Show HN: A simple but effective chess engine in JavaScript

lichess.org

3 points·zamfofex··3 comments

Hello, HN! This is a chess bot I have been working on sporadically for several months now. https://github.com/zamfofex/dummyette

From the very beginning, I wanted to make it simplistic in approach, so the AI algorithm isn’t very complicated. I wanted to balance strength and simplicity, and I think I’m very happy with the results!

My hope is that it can be fun to play for begginers and intermidiate players! It was meant to be played by humans rather than to play against machines.

It can also be used as a library, and I put a lot of effort on thoroughly documenting its API. It isn’t a fixed API, and it follows a “rolling release” approach, but I try to avoid making breaking changes unless I have a good reason for it.

I wrote a post about it in the Computer Chess Club forums a while back, but people didn’t seem so interested about it there: https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=79379 Again, it isn’t a particularly strong or innovative approach, but I am happy with how it turned out!

It was interesting to play against, but it got stuck into a threefold repetition and the match ended in a draw, maybe do something to detect move cycles.

More so than not detecting threefold repetition, it is actually not good at endgames in general, very frequently struggling to find checkmates more than just a few plies deep. I’ve heard anecdotes from friends that played it, where they were able to converge from a losing position during the late middlegame or the endgame.

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