In my last two posts, I gave brief overviews to two of the more established paradigms for chess engines, represented by Stockfish and AlphaZero. In this post, I will go over the latest engine on the block – Stockfish NNUE. NNUE was integrated into the main Stockfish branch in late Read more…
Last week, I wrote an article explaining the basics on traditional chess engines. Today, I will go over the new generation of chess engines, using neural networks instead of brute force evaluation. History For decades, neural networks were thought to be inferior to traditional brute-force engines because training a strong Read more…
Over the next few posts, I’ll be writing a series on how chess engines work. This isn’t intended to be an authoritative, in-depth guide on engines, but just a quick summary on the different types of chess engines, and how they compare against each other. History of Chess Engines Chess Read more…
Introduction Today is the final day of my first rotation with CJ and as part of the rotation requirements, I need to write a final report. In line with some of my other assignments, I’ve decided to complete this in the form of a blog! This post will contain three Read more…
Over the last week, I’ve mainly been expanding on my work from last week, with the dataset of moves represented as differences of compressed chess board states. In my blog post last week, I generated a dataset of 10 players, and plotted the results. The first thing I did this Read more…
Last week, I went over some functions I created to compress a chess board state into a set of integers, based on the component functions created during the Stockfish evaluation process. For example, in the above position, we get the compressed board state of (0.9,0.05,-0.05,-0.42,0.31,0.0,-0.3,0.0). These values correspond to Material, Read more…
Last week, I went over several papers in the area of Biased Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Fairness Criteria. I also brainstormed several possible next steps for research. After talking with CJ on Monday, we decided that the second option was the most promising – extending the ideas behind this paper Read more…
It has been a very fun six weeks in the States Chess Cup. We’ve had a lot of great chess being played, with no shortage of upsets and nerve-wracking finishes! Here’s a quick update on the playoff picture for the league heading into the final week of the regular season. Read more…
Introduction In the last three months, I’ve run twelve USCF rated tournaments online and many more unrated tournaments, as COVID-19 has put all of our OTB tournaments on hold. Our biggest event so far had over 200 players, and a $2500 prize fund! In this post, I’ll give a quick Read more…