can have up to 20 deep analyses a day.

The web client uses Stockfish compiled to WASM which is decently fast.

If you're not an IM/GM, it's "good enough"

[0] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#19

Post by freediver »

I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads (https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a.... ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested.

Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it.

The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#20

Post by Buttons840 »

freediver wrote: post #19

I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads ( https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a... . ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested. Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it. The…

If you would pay for it, then do pay for it, by contributing a few dollars a month.
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