Show HN: We used 890M chess games to make an interactive opening graph

Oooh, this would be really useful for debugging minmax and other search algorithms if you can increase it to encompass the whole game. Congrats on shipping! What stack are you using?

cool tool. is the source code available?

For anyone else like me who knows a little about chess but was wondering what a "transposition" is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_(chess)

When I first looked at the website, I thought that it looked like a nice student assignment or a weekend project. But seeing that you are already attempting to monetize this website and that you are treating this somewhat seriously, I have to tell you that your software is lightyears behind the chess opening modules of professional chess software such as ChessBase 15 or Chess Assistant 12.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/announcing-grand-chessbase-15-...

https://chessok.com/?page_id=19894

Stuff that I found by clicking ..

1. click one of the "Connections" in the lower right to advance through a game.

2. click the copy symbol to the right of the board to copy as FEN

This might have been added since your comment, but for me it had a popup that told me to double click a node to expand it on first load.

There are a few ways I find the graph representation of openings to be interesting:

You can naturally view transpositions in a way that can be tricky with other opening explorers. I find coloring moves by player rating to be very helpful for spotting obscure moves better players make (Black-White win rate can be less helpful as good players play each other so win rates don't change much). I also just find it more fun to look at a graph than a standard opening explorer, so find myself exploring openings I otherwise would not have looked at.

It's a toy compared to serious chess database software.

It looks like it only goes about 6 moves deep and often only considers the most popular moves. For example, after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3, reaching one of the most popular positions in all chess, it only continues with 6...e5. Chessbase mobile shows 42k games for 6...e5 and 25k for 6...e6, as well as 17 other options, at least 3 of which are theoretically important. It also shows their statistical score and some stats about the strength of the players who chose each move. A couple of taps away are the full games and a computer analysis on my phone: on the desktop app I'd also have crowdsourced evaluations with up to three different engines at depths my phone would take all day to reach.

I see the warning to try it on tablet or desktop for the best experience, and maybe I'm missing some features I need to see later. But for now I don't think this even offers a cool visualization. I'd be interested to see a competitor here, but the state of the art (lichess, Chessbase, chessgames, chess24, Scid) is around 10 years ahead of this.

Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of adding position evaluations. Perhaps we could do this with a precomputed pass over the dataset, or possibly do a shallow analysis in the browser using a js port of stockfish, though this is probably not the best option.

I am not suspicious :). I have taught my son to avoid the fried liver attack as black, but he has often walked into it and lost.

You're very likely correct. The Lichess dataset that we have used contains almost all live games played on the site. As fast time controls seem to be more popular on Lichess generally, and take less time to play, we do see a lot more of these in the data. If you'd like to filter the dataset to different time controls or skill levels, you can click the graph button at the top of the page, then click dataset from the drop-down.

Nice Finegold call-out btw.

Also it's "Elo", not "ELO" (it's not an acronym).

Lichess already has it inbuilt and in realtime. Just head into the analytics and then click on opening explorer.

Our website is designed to be a more general viewer for these interesting chess datasets, although our main database is the Lichess one because of its size, we do also have other datasets from tournament games, and from chess engines playing against each other. We are not directly associated with Lichess.

Far from it. You'll need to know, at a mininum, some Javascript and a database technology such as SQL. But it's good to start with being able to make a web page in HTML and figure out how to add new small features one at a time, learning new technologies as they come up.