[HN Gopher] Lichess: The free and open source chess server
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Lichess: The free and open source chess server
Author : perihelions
Score : 418 points
Date : 2022-07-10 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| elliotpage wrote:
| I use the android LiChess app to play my dad, works wonderfully.
| triyambakam wrote:
| This is synchronistic. Just a few days ago I started playing on
| Lichess after I remembered hearing about it here on HN. Actually
| I haven't played many games there, my favorite thing as someone
| actively studying to get better is watching live games on
| Lichess. Its better than Youtube.
| Vvector wrote:
| Signed up in 2017, and have over 5000 games. It's a great site,
| all free.
| teucris wrote:
| My son and nephew are playing lichess right now. It's been an
| incredible summer activity for them!
| cdelsolar wrote:
| This site is one of the best things I've seen on the internet. It
| inspired me to make a similar site for crossword board games
| (think Scrabble, Words With Friends, etc). See https://woogles.io
| - also AGPL. The backend is Go-based, and the site has around
| 6500 MAU (we're about to hit 2M total games). We just released a
| puzzle mode that is pretty popular and is already making people
| improve - some of us anecdotally report better word-finding in
| live tournaments :)
| mlinksva wrote:
| It wasn't obvious to me (though I may have blundered to
| see/search) from the site where the code is, so to save others
| the search it seems to be at
| https://github.com/domino14/liwords ... the repo name
| underlines the source of inspiration I guess!
| asah wrote:
| want to sharpen tactical skills and replace wordle at the same
| time?
|
| https://lichess.org/training/mix
|
| I watch my score float up into the 2000s, get distracted/tired,
| then float back down...
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| I do the same, although haven't broken 1800 yet...
| asah wrote:
| Try this: look for pieces that are defended by a single
| piece, and see if you can force that other piece away. Look
| for undefended pieces and ways to attack and capture them by
| attacking/threatening something else - a classic are two
| undefended projects that one piece can attack (fork).
|
| Also check for "mating nets" where you can get a checkmate or
| threaten a mate. Often that can force a sacrifice.
|
| Lastly, look for pawn promotions - they can be tricky puzzles
| but also occur in real matches.
|
| Good luck!
| [deleted]
| benreesman wrote:
| This is kind of a side-note, but any time chess comes up on here
| I smile at the resurgence in interest via Twitch/Blitz. I'm a
| miserable chess player but I fucking love watching it.
|
| Carlson playing the Botez sisters in Blitz may be a publicity
| stunt, but the best chess player in the world is also model-
| photogenic and surrounded by serious fucking players who also
| photograph well?
|
| Good for the game.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Today there's a really interesting tournament going on between
| NFL players on the chess.com twitch channel:
| https://www.twitch.tv/chess
|
| People like Larry Fitzgerald, Will Davis, and Amari Cooper.
| platz wrote:
| If chess interests you but are looking for a change, try learning
| to play go/baduk online at https://online-go.com/
|
| - how to play go (beginners)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTWujSwL2bQ&list=PLW5_cMTm0w...
|
| - basic openings/joseki
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5_cMTm0wvZOTchMWZag...
|
| - joseki made popular by AlphaGo/AIs (intermediate)
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5_cMTm0wvZU5pQhmQFw...
|
| [Michael Redmond's Go TV]
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Just like to point out that FICS has been going strong for over
| 20 years!
|
| https://www.freechess.org/
| jsf01 wrote:
| Yes! The front-end code for Lichess is what got me to learn
| Mithril years ago. Really clean code for such a complex
| application. Here's a great example:
|
| https://github.com/lichess-org/lichobile/blob/master/src/ui/...
| ajkjk wrote:
| It's decent, but can be cleaner! Better classnames, usage of
| the classnames library, and type-only imports, off the top of
| my head.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Lichess is amazing given how little they receive in funding. The
| interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.
|
| They also handle guest plays much better. I've faced less
| cheating bots and no annoying pop ups on lichess when playing as
| a guest compared to chess.com
|
| Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection? I
| would love a high level overview of how it works especially when
| you have no data on the player.
|
| fun nugget: HN users hosted tournaments on lichess at the start
| of the pandemic [0]
|
| 0] https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news
| cjbprime wrote:
| I imagine (without research) that it's just "what percentage of
| your moves are the same as top computer moves", with a
| threshold.
| mNovak wrote:
| Not sure about lichess specifically, but I know many game
| servers are a bit cagey about their cheat detection systems,
| since they don't want to give the cheaters any hints.
|
| But as a broad concept, one technique is to compare moves
| against bot suggested moves. i.e. if a high % of your moves are
| those that a strong AI would make, something is fishy.
| myle wrote:
| It is open source also the neural network that they use for
| that. It is called Irwin and you can find it on GitHub.
| bkishan wrote:
| > Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection?
|
| You can listen to Thibault talk about here [0]
|
| 0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > The interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.
|
| I much prefer the chess.com UI
| sib301 wrote:
| Same. I love lichess and I'm so happy it exists, but I prefer
| the chess.com interface for playing, and analyzing games.
|
| Probably because I started there
| edgyquant wrote:
| matsemann wrote:
| "Those disagreeing with me are wrong". Seriously?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Not what I said at all. There's always comments agreeing
| with me and I never see an elaboration by the lichess
| hoards who dominate every thread involving it
| edgyquant wrote:
| [deleted]
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| They seem to use two projects:
|
| Irwin: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin
|
| Kaladin: https://github.com/lichess-org/kaladin
| baxuz wrote:
| Everytime I see "lichess" I think of the D&D term - like a female
| lich.
| dang wrote:
| Current ongoing thread:
|
| _Irwin - the protector of Lichess from all chess players
| villainous_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047230 -
| July 2022 (62 comments)
| wjossey wrote:
| Always excited when chess pops up on HN once a month or so. As
| someone who picked it up as a hobby in December, I can attest
| that lichess is a great app and site for folks looking to get
| back into the game or get started (I'm also a premium chess.com
| member as I use both products).
|
| For those of you thinking about picking up chess, I'd highly
| recommend watching the Chess Brah "Building Habits" series on
| YouTube. Watch the first five or so videos, and just start
| practicing those habits in rapid games (recommend 15 minute with
| 10 second increment on lichess, which shows up as 15+10). Embrace
| the losses, and just keep working on not hanging your pieces for
| free.
|
| If you're intimidated by playing other humans, you can try the
| "Maia 1" bot on Lichess. It'll likely beat you up for a while if
| you're a beginner, but it's a bot designed to play more like a
| human, and it'll help you get the reps to feel more comfortable
| playing other humans.
|
| From there, just enjoy yourself. Chess can be frustrating because
| by design you always lose about 50% or your takes, but once you
| learn to accept the losses, it can be a great mental exercise to
| keep your brain sharp.
| Wherecombinator wrote:
| Any tips on handling losses? I've become a puzzle only player
| recently because I end up getting pissed off with myself after
| a loss
| Arch-TK wrote:
| For me the biggest blocker was over-focusing on the numbers
| going up and down. On lichess you can make all ratings
| invisible (bottom of the preferences page, "Show player
| ratings"). This means you can't see your own rating or your
| opponent's. Your opponent can obviously still see both if he
| or she doesn't have this option enabled.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I'm a Lichess puzzle player. I find it more entertaining than
| a full game, and can fit a puzzle or two anytime rather than
| a match (even a bullet game is too draining for a quick time-
| filler)
| m12k wrote:
| Think of the loss as a form of payment. What it buys you is
| experience. So whenever you lose, ask yourself what
| experience that just bought you? What improvement does it
| allow you to bring into your future games?
|
| If your mindset is to become a better player, rather than
| winning, then a loss is still a way to gain something. And
| long term, you'll win more games if you think this way
| brian_herman wrote:
| You don't learn anything with a win. You learn a lot with a
| loss.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I find a lot of beginners have this mentality and skip over
| analyzing games they win to their detriment.
|
| In general, the way to get better at chess, or anything
| really, is all about intentionality.
|
| I'd recommend reviewing every game, win or loss, and
| looking for things you missed, what your opponent missed,
| thinking about what your opponent was thinking, why did
| they play the moves they did, etc.
| iambateman wrote:
| Because of how ELO works, your win-loss ratio will pretty
| quickly normalize to 50-50, regardless of how good you are.
|
| Over time your increased rating will reflect increased skill,
| but even if your skill was doubled tomorrow, you would still
| hit a 50-50 W/L because you would be playing people at the
| same skill level.
|
| However...if you want to feel better, play for a couple weeks
| and then challenge an occasional player. Once you obliterate
| them, you'll feel better about the losses it took to get
| there. :)
| xedrac wrote:
| I had a very strong coach work with me on this exact problem.
| He required me to reframe my definition of what it means to
| win. Basically it came down the the quality of effort I put
| into the game. If I put everything I have into a game and
| lose, it now feels like a win, because I know it will make me
| stronger. Conversely, if I don't give a good effort, but
| happen to win the game, I count that as a loss. This only
| applies to longer time control games. I still play blitz now
| and then for light fun.
| cjbprime wrote:
| People will tell you to not care about losing or your rating,
| but that didn't work for me.
|
| What worked for me is "the rating I care about is my rating
| in three months from now, not today", which gives space for
| learning from losses etc.
| billfruit wrote:
| Also learn the "London System", and try play correspondence
| style games.
| smugma wrote:
| Curious, why do you subscribe to chess.com? What does it offer
| that lichess does not?
| edgyquant wrote:
| For me it's just leagues better. The UI/UX is nicer, the
| lessons are nice videos with a roadmap to understanding
| chess, etc.
|
| The only benefit I ever got from Lichess is that it's open
| source which is nice.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The ux is indeed nice but I'm not paying to have stockfish
| nnue wasm running on my phone.
|
| I personally wouldn't use much more than analysis and I can
| just get it for free exporting the game.
|
| Puzzles feels like their better quality than lichess but
| I've heard discording opinions.
| Scarblac wrote:
| For puzzles, Chesstempo was the first site to generate
| them automatically from games, and it's still the best at
| them.
| throwaway6977 wrote:
| I disagree with almost everything you just said, as someone
| who has bounced back and forth for almost 4 years now.
| dubeye wrote:
| The poster only mentioned two things. So you answer just
| makes me think you just don't admire commercial chess
| sites!
|
| To take the video lessons, chess.com are clearly leagues
| ahead of lichess. They can pay the contributors to
| produce quality productions. You can't really open source
| the time of experts .
| throwaway6977 wrote:
| I agree with most everything you just said!
| forty wrote:
| Isn't all open source built from the time of experts?
| (Not experts in chess, but in programming, design, etc)
| :)
|
| I mean in theory, nothing prevent a professional chess
| player to make a nice video lesson and share it for free.
| And there is no reason to assume this video would not be
| as good as videos made for money (just like it's the case
| for software)
| wjossey wrote:
| Both platforms are worth supporting. Com does a lot of great
| events and creates great content, and I like supporting it. I
| also prefer their UX.
|
| Lichess has Maia bot, some good course material as well, and
| I like to use my lichess account sometimes as an "alt" where
| I can experiment with less stress about losing rating. Rating
| doesn't matter, but it still makes me queasy if I tilt 100
| points while trying out a new opening.
| rearend-dev wrote:
| I agree. I would also recommend Daniel Naroditsky's speed run
| video series. He starts with new account and explains his ideas
| and thoughts as he progress to higher and higher elo.
| heartbreak wrote:
| Naroditsky has the most accessible teaching videos on YouTube
| as far as I'm concerned. He's also writing a regular chess
| column for NYT.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I really like Yasser Seirawan's lectures on youtube. Its
| amazing how he can talk about a chess game and make it appear
| exciting.
| rococode wrote:
| Even their expenses are open source!
|
| https://lichess.org/costs
| lukeschwartz wrote:
| wow, $409,644.10/year; now I really wonder how much money they
| make from donations.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Roughly the same amount, I think? They seem to spend what
| they receive.
| matesz wrote:
| $53k per year for main developer salary - from what I
| understand it's quite complex Scala codebase.
| [deleted]
| aspanu wrote:
| Lichess as an application is very impressive, and I use it
| frequently. The one thing that is somewhat more annoying is the
| way in which there is a (daily?) restart of the servers, causing
| strange behaviour in-game. For example, around the restart time,
| sometimes the restart warning falls away and it seems like you
| are waiting for the other player to make a move, when in fact you
| are disconnected.
|
| Is there a reason why restarts happen this way and there isn't
| traffic draining between servers as they restart one at a time?
| benediktwerner wrote:
| There is only one server. Or well, there are lots of servers
| that make up Lichess but they mostly do different stuff. There
| is only one main server which handles all the core stuff
| including games.
|
| Also, restarts usually aren't daily. They generally are around
| once a week. Though sometimes when a new feature is seeing
| rapid iterations or an important enough bug is found, restarts
| can happen a few days in a row.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I have said it before and I'll repeat it again: Lichess is the
| best thing that happened to chess since castling.
| dpratt wrote:
| I've always thought that this was an amazing project and I've
| enjoyed many many games on it, but I worry that she may not have
| put the proper precautions in place to protect her phylactery.
| actfrench wrote:
| I run an education company that has some clubs for kids. One of
| our families told us about Lichess and used it to start a chess
| club. We LOVE Lichess and our kids use it all the time at Modulo
| to play together or with a chess instructor.
|
| We'd love to expand our little group.
|
| If you have a kid (Grades K-12th grade) who wants to play chess
| with us, please get in touch with me, tell me a little bit about
| your kid and how you found us on Hacker News and we'll add you to
| our club! It would be so great to have more fun families playing
| with us.
|
| https://lichess.org/team/modulo-learning
| nikivi wrote:
| I want to buy an electronic chess board to play over the board
| but have each move sync to Lichess for later analysis. Wonder how
| feasible that is to do.
| gurchik wrote:
| Any board that allows you to download the games in PGN format
| can simply be copy-paste into Lichess. Additionally if you have
| a DGT board and it is plugged into a computer you can sync it
| directly to Lichess:
| https://lichess.org/blog/X6l9bBUAACQAXE8M/play-on-lichess-us...
| Scarblac wrote:
| There is the Chessify app, which allows you to point a phone
| camera at a normal chess board and it will recognize the
| position and sync with Lichess.
|
| I haven't used it myself and don't know if it handles _playing_
| , but it's an interesting idea.
| nikivi wrote:
| Yea I want to avoid taking a photo of board after every move.
| Essentially I want one of those boards they use in
| tournaments like the recent candidates.
| skeletonjelly wrote:
| I've been using a local engine for analysis. Firstly it saves
| Lichess CPU time, and secondly it's more powerful (running on
| GPU). I prefer the Lichess interface so do use it occasionally
| but otherwise the Nibbler front end over lc0 has been handy.
| You can paste in FEN or PGN format which as others have
| mentioned should be available from some physical boards.
| dubeye wrote:
| Ah the monthly 'open source is superior to commerical enterprise'
| hymn.
|
| I use both sites equally and lichess is inferior in pretty much
| every respect. Assuming you pay of course .
| bananamerica wrote:
| You seem to be the only one making that comparison.
| mNovak wrote:
| Related (-ish) is the free and open source Go server [1,2], OGS.
| A great community, and ad free. I've been playing there since the
| pandemic started; lately even some professional/tournament games
| were being hosted there.
|
| [1] https://github.com/online-go [2] https://online-go.com
| spot wrote:
| agree, this is where i play now.
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(page generated 2022-07-10 23:01 UTC)