{"slug": "show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army", "title": "Show HN: EvoChess – start with 8 pawns, evolve your army", "summary": "EvoChess, a chess variant where players start with only pawns and a king and promote pieces through accumulated moves, has a playable version with a neural-net-based AI opponent. The developer, penkovsky, trained a stronger neural network for board evaluation and added a 'Fun' mode where the AI thinks while the player thinks, but this mode drains battery. The project is available on GitHub and a writeup is on penkovsky.com.", "body_md": "This chess variant's theme is evolution. One morning in early 2016 I woke up with an idea: what if chess were built around promotion? Eventually, this resulted in the following game:\n\nIt plays like chess, but you start with only pawns and a king. Pawns can be promoted to bishops or knights, while those minor pieces can be promoted to rooks. Their promotion rights accumulate (every three pawn moves, pawn promotion right; every three minor piece moves, minor piece to rook right). Rooks are transformed to a knight or a bishop on the rook's fifth move.\n\nRecently, I built a playable version. The AI opponent works on phone with no internet. The search engine uses a lightweight neural net. The engine was first weak and my friends complained about it.\n\nSo I have spent quite some time to train a better NN for the board evaluation. Fixed some bugs in search. And I have even designed a \"Fun\" mode where the AI opponent is thinking while you are thinking. (WARNING: \"Fun\" mode is ruthlessly draining the battery)\n\nNow, when the engine became stronger, my friends complain it is hard to beat. Is the Fun mode less fun now? Should I allow the engine to lose?\n\nMore in the writeup: [https://penkovsky.com/post/evochess/](https://penkovsky.com/post/evochess/)\n\nCode: [https://github.com/penkovsky/evochess/](https://github.com/penkovsky/evochess/)\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49146818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49146818)\n\nPoints: 2\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army", "canonical_source": "https://penkovsky.github.io/evochess/", "published_at": "2026-08-02 18:06:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 18:22:36.827165+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "neural-networks", "ai-products"], "entities": ["EvoChess", "penkovsky", "GitHub", "penkovsky.com"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-evochess-start-with-8-pawns-evolve-your-army.jsonld"}}