100M games played | Hacker News Reader

100M games played

en.lichess.org

229 pointsSanderMak72 comments

The punch card graph for the Open Source engine behind Lichess that he wrote is... impressive! https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/punch-card

This whole project is impressive! Programming, community managing, marketing, etc, it seems this guy is working full time on that site. But what is the business plan?

To quote happy0: "the plan is to avoid business!"

For more info, see http://lichess.org/blog/U4skkUQAAEAAhIGz/why-is-lichess-free

Also note that we suck at marketing, but it doesn't matter, since we don't do it at all.

I'm a tournament Scrabble player and I want to do this for Scrabble. The only choices we have are a very buggy and crappy phone app, made by EA (missing tons of words) that only allows correspondence play, and a client written in something like Java 5 and hosted on some computer in Romania (http://www.isc.ro) to avoid the copyright issue. The latter recently crashed and wiped out about a year of data because presumably the maintainer did not do backups. I can't even use it because I'd have to downgrade Java on my computer.

There are great open source tools out there for analyzing/simulating games that can be hooked up to the proposed site (http://quackle.org for example). Both of the aforementioned programs (the EA one, and ISC) have very elementary analysis with nothing close to look-ahead.

I've written a study server at aerolith.org using HTML5/new technologies and am going to add multiplayer soon with Websockets. My time is very limited due to my job, but I'd be willing to help with an effort to recreate something like this amazing site for Scrabble. But again the main issue is the copyright/trademark issue, and the fact that EA has the rights to online Scrabble in North America. If anyone has any ideas it would be awesome.

Words with friends worked around it by simply using a different name. Also, see this https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/e...

The board and tile distribution of WWF are inferior, as is the dictionary. I'd love to use the original game.

You might run into copyright / trademark issues if you use the name 'Scrabble' anywhere though, FYI

Correct, but I can call it Crossword Game or something like that. The issue is that the word list may or may not be copyrighted (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2014/09/major_scra...), and that if I use the exact same tile distribution and board configuration I can still be sued. Hell, Hasbro could still C&D if they wanted to even if I'm not infringing at all. But there is no body that owns chess.

Take the existing list and add a sixteen-character word to it.

I've been slowly working on a scrabble web app in my free time very much inspired by lichess (I've actually contributed a couple of features to lichess) over at https://github.com/Happy0/liscrabble. However, I hadn't intended to do a public deployment of it due to the legal issues that others have already mentioned. I've just been doing it to learn more haskell and to try and get comfortable with front end stuff.

Excellent site! Congratulations!

The only site I ever visit while I work.

Whenever I get stuck on something (multiple times per day), I take a lichess break. If I win, I feel better and get back to work. I never lose because as soon as the computer catches me with a fork or a pin, I angrily close my browser and get back to work. Either way it's good.

"The only site I ever visit while I work." -- edw519

That's the best testimonial I ever read about lichess. Permission to quote requested.

Permission to quote requested.

Absolutely.

> The only site I ever visit while I work.

You never Google stuff for your work? Never read online reference manuals / docs, like cppreference.com, docs.python.org or whatever language rocks your boat?

I am thoroughly addicted to watching John Bartholomew's lichess bullet tournaments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdP7iIsGOU&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6...

You can't go wrong watching Fins play in those lichess tourneys. Great combo!

same

Ha, I remember that some years ago I've found a silly bug that allowed you to take over white's session and play for him by just changing the url token (lichess.org/<token>). I had my fun for a handful of games, then reported it. Unfortunately, I don't know anymore why or how it worked - Maybe the creator can remember and explain it :). Crazy, how the UX changed over the years. Good job!

Haha I remember that one! A very, very nasty mistake from me. Lichess was comparing your token to black token, and if it didn't match, it was just assuming that you were the white player. How silly :D

I must mention that it was fixed, indeed, years ago.

Wow, congrats @ornicar!

Is that comment that lichess.org is the second largest chess site on the web true?

I was happy to learn of its existence last year when you mentioned on twitter that you were using Mithril.js, and I never realized how big lichess had become since then.

Great work!

According to Alexa, it is. And by far. http://chess-links.org/

I don't play as much chess that much anymore, but ICC (chessclub.com) was the king (and I'd guess that it still is).

You don't play via the website though. Same for other chess servers (FICS, etc).

I came across lichess last year, incredible site with a good stack: Scala, Play framework and mithril.js for the client. Now please implement the top 64 chess variants, like 5x6 chess or chess for 4 players, or modern day abstracts like Dvonn, Arimaa (not AI resistant anymore), Hive, Canon, The Duke, Tash-Kalar, Neuroshima Hex or Taj Mahal.

I play on Chess.com a lot. I want to move to Lichess - in large part because it doesn't spam me with requests to sign up - but the matchmaking system is much harder to use.

On Chess.com I can log on and click a "find me a 10+0 game" and I just get a game. On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list. It's a huge mental barrier on "playing a quick game of chess".

I also really wish that the chess UI on lichess showed me what pieces each player had captured. It seems to.. sometimes.. but not always, which is confusing. They constantly disappear. Also, the pieces that show up above/below the move list on the right side both appear as black pieces (when they actually show up), rather than of the appropriate color, so the display could be read as both "pieces you have captured" and "pieces you have lost". I'm sure I could get used to this but it's confusing as a new user.

"On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list."

Or you can just host a game and wait for someone to find you?

Indeed. Lichess also does autopairing, so when someone else creates a 10+10 game, you'll get paired without anyone needing to scan the seek list.

I haven't used Lichess much, so I hadn't discovered this. It's not very obvious as far as I can tell. I hope that it would also do matchmaking approximately based on rating?

(Though, as I mentioned, I still don't trust my rating at all since my first ranked win gave me 150 rating points. Chess.com's give closer to 8-20, as I recall, which is much more credible. Specifically, I don't trust that my rating varied by 150 in one game, but the range of ratings I see on the front page is only about 1500-1800.. so it seems as though I just skipped almost the entire range in a single game.)

That's because you have a provisional rating for the first few games (it should show up as 1553? or 1250?). Your rating will swing for the first 15-20 games, at which point you'll see the 8-20 fluctuation.

It's likely that you've played quite a few games on Chess.com already.

I have played a lot on Chess.com. Perhaps they did the same thing and I forgot - not sure. Nevertheless, I'm calling it because I found it offputting when I tried to switch to Lichess.

And get paired over and over again with 1900s trying to up their rating beating 1200s?

No thanks.

1. You can't up your rating beating players 400+ rating below you. The ELO system just do not allow it, you are gonna start winning zero points per win.

2. Playing against stronger players is not that bad, this a way to became a stronger player.

Or, I could just play on chess.com and not have to deal with it.

Just a general tip on improving in chess; Always evaluate the material situation by looking at what's on the board, never by what's off it. This extends naturally to properly evaluating exchanges. Ignore the relative merits of the pieces being captured and focus on the relative merits of the pieces left on the board. I agree that if there's a feature that displays the captured pieces it should work properly (even though I think it's a useless feature).

I know about that and don't normally rely on the list of captured pieces in regular games. But, online I mostly play speed chess and play in parallel with other activities in my browser, so getting quick information about the board (or what changed between this turn and the last) is very useful.

On Lichess, you can just click on Create a Game and select the rating range you want, this is pretty much a standard feature of all top chess sites.

A standard feature of all ladder-based competitive systems that I know of (video games, etc), is automatic matchmaking. Chess.com has it and Lichess does not, and that's keeping me from wanting to switch to Lichess.

I don't really want to have to select rating ranges. I don't know what ratings to play against, and I definitely don't want to think about it every time I make a game.

God how I love it when there's no login barrier to try. Awesome site!

Yes! I haven't played chess in years and for me these training sessions are a perfect way to slowly get back into chess.

Wow, this actually looks leaps and bounds better than the UX horror that I find Chess.com to be.

Lichess is awesome, and their mobile app (atleast on iOS) is very good as well.

I have not played chess for some years, but just wanted to say congratulations especially for making (and keeping!) the site free without the usual upsells and tiered accounts where you get only X problems a day free and so on, thanks for your effort!

Does anyone know a good site to play chinese chess?

Go?

I'm half-joking but hey, that would seriously be awesome. Talking mainly about ease of use.

It would be awesome to have a website that's as easy to use as lichess for xiangqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go). The existing internet servers for them aren't as full-featured or user friendly.

I've played at https://online-go.com and it's a much nicer interface than native clients have.

That's a different game than Chinese chess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi).

The comment user Jach was responding to specifically mentions both xianqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go).

Same goes for Othello/Reversi. A nice server for that would be fantastic!

Or Shogi.

Go?

Pandanet

I wonder how these kinda models work. I think that over time, while the userbase / costs increases, the donations won't increase as much / decrease. Is this true?

The website exists for more than 3 years, today we are the 7th of October and the donations are already at 100% for the whole month. It's arguably sustainable enough.

On a quick glance, I didn't even find a donation button. In fact, I found none, even after clicking through the menus (google sent me here: http://de.lichess.org/donate ).

I'm sure I'm not alone in donating just to ensure that development continues and it remains free for others to use. I don't get a chance to play many games a month but it's nice knowing that others will be able to get better at chess using their platform. Hope it continues to get more higher-ranked players playing there.

Now that you have such a huge dataset, do you have any plans to make use of it in interesting ways? For example an opening popularity browser, or a puzzle generator?

They already use it for a puzzle generator which ranks their own puzzles against players with endgames mined from their games.

This doesn't require a huge database, but as interesting use, the games are used to generate chess-themed CAPTCHAs, example here: http://en.lichess.org/signup

Sad to report, that most computers are a lot better at solving that CAPTCHA than I am.

They do really cool stuff with with data, including puzzle generation. lichess is worth checking out.

lichess has a nice clean interface and it is a joy to play on it and also it is nice to have easily exportable games (i am looking at you chess.com!)

The one problem with everything free philosophy and relying on donations is that top players are unlikely to play on the site (see FICS vs ICC battles of early 90s where ICC by paying and giving affiliate sales quickly rose to be the dominant force in early net chess despite the questionable morality of taking over original ICS).

This presents a problem for someone who has problems getting a good game on lichess.

At 2400 on lichess, I either have to play masses of 2100-2200s or computer cheaters. As an FM I've played a few FMs and I think one IM on lichess.

On commercial sites (the top 3 being chess.com, ICC, and Playchess) there are incentives to bring in GM caliber players.

Again, if you just want a good amateur game, then lichess is a fine choice.

Please fix your content load priorities, or sub a standard font before the web font is ready. This is how the page looks for the first 8 seconds on mobile: http://m.imgur.com/rKmzqvJ

Nice, Just now closed lichess tab and opened HN and found this :) Its one of the addictive sites

Thanks a lot for a great service! Did not know it was just a single developer, I'd much rather donate to this than pay for ICC. In fact I just did.

Amazing achievement to have everything running so smooth. Obviously not the site for me as I have no idea how to complete chess captcha!

How is lichess different/better from other chess websites? (I had not heard of the site, I play chess so very rarely).

Well it's open source (https://github.com/ornicar/lila), and all features are for free, forever, without any ads. That certainly puts it apart form other chess services I know.

1) The UI+UX is superior, 2) it evolves very quickly, often as a response to user requests, 3) it is entirely free/follows a libre philosophy. The importance of point 3) varies between individuals. Where the competition shines is in the presence of top/titled players, but even there lichess is progressing quickly.

This is such a great websites. Very impressed as a chess amateur/medium skills that how well the site fits the purpose.

Very well done!

Congrats on all of your progress! I remember being one of the first masters to use Lichess and I absolutely loved it.

Love lichess! Hope to see it grow even bigger soon :) probably 500M games played by new year or so >:P

Nice work! Consider it as 100,000,001 games played now on my account. :)

Congrats buddy on your achievement!

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