[HN Gopher] Generating chess puzzles with generic algorithms (2022)
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       Generating chess puzzles with generic algorithms (2022)
        
       Author : zorked
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2023-09-29 10:32 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.propelauth.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.propelauth.com)
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | See also generation of a chess variant's puzzles, which is much
       | more thorough & gets much better results by throwing the kitchen
       | sink at it: https://samiramly.com/chess
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | Fernicia wrote:
       | I'm curious why he sets Stockfish depth to 10 when he's looking
       | for mate-in-3 puzzles. Surely 3 is all he needs?
        
         | aisrael wrote:
         | (author here) That's a good question, I should've explained it
         | better.
         | 
         | Technically, the other property of a puzzle is that there's
         | exactly one good move. If you have one move that can mate in 3
         | and another move that can mate in 4, it's actually not a puzzle
         | by the strict definition of the term. So, the reason I set the
         | depth to 10 was because I'm actually looking for the second
         | best move to be bad/losing.
         | 
         | For real positions, 10 might honestly be too low to
         | confidentially state that every other move is bad, but for mate
         | in 3 it was a good enough and still performed well.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | At high enough depth the only real evaluations are #N, #-N,
           | and 0. I've let stockfish sit on positions for an hour on my
           | computer and it'll find mate in 40. Of course in practical
           | terms that's computationally infeasible for your problem.
        
       | uoaei wrote:
       | Title has a typo: generic -> genetic
        
         | ihaveajob wrote:
         | Yes, I found this very confusing at first. Thanks for
         | confirming.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | wkoszek wrote:
       | Can someone skilled in the art tell me where can I learn more
       | about generating those puzzles? Are puzzles on chess.com hand-
       | crafted, or are they generated with an algorithm?
        
         | ycombinete wrote:
         | I know that the ones on lichess use an algorithmic that finds
         | puzzles in games played by real players on the platform.
         | 
         | Code here: https://github.com/ornicar/lichess-puzzler
         | 
         | You can even see puzzles by player:
         | https://lichess.org/training/of-player
        
       | kmm wrote:
       | For easy of copy-pasting, the FEN for the puzzle with the
       | abundance of knights is
       | N1n1NN2/qNN5/5NK1/1n1nNnNN/n1Pn4/kn2n1NN/nRR1nn2/3nn1Nn w - - 0 1
       | 
       | I guessed the first move right, but calculating the continuation
       | was too messy for me.
        
         | KolmogorovComp wrote:
         | An even easier link to allow you to live-play it against the
         | computer:
         | https://lichess.org/analysis/standard/N1n1NN2/qNN5/5NK1/1n1n...
        
       | isaacfrond wrote:
       | I'm a terrible chess player, which I don't mind. But a side
       | effect of this is that I cannot find decent chess problems.
       | Forget a mate three, I'm at the level where I miss obvious forks.
       | Problem is, there doesn't seem to be a decent size collection of
       | such problems. You'd expect there to be quite some demand for it.
       | Maybe I should try to create a few with this system.
        
         | BurningFrog wrote:
         | Tactical puzzles might be the better thing for you:
         | https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated
         | 
         | These are quick tactical puzzles, that adjust the difficulty to
         | your level. Put in some hours, and you _will_ spot obvious
         | forks!
        
         | soegaard wrote:
         | At chess.com you can search for exercises on both theme and
         | rating (of the exercise). This means you can search for easy
         | exercises on forks.
         | 
         | https://www.chess.com/puzzles/learning
        
         | dfan wrote:
         | I enthusiastically recommend Chess Tempo
         | (https://chesstempo.com/), which will give you interactive
         | chess puzzles from real games that are tailored to your level.
         | Someone else mentioned the similar system on lichess, which is
         | also fine.
        
           | EduardoBautista wrote:
           | And if you are missing forks, you can choose to filter for
           | only fork puzzles.
        
             | Someone wrote:
             | If I know a problem is "find the fork", im in a complete
             | different mindset from "find the best move".
             | 
             | Because of that I doubt doing problems of the former kind
             | will help seeing forks much when going back to "find the
             | best move" type problems.
        
               | pests wrote:
               | > "find the best move"
               | 
               | Before you can do that, you need to understand the moves
               | you can make and their implications. I think identifying
               | forks fit here.
        
         | tempaccount7482 wrote:
         | "Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games" by Laslo Polgar,
         | father of the Polgar sisters.
        
         | KolmogorovComp wrote:
         | Lichess classify puzzles by themes [0], you can practice on the
         | ones you want. It has more than 500k fork-themed puzzles (of
         | various difficulty) [1].
         | 
         | [0] https://lichess.org/training/themes [1]
         | https://lichess.org/training/fork
        
         | adamesque wrote:
         | I'm in a very similar position and it has been very challenging
         | finding good resources -- most feel like the "now draw the rest
         | of the owl" meme after explaining how the pieces move.
         | 
         | I've been enjoying the Dr Wolf app, which mixes lessons, actual
         | play against a very forgiving CPU opponent, and spaced
         | repetition of mistakes.
         | 
         | I tried Chessable but the UI was awful and beginner/learning
         | content was poor.
        
         | danmaz74 wrote:
         | If you want to improve on specific tactical themes, including
         | forks, you can use this for free:
         | https://chess.braimax.com/play/focused_puzzle_rush
         | 
         | Disclaimer: I'm the creator of BraiMax Chess. Any feedback is
         | welcome.
        
         | tromp wrote:
         | Lichess can serve you arbitrarily many puzzles [1]. They'll
         | keep track of your performance and adjust the difficulty of the
         | problems accordingly.
         | 
         | [1] https://lichess.org/training
        
           | amalcon wrote:
           | I can say definitively that many of the easier puzzles are
           | just obvious forks. Don't ask how I know, though :P.
        
           | thope wrote:
           | and here is the project used to generate Lichess puzzle
           | database
           | 
           | https://github.com/ornicar/lichess-puzzler
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-29 23:02 UTC)