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Play the Accoona Artificial Intelligence Chess Game

 
How about a nice game of chess? Just move the pieces and the board will respond. Use "Flip" to switch sides at the start of a game, and Easy, Medium or Hard to adjust the playing strength.

you need to have java installed

What is this AI?

 
The Accoona AI Chess Engine learns from the games it plays against visitors to this site. After playing tens or hundreds of thousands of games it will become noticably stronger. 		 

It doesn't work?

 
The above chess client needs Java to run. If it does not work, you may not have Java installed or your browser may be configured not to display it. You can download Java for your machine here

The story of the Accoona chess AI

 
The Accoona AI Chess Game is an experiment in Artificial Intelligence.

Normally a chess program is programmed to do a "search", i.e. play through thousands of possible continuations in memory, compare the outcome of each line and then pick the one that appears most promising.

The critical part is evaluating the positions at the end of each line. This is done by telling the program as much as possible about the value of the different chess pieces, the importance of mobility, center control, king safety, pawn structure, and about 30-50 other criteria. This knowledge comes from centuries of chess research.

The Accoona AI Chess Game takes a different approach. It has received only very rudimentary chess knowledge from its programmers, and thus takes a very naive view of the game. But it learns. It plays like a beginner who is slowly finding out which strategies are good and which cause him to lose the game.

Naturally it is not the tiny Java program that you are playing against that does all of this. It merely plays and then reports back to the main chess intelligence, located in the Accoona Chess AI lab, on what has transpired. This AI is driven by the analytical tools of Fritz, the world's premium chess playing software, and the German chess database company ChessBase.

Based on the analysis of tens of thousands of games received by the central server the Accoona AI modifies the evaluators of the Java applet, which becomes progressively stronger the more games it plays. It is modifying its opinions and discovering new ideas and strategies all the time. You can watch it "learn from experience" and grow more intelligent month after month.

We would like to mention one other aspect of this AI experiment. The Accoona AI Chess Game also analyses the way humans, especially rank amateurs, lose their games against the program. And it tries to emulate this weak human playing style for its "Easy" level. After all the vast majority of visitors to this site are casual players who don't have a snowflake's chance in hell to beat this machine. But just wait .. it will become creatively weak in Easy mode.

News and reports on progress of the Accoona AI Chess Engine will be added here.