Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB
I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases. I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform. For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution. Then converted…
Sameshi is a chess engine compressed into just 2KB, playing at approximately 1200 Elo strength. It uses Negamax with alpha-beta pruning and a 120-cell mailbox board representation, including checkmate and stalemate… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
A chess engine implementation inspired by AlphaZero, using MLX for neural network computations and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for move selection.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2WU
Chess openings visualized from over 800 million Lichess games, 2 million tournament games and 1 million chess engine games.
2019 · chessroots.com · its alternatives →
- 3
I built over the last two years a human-like neural network chess engine that tries to predict your rating from a single game. It automatically adapts to your play and tries to play like a human at your level would play, giving you a balanced game. At the core I’m using an AlphaZero / Leela Chess Zero style neural network that I have trained on 1 billion human games from the lichess.org open database. Around this network I have built a chess engine in Rust with algorithms that use the outputs from the NN to produce human-like moves at a given rating from beginner to world champion, as…
2022 · noctie.ai · its alternatives →
- 4
Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go. If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
2025 · abstractboardgames.com · its alternatives →
- 5
- 6
- 7
Claude Code skills for chess post-mortems: Stockfish-backed annotated PGN, HTML viewer, narrated video - brumar/chess-postmortem-skills
27d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8IT
I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…
May 2026 · its alternatives →
- 9
LearnChess▲29I've been playing chess for a few years with my ELO stuck around 1600 on Lichess. I wanted an app that combined puzzle training, interactive lessons, game analysis, and AI coaching in one place. But all the apps I used over the years either felt overwhelming, had UX that wasn't up to my expectations for a modern app or were lacking some fundamental features that I really wanted. So, I built LearnChess.ai. The technical angle I'm most excited about: it's built local-first using LiveStore (event-sourced, SQLite on-device), which means zero loading delays for user data and full offline support.…
Jul 2026 · learnchess.ai · its alternatives →
- 10
Spicy Chess▲76Hello! I created SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) because I wanted a tactics training app that would have the following features: - Spaced Repetition. - Countdown time to simulate blitz Chess where you have to find the best move quickly. - The ability to save puzzles for later review. I'd love to hear any feedback that you may have !
2023 · spicychess.com · its alternatives →
- 11CE
We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool. https://devpost.com/software/chess-boss There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life! We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best…
2019 · devpost.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Contribute to openwhisk-blog/whisk-chess development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Play against Stockfish engine, get best hints.
2025 · play-chess-stockfish.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 14
Chess AI in Java - 2005 High School Project. Contribute to theronic/chessmate development by creating an account on GitHub.
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15AL
Hello HN, For a few months I'm been working on a fun side-project to port the (awesome) chessboardjs library to an easily reusable and embeddable web component. The quarantine has finally spurred me to put the finishing touches on it. https://justinfagnani.github.io/chessboard-element/ It works in plain HTML files just by writing an HTML tag: And it works in any framework because it's just an HTML element. Styling is encapsulated and customizable with CSS properties and parts: chess-board { --dark-color: darkmagenta; } /* Highlight the e2 square in red */…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 16
Chess Twist▲29I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess. Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information. From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling. It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.
2024 · polyreplay.com · its alternatives →
- 17HA
Most ZK proving systems are optimized for server-grade hardware with massive RAM. When scaling to industrial-sized traces (2^20+ rows), they often hit a "Memory Wall" where allocation and data movement become a larger bottleneck than the actual computation. I have been developing Hekate, a ZK engine written in Rust that utilizes a Zero-Copy streaming model and a hybrid tiled evaluator. To test its limits, I ran a head-to-head benchmark against Binius64 on an Apple M3 Max laptop using Keccak-256. The results highlight a significant architectural divergence: At 2^15 rows: Binius64 is faster…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 18
Local, gradient-free neuro-symbolic memory engine combining Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC/VSA), Hebbian plasticity, and graph triples for offline AI. - roandejager/Hillock
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN! I wanted to share with you a chess analysis tool that I was building for the past week. First of all I want to explain what is the problem that I'm trying to solve: Chess Engines such as stockfish are superior for us humans, but it's not self explanatory. A player can review their game by stockfish and it will tell them that some moves are very bad and losing, but why? This is the problem that we are trying to solve. ChessRabbit acts as a chess agent with stockfish evaluation tools. It takes every move that the player plays and it reasons about it, with the help, validation, and…
Aug 2026 · chessrabbit.co · its alternatives →
- 20
Play Offline chess with 16 strength levels.
2021 · metatransapps.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!
Apr 2026 · leetchess.com · its alternatives →
- 22
We were genuinely impressed by Yann LeCun’s recent announcement about his Sudoku solver based on Energy-Based Models here: https://logicalintelligence.com/yann-lecun So we (a software engineer and prodigy mathematician) worked in the weekend to see if we can beat it and we did! If Kona solves puzzles in 313 milliseconds, we currently solve 270,000 puzzles per second! We do not know the internal mechanics behind Logical Intelligence’s system, but we are happy to share ours in the webpage there is a full description, code and also a paper published. Why people are obsessed with…
Feb 2026 · davisgeometric.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- A Implementation of Alpha Zero for Chess in MLX alternatives
- We used 890M chess games to make an interactive opening graph alternatives
- Noctie – A chess AI that predicts your rating alternatives
- Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots alternatives
- e4e5 alternatives
- The Kilobyte's Gambit alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →