30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters call it a must-watch for its deadpan, absurdly elaborate engineering and cite it for ideas like diluting strong engines with random moves.
What it is
Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.
Recommended by 8 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2019 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec GuestHNUser · 2022-04 · 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 ( [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.
Recommends symmetricsaurus · 2019-07 · on “Survival in chessland [pdf]”
Tom7 made a video also: [this video] If you haven’t seen them his other videos are well worth watching as well.
Recommends onnodigcomplex · 2019-07 · on “Kriegspiel”
Suckerpinch (Tom) recently had a video[1] 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] [this video]
Recommends rictic · 2019-12 · 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: [this video]
Recommends sillysaurusx · 2020-01 · on “Training GPT-2 to Play Chess”
It's unknown what role if any BPE plays. I was surprised to discover that the final probability of a move is equal to the probability of each token from the root prompt, i.e. even though "1.Nf3 e5" is encoded as ['1', '.', 'N', 'f', '3', ' e', '5'] the probability of e5 seems unaffected by the fact that Nf3 is 3 tokens as opposed to one. You're right that coming up with a token mapping could help things. It's a bit tricky to do that right now. Your options for fitting a custom vocab seems to be "use sentencepiece to fit a vocab, then modify the gpt-2 codebase to use the sentencepiece library for decoding". I am honestly not sure if the output of sentencepiece is compatible with traditional e
Recommends iamevn · 2023-07 · 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 [this video] Reverse Emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! [LINK]
Recommends nick-of-time · 2023-07 · 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] [this video] [3] [LINK]
Recommends Rendello · 2026-05 · 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): [this video] [LINK]