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

Let's have a look at the creative code behind some of the bots, watch their games, and find out who will ultimately emerge victorious.
If you'd like to support my work, you can do so with a recurring or one-off contribution over here:
/ sebastianlague
ko-fi.com/sebastianlague
The code for all the entries, as well PGN files for all the games played in the tournament can be found over here:
github.com/SebLague/Tiny-Ches...
Play against a selection of the bots from beginner to grandmaster level. How many can you defeat?
sebastian.itch.io/tiny-chess-...
Take a look at some videos that competitors made about their entries:
GameTechExplained (rank 78): • Can THIS win Sebastian...
MilkMindV1 (rank 108): • Making an Amazing Ches...
Music credits
Bad Apple Remix: • Bad Apple!! 8bit remix...
github.com/SebLague/Misc-Proj...
TCEC 4K Info:
If you're interesting in taking part in the 4K tournament I mentioned, I recommend joining the TCEC discord linked on chessdom.org/ and enquiring about it there.
You can also read more about the event here: wiki.chessdom.org/TCEC_4k_Rules
Chapters
0:00:00 Challenge Overview
0:01:09 Some Exploits and Disqualifications
0:02:58 Beginning the Tournament
0:03:58 [Bot] Turochamp (Faithful)
0:06:28 [Bot] WhateverBot
0:08:18 [Game] Turochamp (Faithful) vs WhateverBot
0:09:35 [Game] Pawntress vs WhateverBot
0:10:30 [Bot] applemethod-orz
0:11:42 [Bot] Igris
0:13:19 [Game] applemethod-orz vs Igris
0:14:32 Token Plot
0:15:06 [Bot] BadAppleBot
0:17:30 [Bot] 200 Tokens Monstrosity
0:20:18 [Bot] Baby Squid
0:21:38 [Game] 200 Tokens Monstrosity vs Baby Squid
0:23:19 Tiebreak System
0:23:39 [Bot] TinyHugeBot
0:25:45 [Game] TinyHugeBot vs 200 Tokens Monstrosity
0:26:26 [Bot] Electric Shockwave Gambit
0:28:11 [Bot] SimpleMCTS
0:30:23 [Game] SimpleMCTS vs Electric Shockwave Gambit
0:31:30 [Game] Phoenix Chess vs SimpleMCTS
0:32:28 [Bot] ILVM
0:33:45 [Bot] Les Moutons
0:34:40 [Game] Les Moutons vs ILVM
0:35:51 [Bot] NNBot
0:38:09 [Bot] Game Tech Explained
0:38:41 [Game] NNBot vs Game Tech Explained
0:39:27 [Bot] King Gambot IV
0:41:21 [Game] King Gambot IV vs ILVM
0:41:51 [Game] King Gambot IV vs NNBot
0:42:22 Swiss Results
0:43:32 [Knockout Game] Board 1, Round of 64
0:44:27 [Knockout Game] Board 2, Round of 64
0:46:02 [Knockout Game] Board 9, Round of 64
0:47:43 [Knockout Game] Board 3, Round of 32
0:48:30 [Knockout Game] Board 4, Round of 32
0:49:31 Piece Square Table Compression
0:50:48 Round of 16 Results
0:51:14 [Bot] Tyrant’s V9
0:51:55 [Knockout Game] Board 2, Quarterfinals
0:54:40 [Knockout Game] Board 1, Semifinals
0:56:43 [Knockout Game] Board 2, Semifinals
0:58:56 [Bot] Finalist A
1:06:00 [Final Round] Game 1
1:08:56 [Bot] Finalist B
1:14:05 [Final Round] Game 2
1:15:57 Final Results and Closing Ceremony
1:16:52 [Game] Tournament Winner vs Coding Adventure Bot

[@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

[@voidvenom7452]

The hexadecimal above Boychesser at 1:16:50 decodes to "you like chessing boys don't you".

[@zarpela]

LMAAOOOOO

[@miguelguthridge]

Beautiful

[@wolfyrine]

You silly boy chesser.

[@_fudgepop01]

Somehow I just KNEW such a reference would end up high on the list, but if you asked me where I thought it would end up, 1st would have been my 5th guess at LEAST ahahah~

[@coolreader18]

no way lmaoooo

[@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 )

[@GMDeatHSoul]

@@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.

[@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

[@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

[@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

[@WhiteThunder121]

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

[@sgtmajorkiwi]

boychesser being completely and utterly amazing once again

[@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?

[@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

[@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

[@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.

[@i_Soar]

King Gambot IV reaching the knockout stage is honestly incredibly impressive

[@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!

[@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

[@Julzaa]

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

[@user-mt2jm7vy6i]

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 !

[@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!

[@ComfyCherry]

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

[@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.

[@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!

[@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.

[@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

[@Jeff-ct4wk]

Just like a lot of the other competitors, I'm JeffLegendPower (drip leab 4th place) and this was my (and everyone who worked with me) first time messing with chess engines. I feel like I learned so much not just about chess engine coding, but about how we can approach unsolvable problems, how community can emerge from competition, and the importance in trusting the process (SSS enjoyers know what I mean). All in all, I think this was a great competition as I and many other participants learned a tremendous amount during it.

[@user-dh8oi2mk4f]

that could be inferred

[@bilbop4962]

atad carried (this guy ran non-reg boundaries for sprt for some unknowable reason)

[@asthmagod99]

boychesssr

[@commentchannel5375]

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

[@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.

[@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!

[@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.

[@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!

[@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)

[@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!!

[@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!

[@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.

[@MattMajcan]

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

[@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

[@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 🎉

[@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 ?

[@FloydMaxwell]

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

[@frankhaugen]

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

[@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

[@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

[@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!

[@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.

[@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

[@sentinelav]

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

[@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.

[@Vextrove]

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

[@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! ;)

[@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.

[@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! :)

[@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.

[@vastabyss6496]

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

[@vladyslavkryvoruchko]

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

[@s0meb0dy78]

I second this motion.

[@AntiVectorTV]

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

[@snorkfr0ken]

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

[@bfi01youtube11]

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

[@overrideFunction]

This was a fantastic video! Thanks for all the work you and the coders put in to make this possible!

[@underdweller]

wonderful! I've been very much looking forward to this video, and boy was it worth it!

[@SaharshDev]

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

[@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!

[@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!

[@Patashu]

A beautiful, entertaining, creative work. My hat is off to you for making so many decisions and putting in so much work to convey a sample of everything the tournament had to offer.

[@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.

[@RealGhoda]

BadApple was so unexpected and so goofy i love it

[@joranmulderij]

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

[@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.

[@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!

[@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.

[@James-Calvin]

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!

[@pride6438]

Wonderfully structured video and a brilliant concept for a chess bot tournament! Enjoyed it all the way through

[@PatrikBergsten]

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

[@alexandrebellanger9646]

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

[@l.ongman]

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

[@simonisenberg4516]

Amazing breadth of approaches and solutions. Thanks for the deep dive.

[@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

[@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! :)

[@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!

[@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

[@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.

[@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"

[@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.

[@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!

[@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

[@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

[@Skystrike70]

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

[@Kalmageddon666]

Absolutely fantastic Sebastian! Much love! ♥

[@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.

[@JoshuaGutz]

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

[@wittywarbler1117]

ive been so incredibly excited to see this. tysm for making it!

[@creatorofimages7925]

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

[@ai-spacedestructor]

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

[@trueberryless]

58:30 Kinglet only 0.4s on the clock is kinda ridiculous 😂❤🎉

[@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

[@eboatwright_]

Loved this video all the way through! I really wish I'd gotten into chess programming sooner, but as it is this has helped my engine immensely! I was so stuck on implementing aspiration windows because I couldn't find any helpful code examples, but while watching this video I implemented it hahaha

[@sozius0]

Let's go, imma watch my bot get knocked out on the first round. Edit: I was right, spotted myself in 240th.

[@thecalculatedcreativecoder1428]

Be optimistic!!! I'm sure you had a great bot. (I'm saying that and I know that my bot is getting knocked out because I put it against someone elses bot and it got crushed, but mine still beat stockfish after I nerfed stockfish to depth of 5 ply).

[@kongolandwalker]

240 is the top half!

[@razorback8300]

Hey at least you actually made one ( I tried participating but I gave up pretty quickly . I just did not really know that much about ai and that kind of stuff so yeah ….. )

[@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!