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

noctie.ai

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

#21

Post by FartyMcFarter »

MereGurudev wrote: post #6
jdthedisciple wrote: post #4

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?

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!

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

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

#22

Post by 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

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

#23

Post by incomingpain »

cjonas wrote: post #16
incomingpain wrote: post #11

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 pla…

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 :)

>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.

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

#24

Post by MereGurudev »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #19

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 w…

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.

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

#26

Post by 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).

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

#27

Post by FartyMcFarter »

MereGurudev wrote: post #24
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #19

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 w…

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 pla…

Thanks for the info, this is a great project!

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

#29

Post by MereGurudev »

fizzynut wrote: post #18

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.

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?

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

#30

Post by MereGurudev »

lepapillon wrote: post #28

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.

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