I Ran a Chess Programming Tournament, Here's How it Went!

[@SebastianLague]

Hey everyone, I’m excited to finally share the results from the chess coding challenge. Thank you so much to everyone who took part, and sorry about the long wait! Spoilers ahead... There's now a rating list available for all the bots in the tournament, which you can find over here: github.com/SebLague/Tiny-Chess-Bot-Challenge-Results/blob/main/RatingsList.txt I've also made a little game where you can play against a selection of these tiny bots from ~200 ELO all the way up to grandmaster level: sebastian.itch.io/tiny-chess-bots

[@SaharshDev]

FINALLY!

[@thecalculatedcreativecoder1428]

Don't be sorry. Thank you for this challenge. It really helped me improve as a programmer. I look forward to any future challenges you have!!!

[@realmarsastro]

Love you, man. Take the time you need, I'd rather have 1 quality video from you per year than 30 rushed videos

[@thatprogramer]

You are a inspiration!

[@rowburt]

thank you for hosting this competition, it was a lot of fun!

[@Visiorex]

My Average Joe bot placed in the middle. I have never been so proud of my assessment of something in my entire life. Average Joe was average! 🎉

[@SebastianLague]

Haha nice!

[@opticalreticle]

Who's Joe?

[@jrmunro111]

​@@opticalreticlejoe mama

[@cyberneticsquid]

Perfectly average 😎

[@mcbot6291]

That's the median...

[@Lishtenbird]

Bad Apple was definitely not on the list of things I expected to see in a chess coding challenge.

[@Citrus_-ff7qf]

As soon as i heard the name i jumped up and said no freaking way!

[@catgirlQueer]

it should have been, whenever there's any coding challenge you should expect bad apple

[@Loev06]

Haha thanks! I'm the author and when I started with this challenge I was also definitely not expecting to be coding a Bad Apple chess bot :)

[@zombie_pigdragon]

Touhou hijack (lol) once again

[@SirusStarTV]

15:06

[@boatbomber]

I made a PacifistBot that never attacks unless it's the only valid move- surprisingly, it loses

[@Rotem_S]

Still wins against bad apple though!

[@aceman0000099]

Moral victory though.

[@cyberneticsquid]

@@Rotem_SActually would it win against Bad Apple? The Bad Apple bot is still one that makes valid chess moves, and isn't programmed to avoid captures. It might end up in a situation where the first valid move is actually beneficial.

[@EriksV99]

@@cyberneticsquid But Bad Apple bot doesn't make valid chess moves, it just timeouts at their move. The games it managed to win was against bots that managed to lose before Bad Apple bots first move (when it was black and their opponent either timeouted or made illegal move as their first move).

[@davutsauze8319]

It's because nice guys finish last :( If there was even just a single sensible chess bot girl who would accept such as nice gentleman for who he really is your bot would've outcompeted everyone

[@Bassalicious]

King Gambot IV wins my "viewer's favourite" vote without a shadow of a doubt. What a mad lad.

[@namAehT]

I wonder if it did so well because most bots seem to be programmed to seek out checks at all costs, effectively using its king as bait to mop up "poorly" programmed opponents.

[@Bassalicious]

@@namAehT Not adhering to the behaviour that resulted in the training data and tuning yeah. When it didn't stun-lock opponents it still did pretty well too and kept the king kind of tight. It's just so bold and getting away with it, I love it

[@WaluigiisthekingASmith]

If the king does not lead, how can he expect his subordinates to follow

[@dzuchun]

- my lord, we've lost our queen - WHO CARES? WHOHOOO!! 🎉🎉

[@DingleFlop]

The fact that this strategy worked at all is really awesome. All of these bots are trained to make strong decisions against strong bots, so the change in strategy to have a suicidal king seems to have thrown them off their game a bit, hahaha!

[@erwanfagnou9511]

Hey, i'm ErwanF (200 tokens monstrosity :p), thanks a lot for this tournament!!! That was huge, really.

[@kevinv19900]

Well done Erwan :) you did well

[@user-dh8oi2mk4f]

Congrats! Your engine was really good for 200 tokens

[@DEMEMZEA]

Huge unlike your bot lmao ( this is not supposed to be offensive, sorry if it did )

[@nemikuuro]

@@DEMEMZEA :D

[@Li0nhunter]

It’s kind of scary how good your bot was within the confines of your extra challenge. Kinda makes me wonder how much better a bot that used your level of optimization would do if it used the full 1024 limit.

[@smort123]

56:20: > Promote pawn to bishop for maximum disrespect > Do not elaborate > Win game

[@bargledargle7941]

That's hilarious

[@trevorcarlson4348]

if you promote to a queen, you'll lose it. The bot is disincentivized from losing points, so promoting to a bishop is the best move.

[@shieldgenerator7]

what a taunt

[@LeeAnnC]

I love this

[@nikotheoneshot]

boychesser being completely and utterly amazing once again

[@popax6658]

As one of the two devs of TinyHugeBot: this tournament was a lot of fun, even if we might not have approached it in the intended way ;) We actually expected to get disqualified or completely crushed by bots made by people who actually know what they are doing, so it's great to hear we got 13th place! Huge thanks again to Sebastian for hosting the tournament, and to everyone who submitted a bot (it's a lot more work than it appears to be from the outside!)

[@RichConnerGMN]

hi

[@AuroraAquir]

Seeing a familiar name was amazing and of course you two end up doing it by creating some c# black magic! Absolutely incredible

[@RoyRope]

Nice way of thinking out of the box.

[@oliviapg]

It was a lot of fun following your progress!

[@GammaRadiation]

congrats popax

[@rumengol529]

The Electric shock gambit is my favorite, I love the idea of (virtually) tasing your opponent as a way to ensure victory

[@matroqueta6825]

same, I'm sad that the approach did not work as intendd but the intent made it win my heart

[@Loev06]

Thanks for this challenge! I'm the author of BadAppleBot and LoevBot. It was really fun to come up with my own challenge to compress as much data as possible for the video, and I was stoked to see my serious bot perform so well in the competition! (30th place)

[@SebastianLague]

Great entries - thanks for taking part!

[@youpvl]

You mad man!!

[@KellyWu04]

You’ve sandwiched almost the entire competition!

[@josiahjack455]

Epic that both your bots did so well, in how they played and in what they accomplished.

[@m_affiliates]

i wonder if loevbot and badapplebot played against each other at any point

[@i_Soar]

King Gambot IV reaching the knockout stage is honestly incredibly impressive

[@lev7509]

It's really interesting how it combines a gimmick (bold king) with genuine hard chess bot design

[@castur_]

My bot, "The Copycat", got 581st, which is actually better than I had anticipated! It always tries to replicate the opponent's move as closely as possible (hence the name) so it was really quite easy to beat it once you knew that, but I suppose it could be a bit confusing for the other bots who didn't know its strategy. This was fun! Thanks for hosting ^^

[@multiarray2320]

very creative idea. i love it!

[@aceman0000099]

I was imagining a bot like that would be fun

[@vastabyss6496]

I don't know if you're already aware of this, but this challenge has created a new community and connected people who otherwise wouldn't have had ever known each other. It's also encouraged more people (like myself) to try to learn more about game-playing AI and programming in general. I just want to thank you for this and the community you've created, it's been a pleasure participating in this challenge. Congrats to everyone who attempted building a Chess bot!

[@SebastianLague]

That’s wonderful to hear, thank you!

[@Drakenfeld]

@vastabyss6496 Do you use Unity C# and make games? or are you just wanting to learn to make games ? I'm in the sorta same boat, looking for people to work with and finish a project.

[@vastabyss6496]

@@Drakenfeld I'm not really the right person to ask since I don't really make games lol. I'm much more into the AI stuff than the actual game dev stuff (not to say that game development isn't fun, it's just not my main point of interest). PyGame can be nice though if you're working with deep learning and you don't care about game performance and you just want a decent testing ground for your models, since you can use Tensorflow and PyTorch. It all depends on your specific project needs.

[@Drakenfeld]

@@vastabyss6496 tbh i have never used python before or learnt how, only coding language i can use is C#, though i kinda do want to get into more AI related things to make games with. such as auto genarate storys, map npc ect

[@AureliusAurelius]

Where does this community hang out? Is there a subreddit or something?

[@Julzaa]

The 200 tokens monstrosity is indeed a monstrosity of token optimization, love to see it

[@JetzYT]

Hi, I'm Nathan and made Onion (14th in Swiss). This was my first experience with computer chess and was a ton of fun. Shoutout to everyone from the discord for such a great community!

[@SebastianLague]

Great work, thanks for taking part!

[@nick1752]

Nice first experience, you are a genius.

[@paulpruenster5884]

Damn the garbage collector one (Electric shockwave gambit) blew my mind. Nicely done

[@LagMasterSam]

New flagging strategy just dropped.

[@MaskedDeath_]

You can try the strategy in real life by just shocking your opponent with a taser during an OTB game. Might get you arrested though.

[@HemanthKumar-mx1mw]

@@LagMasterSam Holy hell

[@muenstercheese]

truly 5d chess

[@tolbryntheix4135]

@@MaskedDeath_ Just use the thermonuclear gambit then. No police or military left to arrest you afterwards. No you left to arrest afterwards either though I guess.

[@mitigatedrisk4264]

King Gambot IV is the winner in my heart. I love the whole "best version of a bad strategy" dynamic, and I would have loved to see more, but of course, that wasn't the point of this competition, and I'm even not sure how you could structure a competition to encourage that kind of thing.

[@shieldgenerator7]

it would be fun to play a tournament where the king has a shield that captures the piece that tries to capture it, thus making it so you have to checkmate twice. it would encourage more king gambot bots

[@SeanCMonahan]

You could introduce a random chance that any given move will be replaced by a king push. Or require the engines to move their king at least once every _n_ moves, maybe disallowing it from returning to a square it recently visited (unless there are no valid alternative moves). Or have a battle royale kind of setup where there's a shrinking safe zone the king must remain within, forcing them to move towards the middle of the board as the game progresses.

[@МихаилЧалый-щ3ж]

Top 2 engines have some serious names involved. CJ is a stockfish contribrutor and has contributions to a lot of other engines (alexandria, stash, etc). MinusKelvin is a dev of FrozenNight. Basically pretty established engine devs who were in this area long before this challenge even existing :) No wonder they finished at top. Also to no surprise they use common "try and try again" approach based on statistics because this is how you develop modern chess engines and they have a lot of experience with it. Probably if you could get stockfish team / torch team into this it would produce even more epic things, I would guess that smth like 3000 CCRL is barely doable with this code size, but it will require gigantic amount of testing.

[@Hack--rz1io]

It was pretty fun recognizing some names in there I knew MinusKelvin from his work on Tetris bots and I didn't know until today they're also into chess !

[@TheThirdPrice]

Holy moly, using the disposal function to gain functionality is genius

[@blockmath_2048]

using the disposal function to *attempt to stall the opposing bot and make it lose on time* no less

[@octoBadger]

Yeah, that was choice lateral thinking - eat your enemy's CPU cycles... Love it!

[@jasper7439]

I kinda wish it worked lol

[@ashutoshsamantaray6596]

Definitely my favorite entry, felt like a convoluted anime protag's strategy, but in real life it failed :(

[@stewartzayat7526]

It's the equivalent of a player comstantly distracting their opponent during their turn so that they cannot focus. I love it!

[@Tesl8n]

Very impressive work making a compelling narrative out of this whole thing that really adhered to all the various things that viewers might have wanted - highlighting the creative & strange bots, showing the top results, creating fan favorites to root for, etc. I can't imagine how hard scripting this had to have been, but it turned out incredibly well, excellent work!

[@SebastianLague]

Thank you, it was a tough one for sure!

[@GabrielB-cg8rj]

Brilliant video. Good job, and I hope you do something like this again!

[@pavelmatusu4457]

16:12 For anyone who wonders what Bad Apple is. Bad Apple was originaly a soundtrack in a fourth game in the Touhou series (1998). In the year 2007 a singer named Nomico created a cover known today. The black and white video that usually comes with the song was animated by fans. The characters shown in the video are characters from Touhou series.

[@ComfyCherry]

king gambot is basically constantly baiting out the other bots, pretty interesting how effective that was

[@PatrickHoodDaniel]

I am humbled by the skill submitted to this project. The worst of these attempts are miles ahead of what I would dream of creating.

[@snowfloofcathug]

On the other hand, plenty of people with bots in the top half have said the same thing! You’d do better than you think, if you just put your mind to it :)

[@PatrickHoodDaniel]

@@snowfloofcathug I guess I could, but I program every day! When you pass 54, the brain melts.

[@minuskelvin3619]

That was fun, thanks for hosting the tournament! Now, I need to make sure ice4 is ready for the third TCEC 4k in a week...

[@lavendeerpuyotet4813]

Hey! It was cool to see you here! I will never forget the person who made cold clear.

[@Redstonewilli]

Seeing "Boychesser" crush your bot at the end of the video made my jaw drop. I expected these tiny bots to be a lot worse than that. Congrats to all participants!

[@SaharshDev]

I'm the one who made Dream (42nd in Swiss) and I'm really proud of myself that it came that far! I expected way less because of the amount of competition. It was a great experience about Computer Chess and C# overall!

[@0-Kirby-0]

I'd have loved to see Boychesser fight Stockfish. It'll obviously lose, but I'm curious just how close to industry standard "perfection" it can get, while being so much smaller.

[@reconnecting5426]

On the CCRL rating list, Stockfish is at more than 3500 and Boychesser at about 2750, so it would still hardly ever draw a game, maybe like 3 in a thousand. Still absolutely impressive, what they pulled off!

[@Hjelp-xr5ov]

Yes i would have loved to see the top bots fighting against stockfish of different strength, eg like in Tom7's chess video to see their strength

[@orangepacker7479]

@@reconnecting5426I was looking for it’s rating! Thanks Super GM level with all the limitations is crazy

[@eb4841]

@reconnecting5426 ​If it is the case, then Boychesser is close to GM level. So it would be more fun to see Magnus Carlsen play against it or any other GM actually.

[@Frank_Lee_Terrible]

​@@reconnecting54262750?? Holy hell

[@wincentholm]

Thanks for showing off ILVM, put a lot of effort into it 😀 Great challenge! ❤️

[@popax6658]

Huge props for actually going through the effort to make and submit ILVM, it's an amazing bot (and one of my favorite submissions, next to ESG)! We initially had a similar concept before THB, but decided against it since we didn't think that a reasonable VM implementation + search algorithm would fit into the token limit, so congrats on actually getting it to work!

[@josiahjack455]

This idea is on a whole nother level. Absolutely floored by what you accomplished and by how good it was. Amazing!

[@strangejune]

One of my first ideas for compressing beyond the token limit would be writing a VM. I love this entry, and good work actually doing it!

[@starvoid_official]

I got 567 place! Yay. I'm happy, considering the fact that it was my first programming challenge. Good video and thanks for this opportunity!

[@PatrickHoodDaniel]

Yes, I do like chessing boys! By the way, I also added similar hidden HEX strings to be decoded by my viewers and I planted them in the description; however, not a single person noticed, and the HEX spoke of a giveaway, so nobody got anything. I was pulling for you at the end!!

[@ThatGuy_33]

You should do a part two, where all of the disqualified bots play against each other. I’d be interested to see how much of an advantage they actually have versus the bots that didn’t break the rules.

[@mads_in_zero]

Just like you test any programming language by asking "can it print Hello World", and eventually building up to "can it run Doom", if something has an image display, it's inevitable that you'll evolve from using a standard test image to asking "but can it display Bad Apple?" - it's like the Hello World of image and video display! The Bad Apple Music Video is a fan MV for a fan cover of a vocal cover of a video game song from the Touhou Project series (phew!). Touhou has a very vibrant and extensive fan content culture, which both explains why the music video is so popular to remake, and why the original got produced in the first place. It also helps that the Bad Apple MV has aged beautifully, despite being from 2009. The shadow-art artstyle, seamless transitions between scenes (and strong character designs from the original game series) means it still looks gorgeous, even today.

[@michael.chistyakov]

Great job Sebastian! Think about creating "tank wars". The playing field is (for example) 32 by 32 cells. Each tank occupies one cell. In one cycle, the tank can either turn, move, rotate the turret, or fire. The tank cannot travel beyond the boundaries of the playing field. It is possible that the size of the playing field will be proportional to the number of participating tanks. It is possible that the damage caused by a shot depends on the distance of the shot. Programmatically, “tank” is a function that receives its own data about the tank (position, rotation etc.) and an array of data about enemy tanks and shoots. At the output, the function returns the game action of the tank (shoot, turn, etc.) Shoot is an independent thing on a game field, moving by 1 cell length in needed direction each game frame. The idea is to have very simple game rules and mechanics to look at complex and winning algorithms. Also, the “tank function” can be written in any modern language. And, of course, after the matches, you will be able to visualize it very beautifully. Please support with a like so that Sebastian notices. Thank you and greetings from Siberia!

[@MayaPapaya497]

Oh that would be so cool! I imagine there are a ton of emergent strategies that would arise from the basic rules. Andit would be a little bit more accessible to understand for the average viewer (me)

[@jasiek511]

I’m so excited to see this video. Even though I don’t think my submission is included I feel like I was a part of the community during that challenge and I can’t wait to see the results and all the showcases. Don’t worry about the delay I’m sure the video is worth the wait!

[@jasiek511]

It actually made the cut! I’m the author of PeSTO compression, amazing challenge Seb 🎉

[@jukmifggugghposer]

Oh I'm only twenty minutes in but this is lovely. I love to see Bad Apple here. And the 200 Token Monstrosity is absolutely inspired - taking the log of available moves to detect checkmate is so very cool. This is great.

[@ryan-heath]

The ranks reveal was exciting. I was getting even more excited when I had not seen my bot and the last 100 had yet to be revealed. The bot even ended in the top 50 😂 Never would have excepted that 😎 Before this challenge I didn’t know about the large world of chess programming. So many theories and approaches exist. The token limit was a smart move. Great to see how many inventive bits were created! Thanks Sebastian! The was a great learning journey for me personally.

[@jaideepshekhar4621]

What was your bot?

[@ryan-heath]

@@jaideepshekhar4621The one with a question mark 😅 Though it is not a question mark, it is a unicode character for Delta. For some reason it displayed a ?

[@Vexurayr]

I wasn't confident enough to participate in this challenge, but watching what you do is truly inspiring, along with all the people we saw this video.

[@mikejameson7678]

Completely in the same boat. Congratulations to everyone who participated in this tourney; because I was unable to do so. And if you didn't - we, as a community, should create a challenge when the next generation of small bots are ready.

[@hartvenus]

I have major respect for you not shying away from technical details and longform video content so that we could enjoy a thorough analysis of this amazing tournament.

[@nopfp416]

I made the bot "LowEloBrain" which was one of the bots that only looked 1 move in the future as it was my first time using c# I didn't want it to be too difficult to make but also didn't want it to come last and gladly it didn't not sure if the bots in the video but it was nice trying c# and making something with it

[@Vextrove]

I love Sebastian Lague's videos. They're relaxing, educational, entertaining, interesting, enjoyable to watch

[@BGOPC]

Guys I just wanna thank Sebastian for all his hardworks He doesn't upload regularly but when he does it's banger It's fascinating to imagine how many long hours it took just for the games to be played He also checked each code Made it clear Read it Understand it And explain it to us Good work bud

[@Gosuminer]

I am blown away by the amount of work compiling this video must have taken. Thank you very much and also huge thanks to the developers of the submissions. There is so much to learn from this.

[@amaureaLua]

It would have been nice to see elo scores for these bots too! You could even calibrate it vs. Stockfish by using the "diluted stockfish" technique from suckerpinch's "Elo World" youtube video.

[@strangejune]

Check the community tab!

[@commentchannel5375]

1:16:51 lmao just when I thought you weren't going to acknowledge it "you like chessing boys don't you"

[@paris_mars]

Man, I love this channel so much. I was rewatching some of your videos last night and they're all just really amazing, beautifully made, and inspiring.

[@SebastianLague]

Thank you! :)

[@vladyslavkryvoruchko]

The best programming competition idea in the world! Would love to see more of those. Cheers!

[@s0meb0dy78]

I second this motion.

[@vastabyss6496]

The hype is real right now. I can't wait to see how things turned out!

[@frankhaugen]

I gave it a try, and have rarely felt so inadequate as a programmer before 😅

[@giacomotessera1054]

This challenge was very fun and engaging. My bot achieved a rank of 243, and as a university student, I'm genuinely pleased with the outcome. Gratitude goes to you for organizing such a rewarding challenge and for sharing inspirational coding videos on your channel. They've truly influenced my perspective on programming and studying with enthusiasm. Hope for more in the future! ;)

[@MattMajcan]

King Gambot was absolutely incredible. It honestly makes me question conventional wisdom about chess to see that thing perform that well

[@lofinightc0re36]

Love to see my bot Igris so high up on the list even if I just spent a day or two on it. Thank you Sebastian for such a great event will be looking forward for more in future

[@FloydMaxwell]

Surely this could be made into an entire computer chess programming course. Glorious.

[@shadowflamelightburst4503]

I really appreciate the small, but major detail that you don’t just spoil what bots are where in the “chapters” of this video, especially the finalist bots

[@Qfeys]

I got place 429! Better than expected, honestly. Especially considering that I looked nothing up about how modern chess engines work, so everything was from first principles. Pretty happy with the result.

[@Skystrike70]

Damn, code showcases are so much more interesting with this type of commentary, excellent video!!

[@N8thegr8erthnu]

Thanks for running this tournament!! I had so much fun building a bot even though it didn’t come close to first 😂. I ended up working on it as a school project and did a presentation on it :) I hope you will consider doing future events with other games or faerie chess!

[@slemsvamp]

Adding a comment both to help with the algorithm, your work is always so dang inspiring, and to say thank you for doing this! This was a very fun and interesting project, nice to see the results! :)

[@SebastianLague]

Thank you! :)

[@SaharshDev]

Finally! after months of waiting, can't wait to see how it went.

[@AntiVectorTV]

The little "podium" with a handful of confetti at the end was adorable!

[@GuillermoAa]

Excelent video. I'm always impressed by how you can make these more than an hour long videos with such elegant animations, really thought-out scripts and apretiation for the participants, watched it full without even noticing!

[@TejasIsAmazing]

This was fun to participate in! Seeing the different bots people made and the strategies they used was pretty cool. My own bot came at 322th place, but I did just give up on it after failing to figure out some implementation. But still, I wouldn't have even attempted, if you didn't provide any sort of API, which made the challanges a lot more interesting and fun.

[@NN-fx6oj]

This video is among my favorite KZbin videos of the year. It is so full of things to geek out about while being entertaining start to finish. Incredible effort and variety with those bots. Loved all the shenanigans that were snuck in, and the Electric Shockwave trick gave me a good laugh. Thank you to everyone and happy holidays.

[@qwerasdliop2810]

Electric Shockwave bot made me wheeze and left me with my mouth open, by far my favorite among all, it leveraged that it was against a bot perfectly, I think that's incredible really ahahhahah

[@bobbiesterling574]

out of all the videos ive watched in the last few months, this one has held my cat's attention the most, and so therefore this is the best youtube video in the last few months, because i cannot imagine a better metric than that

[@PatrikBergsten]

I love the sound of the pieces being placed on the board

[@Ahri--]

I am really blown away on how much about programming I don't know about. Some of these are just incredible only for the concept and then the entire chess algorithm (or bad apple) behind it. Really amazed about how you were able to explain them so clearly. Really huge props

[@LeeOades]

I had a go at this and it's pretty tricky. My solution was so mind-numbingly boring I didn't want to waste your time with it 😂. Looking forward to seeing some creative solutions. Thanks again!

[@stefanmilicevic5322]

That was insane! Huge applause for every participant, and a special applause for the top 3. Also, a big round of applause for you for hosting the tournament. The whole tournament was very informative and exciting.

[@meistermoehrchen]

Thank you for creating this challenge! Was a lot of fun to participate in and I would be happy to see other events like this in the future :) I am slightly confused how my second version of the bot, which is significantly stronger and has played 58 | 2 | 0 against the older version, hasn't come into the knockout stage, while the older version did. I guess I had somewhere a flaw against other bots which I've not recognized xD Nontheless; I am sure, that that one would not have come that much further ^^ Again Thank You

[@negativerainbow]

I just found this randomly in my feed, and I have to say this looks like it was a ton of fun. I've been trying to get motivated to start coding again for fun instead of just work, and these kinds of projects look like an amazing way to get people motivated to program something and give it a go!

[@officialbfi01]

This is a beautiful video of a fantastic event! I look forward to seeing what you do next!

[@zarpela]

ILVM was such a genius approach! Gets my fan favorite spot; Boychesser was amazing, never would’ve thought of just completely ignoring some moves.

[@strangejune]

Branch pruning is essential to chess engines that want maximum performance. You can use early judgements as well as heuristics to skip analyzing branches that you think are worse than a branch you've already seen.

[@snorkfr0ken]

The bishop promotion at 56:21 was just high class 😎

[@annorome]

The EletricShockWave part is sooo hilarious! 😂 As a Cybersecurity Student I am an absolute fan. As well as the TinyHugeBot. They basically used a technique that is normally used to decompress obfuscated virus code to run on a system and initially avoid detection via static analysis.^^

[@RealGhoda]

BadApple was so unexpected and so goofy i love it

[@Apes-With-Computers]

This was an awesome event. Thanks for running it! It was interesting seeing all of the different approaches taking, but the most surprising thing to me was all of the cooperation! Really awesome of the community. I hope to participate in future challenges if this is something you plan to host again!

[@alexandrebellanger9646]

Was happy to take part in this challenge, even if my bot didn't perform very well. Thank you Sebastian for making this !

[@mc.ivanov]

Amazing tournament! Thank you! I haven't submitted my bot, but I enjoyed spending a week working on it. It beats my friends, and that's what matters in the end.

[@kaisalmon1646]

MCTS works really well in situations with hidden information or randomness - where a minimax really struggles, since even the modifications (e.g. expecti-max) lose all the performance optimizations which make a/b pruned negamax so fast. I've used it for trading card game ai before and it works remarkable well

[@zelenpixel]

i dont know chess like at all but this was so fascinating. i love the tiny little confetti also shoutouts to some of the bot names ive seen here even if it didnt make it into finals i was basically cheering for 200 token monstrosity. go little guy go bad apple bot is incredible. hilarious. also i like how electric shockwave gambit just attempts to blast the other bots with slowdown spells even if it doesnt work, i get the ones that actually got a lot of wins are really impressive but i really like the gimmicky ones too from how they sound

[@JoshuaGutz]

If I could only ever watch one KZbin channel for the rest of time it would be yours. Keep it up!

[@JC-jz6rx]

This exceeded my expectations. I didn’t participate this time , but this certainly makes me want to give it a try. I’m a web developer , so I never have to use any of these fancy algorithms and such, but man does this make me want to try. Please do more of this style of video in the future.

[@kierkegaard54]

This has become my favorite KZbin channel... Just after 3B1B :) thank u Sebastian

[@acathosh]

I would love to see more community fucused content like this from your channel in the future. This was absolutely lovely!

[@sixbit_dev]

This challenge made me learn so much. I began thinking there was no way I could make a chess bot, but I ended up making a tutorial teaching basic minimax and alpha beta pruning :)

[@Citrus_-ff7qf]

If it's ok to share, what was your learning journey in detail, which documentation/books and materials have you started and ended etc...

[@sixbit_dev]

@@Citrus_-ff7qf I just watched a lot of KZbin videos on basic bots. Sebastian lagues mini max and alpha beta pruning one was really helpful

[@yayer_27]

Truly fantastic entrees by the competitors. Great job on this chess competition! I was looking forward to seeing the Game Tech Explained one, as I had seen their video prior to the tournament being finalized. Interesting to see it placed 78th. I also enjoyed the NN and TinyHugeBot, pretty creative IMO. Finally, congratulations to BoyChesser for winning the tournament!

[@sentinelav]

"You like chessing boys don't you?" If you know, you know

[@annorome]

Tremendous work!! Thank you so much for this video. Truly the best video for the end of 2023!!

[@schmiddey678]

For those that want to know what the Code at 1:16:50 stands for: When you convert the Hex to ASCII it reads: "you like chessing boys don't you"

[@adarshupadhyay5837]

Boy have you motivated me to create my own chess bot..... Loved the video

[@bez_64]

Sebastian never outright stated there will be a part 3 of his chess bot but I believe now he has found the proper motivation in a rematch with Boychesser (or Kilofish as I like to call it).

[@l.ongman]

Thanks Sebastian and everyone for the effort! Easily my fav vid around the year. The storytelling is absolutely fantastic too!

[@Peytoneli]

In case anyone is wondering, the hex at the end of the closing ceremonies translates back to ASCII as: "you like chessing boys don't you" Cheeky, Sebastian, very cheeky :D

[@Notester82]

Fun overview on your chess bot tournament! c: Congrats to all the competitors and shoutouts to the fun ones like BadAppleBot's Bad Apple recreation and GameTechExplained having code in the shape of a pawn! ;u;

[@thatprogramer]

Du gör väldigt bra videor och du har inspirerat mig att göra mina egna projekt! -Edit: I can't wait for this to start!

[@PedroContipelli2]

My heart was racing seeing the results appear throughout and wondering if mine would be on there. Especially through the disqualifications and compile errors! I'm just glad to be one of the lucky few who made it into the video! :)

[@thecalculatedcreativecoder1428]

I got 109. Wouldve been cool to have made the top 100, but thats ok. I wish to see more challenges like this in the future!!!

[@joranmulderij]

Thank you so much for making this. Everything about this is inspiring.

[@ai-spacedestructor]

over 1 hour of chess tournament, finally we peaked with entertainment.

[@AnitaSV]

Very nice, I have seen such tournaments but organizers never went through the code and explained each of them. Well worth the hour and a half. Wish more organizers did this, thank you!