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30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World

suckerpinch

202K subscribers • 15 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 9 people: 8 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2026.
  • Presented by Tom Murphy VII, computer scientist
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 7 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

964K views7 years ago9 recommendations

Computer scienceAI and machine learningAlgorithmsClassic machine learning

Tom7 presents a tournament of thirty highly unusual and absurd chess algorithms designed for his SIGBOVIK research papers.

An intricate and lengthy account of several different computer chess topics from my SIGBOVIK 2019 papers. We conduct a tournament of fools with a pile of different weird chess algorithms, ostensibly to quantify how well my other weird program to play color- and piece-blind chess performs. On the way we "learn" about mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perversions of game tree search, spicy oils, and hats. Papers: tom7.org/chess/ No animals nor automata were harmed in the filming.

Why it's here

9 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its brilliant, entertaining, and deeply creative exploration of unconventional programming and chess engine design.

zgeon Lobsters • Recommends

30 Weird Chess Algorithms

GuestHNUseron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [video]”

Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video ( link ) and Weird Chess Algorithms ( link to this video ) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.

symmetricsauruson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Survival in chessland [pdf]”

Tom7 made a video also: link to this video If you haven’t seen them his other videos are well worth watching as well.

onnodigcomplexon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Kriegspiel”

Suckerpinch (Tom) recently had a video1 about predicting the position of the oponents pieces from knowning just white. I don't think he's aware of this. Great video anyway. He trained an NN to predict the pieces and then used Stockfish on the resulting position. 1 link to this video

ricticon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Immortal Game”

Only somewhat related, but if you found these ideas amusing, you'd probably enjoy watching tom7's video on unusual chess engine strategies: link to this video

sillysaurusxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Training GPT-2 to Play Chess”

…ead of Nf3): link Another extension that might help is to periodically inject the full FEN board state. This was the format we were going to try next, which injects the full FEN after every move: link I'm so happy to get to work with GPT-2 1.5B. It's been a lot of fun to train. By the way, if you like this kind of thing, you'll love Elo World. link to this video…

iamevnon Hacker News • Recommends

On “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]”

Anything that catches your eye is good but my favorites are: 30 Weird Chess Algorithms: ELO World link to this video Reverse Emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! link

nick-of-timeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]”

Mine are "Harder Drives"1, "ELO World"2, and "Printable x86"3 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link

Rendelloon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions”

This reminded me of Tom7's video where he made a bunch of ridiculous engines and pitted them against each other (and against "diluted" versions of Stockfish): link to this video link

rrauenzaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Kriegspiel”

I had just looked up this wiki article a couple days ago based on this video: link to this video , "30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World" An intricate and lengthy account of several different computer chess topics from my SIGBOVIK 2019 papers. We conduct a tournament of fools with a pile of different weird chess algorithms, ostensibly to quantify how well my other weird program to play color- and piece-blind chess performs. On the way we "learn" about mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perversions of game tree search, spicy oils, and hats. Is this also why it showed up just now?

mixmixon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [video]”

Tom's really mastered his skill of casual misleading, he adds these "wait, what?" moments to every video. A more notorious example will be his explanation of how optical reflection works, check out his "30 Weird Chess Algorithms" ( link to this video ) around 10:20. Edit: spelling.

jerfon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The rarest move in chess [video]”

"I was initially hoping to get some insight on e.g. which pairs of squares had the fewest moves for a given piece etc." This may not be quite what you were asking for, but it's close, and has the advantage that I can link it right now. Tom7's Elo World chess video has where pieces start and end up, and their survival rates, as a chart: link to this video

Uehrekaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]”

> I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders. In tom7’s Elo World, he does this (“dilutes” strong Chess AIs with a certain percentage of random moves) to smooth the gradient since otherwise it would be impossible to evaluate his terrible chess bots against something like Stockfish since they’d just lose every time. link to this video

fuglede_on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot”

In fact, you don't even need an LLM tournament when you can have tom7's Elo World tournament: link to this video