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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering what the cost per game is on lichess, and fortunately the linked spreadsheet includes the answer: lichess currently runs at a cost of $0.00022 per game (4545 games to the dollar).

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That's good to know. I've played 12,316 games on lichess so almost $3 worth. Might donate $10 or so soon.

Do you computer-analyze your games?

One stockfish computer analysis must cost more than merely playing 1,000 unanalyzed games.

You're downloading the engine from the Lichess server but the analysis is done on your computer, with your resources.

Computer analyses are done on a distributed network called fishnet[0], not locally

0: https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

Except fishnet is used to analyze broadcasted games, puzzle discovery and others. Not used when analyzing your own games. You can easily test this by opening your task manager, monitoring your CPU usage, then opening a game you played on Lichess and toggling the aptly named "local evaluation". It's the toggle bar on the upper right, next to the text "Stockfish 14+ NNUE in local browser". You will see your CPU usage increase while the evaluation is on.

That is true when you’re playing in your browser. On the mobile app (at least the iOS version) you can request computer analysis for your game done on the server.

You can request server analysis for your own games, up to 40 per day. They use fishnet.

No, that is an analysis of a single position, not a game. The big button under every game which says "Request Computer Analysis" is done on fishnet as well, it literally says "Stockfish 14.1 server analysis".

<sarcasm> So ... time to implement fishcoins?</sarcasm>

Analyzing a chess game or two is not exactly easily verifiable, but it should be somehow possible to shoehorn that into a proof of work thing.

Only if you toggle local-evaluation in the analysis board. When you "request a computer analysis", the computation is done by fishnet [1] on volunteers' hardware.

[1] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

But can you request a computer analysis with fishnet anymore? I have a non-patron account and I can't find that option anywhere. Old forum posts seem to talk about it working by pressing Z and being limited, but when I press Z I get a message that it is disabled by default and a link to enable it. When pressing to enable, nothing happens.

It's been a while since I used Lichess anonymously, but I suspect you do need an account to request a server analysis – that way they can limit the number of analyses per day for a user [1].

[1] 40 a day per https://lichess.org/features

You don't need to be a patron, you just need an account. One of the many amazing things about lichess is it's 100% free and donators get no extra privileges except a little logo next to their user

Stockfish runs in your own browser using your own CPU.

Not if you do a game analysis

I think Stockfish usually runs clientside but it does look like they do some server side too

https://lichess.org/blog/YOCx7hIAACUAgsUo/stockfish-14-has-a...

For this reason I wish I could run something locally to generate the same analysis UI and therefore not put any load on the Lichess servers.

I do run a computer analysis on maybe 10% of games, but I also participate in fishnet (explained elsewhere in this thread) on a local machine so that hopefully offsets it

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