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:

The code for all the entries, as well PGN files for all the games played in the tournament can be found over here:

Play against a selection of the bots from beginner to grandmaster level. How many can you defeat?

Take a look at some videos that competitors made about their entries:

Music credits

TCEC 4K Info:

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...

[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! 🎉

[Lishtenbird]

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

[boatbomber]

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

[Bassalicious]

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

[erwanfagnou]

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

[popax]

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!)

[smort]

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

[Loev]

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)

[rumengol]

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

[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 ^^

[avastabyss]

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!

[mitigatedrisk]

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.

[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!

[МихаилЧалый-щж]

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.

[paulpruenster]

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

[i_Soar]

King Gambot IV reaching the knockout stage is honestly incredibly impressive

[Julzaa]

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

[pavelmatusu]

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.

[Tesln]

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!