Hacker News Reader

Really glad to see a few projects like this recently. For teaching it's _so_ good to be able to quickly help kids analyze a position (even when you have no real right to be teaching people chess) without blundering. I do think the loop needs to be closed with better, more explainable chess engine analyses on the other side though, but this is fantastic for a hackathon project!

View on HN

So, as we think about making this into a production app, a feature you’d request is the ability for a user to add input as to why a given move is being suggested?

At present, we’re simply outputting the recommended move from StockFish, which also does give a “Why.” Perhaps letting users add that commentary in the app sufficiently solves that need.

Oh I'm not sure I'm making a practical suggestion here, I think it's a tremendously hard problem to humanize engine outputs (quite often the answer is just "because otherwise in five moves you lose your knight" etc). Some people have attempted this:

https://decodechess.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com