Comment by babalobo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babalobo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not finding the bot realistic at all. It makes the exact same type of blunders you would expect a dumbed down bot to make. Just random, strange looking blunders.

As at 900 level, me playing white, it goes Bf3 in the opening as if I have a knight there, but there isn't a knight there anymore. I just moved it to e5. There's 3 pieces protecting that square. Would never see that in a real game except if it's a crazy premove (it did not move quickly).

At 1800 level, I'm about to double attack their knight on h6, so it moves its king out of g8 to get a flight square. But then it doesn't follow through on its plan, inexplicably ignoring my threat and giving me a piece. I have no other immediate threats.

That said, I spent some more time playing it and beyond the first impression it was fun and the games were mostly more realistic. It was more fun than playing weak stockfish.

The bigger annoyance now is that there seems to be a bug with premoves where the move registers (or appears to do so) but your timer just runs down and nothing can be done.

I was able to beat the max elo (2800) bot in bullet chess pretty consistently because if you manage to not get checkmated in some number of moves it just always runs out of time. Still fun though as it's kind of like playing an older GM who is playing on their phone.

Ah this is a great find, the bullet chess clock. It's partly inference time before the intentional delay, and partly the animation of the move counts towards the bot's time. Should be fixed now though.

Fixed the premove thing too, I think.

This approximates 2800 level bullet better now but overall things are actually worse. It's impossible to flag even the easiest bot, you can easily get it to exactly 0.2 seconds and then it will just play instantly and never lose time again. Even if you have 50 seconds you can't flag it. It has to lose a nonzero amount of time per move on average for it to be fun and realistic.

I haven't run into the premove issue anymore.

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