Improving in Chess Is Hard. I Built the Most Human-Like Chess AI to Help Me

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

marcusbuffett

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4 comments

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Chess AIMachine LearningPersonal Projects

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Chess AI

Machine Learning

Personal Projects

The author built a human-like chess AI to help improve their chess skills, and shares their experience and insights on the project, with commenters discussing the technical aspects and potential applications.

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01Story posted
Nov 2, 2025 at 9:40 AM EST
2 months ago
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Discussion (4 comments)

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DoctorOW

2 months ago

1 reply

I've been trying to get better at chess recently and I absolutely can relate with the intent of this. I've just been using Lichess and the Stockfish levels and I'm still working on beating level 3 (no judgement please). I've tried to go through with the analyzer, and I'll get told what the best move is, but the only way of knowing how it's better than my previous moves is whatever insight comes to me.

> The models themselves (221MB for the 512-dimension model, 494M for the 768-dimension model), are too large to upload to GitHub, but if anyone wants them I suppose I’ll figure out a way to share them.

I have no real interest in spending this amount of time and effort on my chess hobby not actually playing chess. If it gets made available somewhere I'd try it out.

marcusbuffettAuthor

2 months ago

Yeah the intention is to make them available on my chess site eventually (Chessbook). It's in very early alpha though, so it's breaking constantly as I tweak things and try playing against it with different configurations.

beardyw

2 months ago

1 reply

,> So I’d like to get feedback as I play. Are my moves good, what are my chances of winning, did I miss a trick somewhere, etc.

My approach is to play against a strong computer opponent in chess.com. I also have Lichess open at the analysis page with stockfish open. Each time I move I update Lichess with my opponents previous move to see what options I had and if my move was one of the good ones. Then I record my move and play again back in chess.com. Works for me.

marcusbuffettAuthor

2 months ago

Do you find the bots on chess.com play human-like chess? I'm not sure what they're using under the hood but I assume they've also put some effort into this sort of stuff.

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