101 karma · joined April 11, 2023
Classical is 562nd of 960 by score so far. The article did not make that clear, which is on me.
The reason is simple. I built this because I wanted the answer for myself. I still don't know if it is useful to anyone else. So I put my effort into running the tournament and almost none into writing about it. Clearly that shows.
The tournament is real. Stockfish 15.1 with NNUE turned off, same time control and same hardware for every game. 460,800 games played, 921,600 total. No model touched the numbers.
The cause wasn't time pressure (0.5s per move), but a logical bug in the system: although castling was technically possible, the engine failed to recognize valid conditions during play. This distorted the data significantly, as castling is a key strategic element, especially in asymmetric setups.
The bug has now been found and fixed. A full restart with clean data is planned. The time control will be increased from 0.5s to 1 second per move — improving stability and evaluation quality, though the core issue was logical, not temporal.
The project is open-source — code is available for anyone to run longer sessions (5s, 30s, 1min+) to study position balance and fairness.
Upcoming features include online multiplayer with custom starting positions, and later, a hidden pieces mode (in development), where only pawns are shown, and players must scout to discover the true location of enemy pieces.
Brief downtime may occur in 1–2 days due to an IP address change. Feedback welcome, especially from those interested in chess asymmetry, engine-driven analysis, and novel game design.