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Show HN: Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters (playchessgate.com)

5 points by Tdxt ↗ HN
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face.

While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it.

Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath, visibly different choices each time.

playchessgate.com: browser, no signup. The kids never got their Christmas present.

3 comments

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vunderba
Nice job. Did you ever play the Chessmaster series back in the 90s? It was probably one of the earlier chess game examples where you could play against simulated historical opponents, including Nimzowitsch, Fischer, Lasker, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessmaster

sahar_builds
No way! Masters need to start playing with each other.