Loved it! It gets crazy with the pawns, I was so surprised. The visuals of the game are so and so, but they are really cool nonetheless. Two thumbs up from me!
The Kilobyte’s Gambit
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#52Nice work! I'm about 1850 in Lichess blitz, and it played at the level of an earnest 12 year old, which is actually meant as a compliment. It got crazy with its kingside pawns in the opening (no book knowledge), lost material pretty steadily and was checkmated down a queen, bishop and two pawns by move 25. But it developed some pieces sensibly, made obvious recaptures and was not reckless about king safety. It avoide…
For those of us who have no idea how to play chess, what level does an earnest 12 year old play at?
What op probably meant was that the engine knows no theory, but can See when something can be taken and can think a few steps ahead.
Not sure if I agree completly, but since you can win in under 10 moves simply focusing on an attack in the king I know what he means (wasn't quite a fools mate, but couldn't protect the Kings side)
I think that a 12 year old would play Mord reckless and would make more obvious mistakes. I think this is at the level oft a self taught novice that only played against another self taught novice (funny enough I was thinking of when I player chess against my friends when I was 12...) good times
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#53Wow it took me 40 or so attempts to beat it. I’m a chess novice but you’d think a human novice should be able to beat a small chunk of JavaScript. This code must be pretty compact even if expanded to readable form? Is there a repo anywhere with this type of chess engine explained and expanded to human readable commented code?
You’d be impressed by the old 8 bit chess computers, you should check them out!
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#54Well, I did beat on the first try, but it's really impressive for such a small program! It didn't make really silly moves and was confused only by rather complex attacks with double threats.
Graphics are horrible though, very easy to confuse bishops and knights.
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#55I'm about 1600 lichess, and this was a pretty easy conversion for me. It started by moving the a and h pawns in response to 1e4, which let me get center control and some advantageous pawn pickups. Second game I got threefold while down a rook in a completely lost position (which I'll blame in part on the graphics, but was mostly me blundering).
It lets me move all of the 4 center pawns two squares forward :) Nonetheless, it's very impressive how well it plays with such a small amount of code!
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#56Lost one, won one, I'm a 1350 rapid player on lichess.
Of course I would say I lost the first game because of graphics and being hard to tell pawns from bishops, but it definitely wrecked me on the first try. Second try it blundered much more.
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I added it out of desperation after around 100 people on reddit claimed the black pawns are "cheating".
Did it help? Or do people still complain about it?
In my experience having small webapps, it hardly helps. I literally added a huge modal popup on my feedback button specifically saying "DO NOT MESSAGE ME ABOUT X" before continuing and I still get dozens a week.
Even on reddit, when you get a high ranked comment, you will often get the same reply over and over again, even though a similar response is already the highest ranked reply to yours. There are people who just want to blurt out their opinion regardless of whether it's original or not..
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#58If anyone’s interested in the guts of this, you can get Oscar Toledo’s annotated source of the C version of Nanochess at: https://nanochess.org/chess3.html
He also wrote bootOS, "a monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code."
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#59It took me 4 tries to beat it, and I have a rating of 1300 on lichess.org and 1100 on chess.com.
In an effort to guestimate its strength a little more accurately, I had it play the first 4 levels of bots on lichess.org. It comfortably beat the level 3 (1400) bot and got crushed by the level 4 (1700) bot. Combined with beating me 3-1, I would estimate its lichess equivalent Elo rating to be somewhere in the 1400-1500 range.
Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit
#60Doesn't properly implement pawn promotion, assumes Queen