Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it. Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath,…
Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters launched on April 30, 2026 with 5 votes, #1,846 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Play chess online for free against 41 historical chess personalities, each rebuilt from thousands of real games. No login, no download. Plays in your browser.
Their openings. Their plans. Their instincts. Resurrected through a new kind of chess analysis. Discussed by Chess Tigers , Schachkicker , the Emanuel Lasker Gesellschaft , and Schachcomputer.info . Swipe or scroll for all 49. Click a portrait to start a game. Ostende-B 1907. At move 40 there is exactly one move for Black, and both engines agree on it, nothing else comes close. Find it, then beat Aron Nimzowitsch from there. An absolute elite player of unknown identity. You are told nothing: no name, no rating, no engine output. Can you work out who you are facing? The GM only accepts one challenge at a time. The seat is open. Live chess against other people, not personalities. Rated with…from playchessgate.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- WUWe used 890M chess games to make an interactive opening graph2019 · chessroots.com · ▲295
Chess openings visualized from over 800 million Lichess games, 2 million tournament games and 1 million chess engine games.
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Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KBFeb 2026 · github.com · ▲230I 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…
- ITI trained a chess engine to play like humansMay 2026 · ▲14
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…
Play against well-known chess players' openings2022 · d2frm2q2a7fq8v.cloudfront.net · ▲5Hi, this is my first HN submission so please forgive the rough edges. For this project gathered chess positions from some well-known chess players with a lot of games. (Usually ~25k games and 1M+ positions. The most for any player was GM Aman Hambleton with 1.8M positions indexed.) With each board position I create a probability distribution of moves the player has made from that position. Then, I simply draw from that distribution (with sampling temperature) to choose a move. As long as there's at least one game with a given position, you can keep playing. You'll see that it's pretty easy…
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