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Work · October 17, 2022

PA

Play against well-known chess players' openings

Hi, 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…

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi, 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 to get "out of book", where you've reached a novel position. It is possible to indirectly model a player's behavior throughout the game, so we can guess what moves a player might make in that position. But that's a bit more than a weekend project and a bit more involved than a lookup table.

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