Show HN: Chess bot based on the transformer architecture

A developer built a chess bot using a transformer architecture with 11 million parameters, achieving a 1500 Elo rating from the model alone and 2100 Elo when combined with Monte Carlo Tree Search. The bot is available as a Lichess bot for human players to challenge.

Hi HN I build this project to explore an idea I got in mind for a long time : Is transformer a suitable architecture for a chess bot? I built a small model 11M parameters and trained it on human games Elite Lichess DB . Model alone is performing around 1500 elo, but I built an harness using Monte Carlos Tree Search MCTS using my model heuristics to improve the model to ~2100 elo evaluated against stockfish . If you want to try it, it is available as a Lichess bot : https://lichess.org/@/ChessTransformerBot https://lichess.org/@/ChessTransformerBot I'm looking to evaluate this model against human players so challenge, I would be grateful if you try it The project is open source, don't hesitate to star the repos if you like the project. For me, the main key learning is that machine learning is an important part of the project, but it was the harness design that makes the system works with a nice performance regarding the small model size. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572951 Points: 1 Comments: 0