From June to October 1999 then world Chess #11 Garry Kasparov played a game over the internet against tens of thousands of users of the MSN Gaming Zone.2 The moves of his many opponents—playing the black pieces—were decided by voting, with four teenage chess masters (Étienne Bacrot, Florin Felecan, Irina Krush, and Elisabeth Paehtz) nominating options. Kasparov vs the World was not the first such game but it seems to be considered the best.
I play chess off and on (poorly) as “Hosidia” on both lichess and chess.com. I was introduced to “vote chess” on the latter site as correspondence games between groups and clubs, particularly between country teams. In the middle of 2020, actually as the first COVID lockdown had just come to its end in NZ but while we were all still feeling quite isolated, I made an account on the bot3-focussed Mastodon server botsin.space called @VoteChess@botsin.space to run my own games.
This was not my first bot—I made the Esperanta Vortaro @vortaro@botsin.space way back in 2018—but it was my first and so far only interactive one. The bot seeks to answer the question “Is the wisdom of the Fediverse crowd better than a modern chess engine?”
Two games are generally ongoing at any one time, against two different engines. Four candidate moves for the human side are chosen by the engine and presented in a poll. Originally it gave three good moves and one bad, but it turns out we can’t be relied upon to always avoid the bad one and many games were needlessly lost. I’ll admit the search depths for our opponents are tuned to give us a challenge but not to walk over us. We’d need a lot more regular players to fully explore the mission statement.
One of the poll options is replaced with the choice to resign if the engine believes itself to be at least 5 points ahead; conversely the computer will never resign and we play to the checkmate. Currently a draw is declared automatically when the Syzygy Endgame Tablebase says it is inevitable; the 3-fold repetition and 50 move rules are also used to adjudicate draws but they are sometimes decided slightly over-zealously.
Schedule
As of mid-2024:
- Once an hour, around 49 minutes past the hour, Stockfish makes its move and offers us choices about a minute later.
- Every three hours, at about 01:19, 04:19, 07:19 etc, Fruit 2.1 gives us a move. These times are for Pacific/Auckland, so UTC+12 in the southern winter and UTC+13 in the summer (so 00:19, 03:19 UTC during those periods).
- Once a day, if another game has been completed, the pgn file is appended to the archive (see below).
Archive
The pgn archive was getting rather large (more than half a megabyte! That’s almost half a floppy disk!) so I’ve split out the first four years. You can view and analyse the games in PyChess, ChessX, SCID or whatever chess database software or website you use (note to self: get Chessmaster 8000 working again sometime).
Source code
Source code for the bot can currently be found on github but it is currently badly in need of a complete rewrite.