Added cloud support for Stockfish 12 (NNUE). This is a very exciting chess engine. It is stronger than previous versions of Stockfish and has the additional capability of using a neural network. The combined classical engine approach and neural net approach, which continues to evolve based on training, should result in new and interesting games. Your current SF strength setting will affect the play level of the cloud SF12.
This latest release allows the user to choose different chess pieces, board colors/themes and separates other settings to make the options less cluttered. I also added a move highlight for each angine move. This was needed because its easy to miss the latest move from the engine (a blink and its over); also I noticed that people review the last moves a lot which tells me this should be a good feature.
A cloud based engine is far more expensive to run than stockfish on the browser so I can only allow the requests to happen early in the game and not deeper into the game when more calculations might be required.
The best aspect of cloud engines is that it allows me to make the Leela Chess engine (Lc0) into the mix; just for fun I've added Fruit as well. Between Lc0, Fruit and Stockfish you should have plenty of variety of play styles.
The cloud engines is only an experiment at the moment for two reasons: 1) Cost and 2) Lc0 and Fruit play at their strongest levels. This might just prove too difficult for casual players so I will keep an eye to see if I should set it back to Stockfish only.
If you want to donate to support the use of cloud engines please use the link above. Or use the affiliate links to purchase!
Major improvements and fixes to the opening book selection. Previously, the opening displayed may not match the actual opening selected by the engine. Now it does and it is maintained so that the player can follow a specific opening line accurately.
Links the current opening being played to the new Chess UI database.
Updating from Stockfish 5 to Stockfish 10. A major jump in version! Both versions of Stockfish are rated 3000+ Elo. Stockfish 5 was not lacking in power but its always nice to be running on the latest and greates.
This latest release brings some nice improvements to the opening book functionality. It's not perfect yet but its def. better!
I have a couple of long term projects that could be useful for players. One of them is to search in a database for games with the same opening that was played on the last game. Perhaps this feature can inspire game play as you will be able to see how high level players approached the same opening.
Running such a database can be expensive, however, so I have to find ways to keep costs low for this feature. I am also thinking of other ways to help players learn about the openings that they are playing.
I hope you find the new opening experience to be better than before.
- CarlosHello! Its been a while. I am releasing some nice improvements to the opening selections by the engine. If you leave the opening choice as "Any" then the opening selections will be more randomized than ever before. In the past you may have only seen a few openings being used but now the selection will vary greatly and you should see more fun opening play. I am also releasing some bug fixes to the Syzygy book which has been freely provided to all by Syzygy tablebases. The fix now uses their updated API and results.
I'm releasing some tweaks to the UI after noticing that people need an easier way to highlight the last move and to jump back to a previous position. I'm also updating the chart to give slightly more interesting information.
Happy New Year!
There's been a bunch of great updates to the Chess UI recently and I hope you enjoy them. Here's some of the recent features on the latest release:
There are a lot more features that I would like to add to the Chess UI to bring it closer to standard desktop UIs and I hope the ability to export games, load fens, set up positions, have a kibitzer and evaluation cover the most important set of features.
This is the second iteration of the Chess UI site. The improvements and changes are many but I'd like to highlight the following:
I hope you like the changes. There are more coming. I'll also write about the project more on my code blog.
- Carlos Moran
@heycarlitos