
Chessvision.ai – Analyze chess position from websites, images or video - innerspirit
https://chessvision.ai/
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pkacprzak
Hi, many thanks to innerspirit for posting this! I'm the author of the app and
you can find discussions about it on reddit as well:

r/MachineLearning
:[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/b8jdho/p_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/b8jdho/p_detect_and_analyze_chess_positions_with_ai_from/)

r/chess:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/b826h5/created_chess...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/b826h5/created_chessvisionai_a_computer_visionmachine/)

If you have any opinions and suggestions I'd love to hear them!

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MisterOctober
Very cool! This'd be absolutely great for getting more value / use out of the
pile of Everyman books that I [and, I'd hazard a guess, a solid chunk of
chessplayers in general] have sitting on the shelf that don't get used as much
as they should

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0db532a0
What are the best three books for beginners?

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MisterOctober
Great question! There are lots of great beginner books out there, but if I had
to pick three:

1) "A First Book of Morphy" by del Rosario -- takes the very well-considered
principles of GM Reuben Fine and illustrates them with [mostly] Paul Morphy's
games. Of all the books I've ingested on the subject of chess, this one has
stuck with me most. Even my kid loves it!

2) "Winning Chess Strategy for Kids" by Coakley -- it's not just for kids! And
it's not just strategy! Covers fundamental tactical concerns such as pins,
forks, etc in a straightforward way. Similar in some regards to Pandolfini's
"Weapons of Chess" but pedagogically superior in my view.

3) "Silman's Complete Endgame Course" by Silman -- the old saw that one should
study the endgame _first_ is pretty true -- Silman is the best at teaching it
-- man, if I had a dollar for every game I was winning in the middlegame and
then lost in the endgame, I'd have... well, a lot of dollars

cheater extra: 3.5) "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" \-- the old standby -- this
is a tactics book first and foremost, and the main value of it is that it
gives you puzzles of gradually increasing complexity so that you can really
feel your comprehension improving and say to your self, "I'm getting it!"
Truth is that getting discouraged is the thing that stalls or scares off many
/ most novice chessplayers

When you start getting up in the 1100-1300 range, pick up "My System" by
Nimzowitsch and "How to Reassess your Chess" by Silman, "Soviet Middlegame
Technique" by Romanovsky -- and after then, start learning openings in more
detail. The biggest mistake most beginners make, including me, is building up
a repertoire of openings before having a solid grasp of the fundamentals.
Truth is, below 1300, most players are "off book" by the ~tenth move anyway,
so learning the intricacies of the Nimzo-Indian isn't gonna do a person much
good at that stage.

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0db532a0
Thanks a lot. Appreciated.

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smallgovt
It’d be great to convert this into a mobile app that lets you take a photo and
then loads it into a game analysis board. We would use this all the time at my
local chess club. Sometimes we just want to know what the best move is and
other times we want to save the game so we can continue it later.

I would pay $10 or $1.99 a month for this.

Food for thought!

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rtkwe
This would be much much harder with a real board with 3D pieces.

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smallgovt
I see. Well, one thing that may help is that 95% of chessboards (at least at
the clubs I've visited) use the same piece set: [https://www.amazon.com/WE-
Games-Complete-Tournament-Chess/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/WE-Games-
Complete-Tournament-
Chess/dp/B000JMCLME/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=scholastic+chess+board&qid=1554314003&s=gateway&sr=8-4)

Also, a 10% error rate wouldn't be a big deal as long as it was easy to
correct the position within a few seconds.

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rtkwe
That makes it vaguely possible yeah but going from a flat on 2D grid to a 3D
set of pieces at an angle is a whole different set of problems.

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tgarv
I wonder how much easier it would be if you narrow down the likely set of
pieces for each square. There are obviously some positions for some pieces
that are invalid (bishop on the wrong colored square), but there are probably
a lot of other positions that are so uncommon that they could be discounted.

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levesque
What would make it easier IMHO is to make it a top-down version only. Take a
photo from the top, then the program breaks down the board into 8x8 squares,
feeds each square into a classification algorithm that you will train on a
bunch of hand labeled images. Fine tune the model as you gather more data.

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dmurray
The pieces look more similar from the top, though. With bad enough contrast
everything is just a circle. So you need some kind of angle.

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codetrotter
> With bad enough contrast everything is just a circle.

Yes but does real world photos ever have that poor contrast? IMO, top down
photo is worth exploring.

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jonwachob91
Just to clarify an important detail that pkacprzak (the author) has been asked
many times now by the streamers he is using the images of (GoldDustTori and GM
Ben Finegold) - NONE of the streamers actually used this app during a game, as
that would be considered outside assistance and cheating. The app is intended
for viewers to follow along, not to enable cheating (even though the cheaters
will use it for that purpose).

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chess93
One feature that would be useful for me would be the ability to convert a
video to a PGN of the game. This could, for example, be used to strip game
data from streamed chess en masse and then analyze the chess games in
aggregate.

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EGreg
I thought they meant like in vivo in 3D, such as the scene in Independence Day

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novalis78
That would rock for chess tournaments. Webcam next to the board and run
analysis for the audience...

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owldimoon
Hey! I'm working on exactly this same problem for an undergraduate Computer
Vision course right now. It's not going well! Chess piece recognition is hard.
I definitely think the electronics approach described in the other comment is
a much more reliable way to go.

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danielvf
Sounds like a blast!

Are you restricted to to a single game piece set?

This might be hugely easier if you can keep state between turn analyses. IE,
if a white rook disappears from A5 and some unidentified white piece appears
at C5, then it’s probably the rook.

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Ayeceedee
We weren't given many constraints related to the chess piece recognition
itself. The course instead asks us to implement a CV research paper, and we
chose an existing research project which focused on chess piece recognition.

That lack of constraints led us into running face first into issues of
generalisation and variability within datasets. As in, exactly what you allude
to with limiting the piece sets.

I think in my undergraduate naivety my aspirations were too high with what
could reasonably be accomplished. I've spent a lot of time trying to improve
an aspect of the project that really didn't need to be improved, which
prevented meaningful progress.

Now finals are coming up and I feel terribly stressed. Having trouble
functioning. Brain fog, etc. I feel so sad right now.

EDIT: I keep forgetting my password so apparently I have multiple throwaway
now. Sorry.

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heinrichhartman
Pretty sure this will be (ab-)used for cheating in online-chess.

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elcomet
Isn't it much easier to run the moves yourself on another board with computer
help?

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jczhang
not if you're playing bullet!

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epiceric
Maybe it's just me, but I'd be wary of any browser extension that captures and
analyzes my screen over-the-wire, especially if it is closed-source like this
one.

Not to say that this is necessarily malicious. But I personally wouldn't
recommend this to anybody as of right now, unless you want to risk leaking
potentially sensitive data to a third-party.

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typo_hunter
Small typo on the front page: "Postition From a Video" -> "Position From a
Video"

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pkacprzak
Thanks a lot, I fixed the typo

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Romanulus
Should have called it CheckMate!

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hgasimov
Seems cool. Does it use a server or it does all the calculations in the
browser?

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pkacprzak
Server side

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unholiness
This is kind of a bummer for privacy reasons. Sending your application
screenshots of my browser feels not-great.

To be honest, I trust you, even as a random stranger on hacker news. But I
don't trust that you'll never sell this, and I don't trust whoever you you
might sell it to.

~~~
pkacprzak
I understand your concerns and would like to clarify any potential doubts. The
client app (the extension itself) has only currentTab permission which means
that it has access only the tab where user opened the extension and it takes a
screenshot only when a user explicitly clicks Scan button. The source code of
the extension is completely public - everyone can unpack it and verify that
indeed it does exactly that. So this actually reduces to the same
functionality as for example using any photo app with cloud processing - i.e.
you take the photo/screenshot explicitly and no other information is sent to
the server.

