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The Chess Mind Project: Building Better Chess Analysis Tools
🧠 The Chess Mind Project: When an ML Engineer Gets Too Ambitious Over Chess
[TECHNICAL SERIES - POST 01]
♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ Current Chess Analysis Experience ♟ ♞ ♝ ♜ ♛ ♚
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Move 23: Mistake (-0.8) │
│ Move 31: Blunder (-2.1) │
│ Move 42: Inaccuracy (-0.3) │
│ │
│ 💡 Insight Level: ████░░░░░░░ (40% helpful) │
│ 🔍 Context Provided: ░░░░░░░░░░ (0% useful) │
│ 💰 Cost: ████████████████████ ($149/year) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Picture this: I'm in my air-conditioned apartment in Saigon (because chess requires optimal thinking temperature, right?), sipping my third cà phê sữa đá of the day, hovering around 1750 on chess.com. After spending years studying neural networks, you'd think I'd be better at pattern recognition, but here I am, still hanging pieces like it's my day job.
"Ah yes, mighty Stockfish, please enlighten me about how my 'brilliant' sacrifice was actually just me hallucinating tactics again. My psychology degree is really helping me cope with these moments." 🤖
💸 The $150/Year Subscription That Costs More Than My Monthly Phở Budget
Like every other ML engineer trapped in the 1500-1800 ELO purgatory (or as we say in Vietnamese, "đẳng cấp gà mờ" - the foggy chicken level), I thought throwing money at the problem would help. My Australian university tuition didn't make me a genius, why would this be different?
📊 Premium Chess Tool Comparison (aka Ways to Waste Good Coffee Money)
Service | Cost/Year | What You Get | What You're Actually Getting |
---|---|---|---|
Chess.com Basic | $49 | "Your move was bad" | Digital disappointment |
Chess.com Diamond | $149 | "Your move was REALLY bad" | Premium disappointment |
Private Coach | $3,900 | Actual insights | Someone to judge my moves like my mom judges my coding career |
Chess.com Diamond: $149/year. For what? The computer tells me my knight move was bad but doesn't explain that I just hung it to a back-rank tactic I've missed literally 47 times this month. Thanks, computer. Very insightful.
The really annoying part? Even after paying, I'm still doing ALL the work:
🔄 The Endless Manual Analysis Loop:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. Click through every single move │ ⏰ 20 mins
│ 2. Try to decode engine hieroglyphics │ ⏰ 15 mins
│ 3. Google "why is Rd8 better than Rd7" │ ⏰ 10 mins
│ 4. Forget lesson by next game │ ⏰ Instant
│ │
│ Total Improvement: 📈 0% │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
And don't get me started on hiring a coach. Like yeah, $75/hour for someone to tell me "you need to calculate better" is definitely in my budget. Right next to my yacht payment.
💡 The Developer Moment: When Your ML Background Finally Becomes Useful
Picture this: It's midnight in Ho Chi Minh City, I'm surrounded by empty cà phê sữa đá cups (because energy drinks are for amateurs), staring at my latest psychological blunder, when suddenly my ML-trained brain kicks in:
🧠 ML Engineer Brain Boot Sequence:
══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
import tensorflow as confusion
from psychology import self_doubt
from chess import missed_tactics
if brain.training_data == "mostly_blunders":
return create_better_solution()
else:
return order_more_coffee()
══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
Result: Time to tensorflowify this chess problem 🚀
"Dude. You're a software developer. You literally automate boring tasks for a living. Why are you manually clicking through chess moves like it's 1995?"
🎯 Reality vs. Expectations (Like My ML Models)
What I Want:
📈 Upload 30 games ➜ Get insights that don't hurt my ego
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ "Your aggressive style would make Tal proud... │
│ if he was playing blindfolded after 10 cà phê sữa đá" │
│ "Your psychological pattern: Attacking like a tiger │
│ but defending like a sleepy pandas" │
│ "Here's your tactical vision score: HTTP_418_TEAPOT" │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
What I Get:
💸 Pay $149/year ➜ Do all the work yourself
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ "Computer says you played badly" │
│ "Figure out why yourself" │
│ "That'll be $149, thanks" │
│ "Good luck with that improvement thing" │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
🛠️ The Part Where My ML Degree Met Reality
"It's just matrix multiplication and if statements, right?" - Me, before discovering that chess engines don't appreciate psychological analysis
Three months, 147 Stack Overflow tabs, and countless Vietnamese coffee later, I'm debugging why my neural network thinks the Queen's Gambit is about actual gambling and knights move like Grab bikes. Here's what I've learned:
🔥 The Technical Rabbit Holes I Fell Into
┌─── Problem #1: Position Selection ────┐
│ Q: Which positions actually matter? │
│ A: Definitely not all 40+ moves │
│ 💰 Cost: $20/batch if you get it wrong│
└────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─── Problem #2: AI Chess Knowledge ────┐
│ Q: Can AI analyze chess positions? │
│ A: Yes, but it suggests illegal moves │
│ 🤖 LLMs are surprisingly bad at chess │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─── Problem #3: Pattern Recognition ───┐
│ Q: How do you find psychological │
│ patterns in chess moves? │
│ A: This is like... really complicated │
│ 🧠 Turns out brains are complex │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘
But here's the thing - solving these problems is actually kind of fascinating from an engineering perspective.
🏗️ The Actually Cool Part (I Promise)
ChessMind = "Because even a broken clock finds a mate in two twice a day"
🎯 The Technical Challenge
Build something that gives you insights like a $75/hour coach but costs like a Netflix subscription.
🏗️ Architecture Overview:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 30 Games In │
│ ↓ │
│ 🔍 Smart Position Selection (only analyze 7% with AI) │
│ ↓ │
│ 🤖 Engine + AI Analysis (with hallucination prevention) │
│ ↓ │
│ 📊 Vector Database Pattern Recognition │
│ ↓ │
│ 🧠 Psychological Profile Generation │
│ ↓ │
│ 📈 Actionable Insights Out │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
💰 Cost Optimization (or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AWS Bills in VND")
Approach | Positions Analyzed | AI Cost | Result |
---|---|---|---|
Naive | 1,200 (100%) | $120.00 | 💸 Time to sell my gaming PC |
Smart | 90 (7.5%) | $9.00 | 🎯 Still afford phở |
Savings | 92.5% reduction | 91% less | ✅ My AWS bill is now reasonable |
📚 What This Technical Series Is Actually About
I'm gonna document the whole journey of building this thing, including:
🗺️ The Roadmap
📖 Technical Deep-Dive Series (10 Posts):
🔍 Post 2: The Critical Position Detection Algorithm
└─ How to identify the 7% that matter
🤖 Post 3: Engine-AI Constraint Systems
└─ Preventing AI from suggesting illegal moves
📊 Post 4: Vector Embeddings for Chess Pattern Recognition
└─ Finding your recurring blind spots mathematically
⚙️ Post 5: Windmill Workflow Orchestration
└─ Managing complex analysis pipelines
🗄️ Post 6: Database Design for Chess Analytics
└─ Storing millions of positions efficiently
🧠 Post 7: Player Psychology Pattern Recognition
└─ Extracting insights from playing style
💰 Post 8: Cost Optimization Strategies
└─ Building premium analysis on a budget
🚀 Post 9: Production Architecture & Scaling
└─ Making it work for real users
🎯 Post 10: Lessons Learned & What I'd Do Different
└─ All the stupid mistakes (for your benefit)
Plus all the stupid mistakes I made along the way. Because those are usually the most educational parts.
🔬 Sneak Peek: The Position Criticality Algorithm
def is_position_critical(position, game_context):
"""
The algorithm that makes this economically viable
"""
score = 0.0
# Big evaluation swings = critical
if abs(eval_change) > 150: score += 0.3
# Time pressure = more mistakes
if time_left < 60: score += 0.2
# Opening deviations = learning opportunities
if not_in_theory_book: score += 0.25
# Tactical complexity = important
score += tactical_density * 0.3
return score > 0.85 # Only ~7% pass this threshold
🤔 The Real Question
How many other people are stuck in this same exact spot?
- Paying way too much for analysis that tells you nothing useful ✅
- Manually grinding through games hoping to magically understand mistakes ✅
- Knowing you have patterns but no way to identify them systematically ✅
- Frustrated that premium tools still require you to do all the work ✅
I can't be the only developer who looked at this problem and thought "there has to be a better way."
🎬 Call to Action
Drop a ♟️ if you've ever blundered while thinking "this is definitely winning"
Drop a 🧠 if you want to see how deep this ML rabbit hole goes
Drop a ☕ if you think chess improvement requires more coffee than code
Also, if you have ideas for what would make chess analysis actually useful, let me know. I've got the psychological insights of a therapist and the coding skills of an ML engineer - let's make something interesting.
🔗 Coming Up Next
Next post: "Getting into the weeds of how to identify which chess positions actually need expensive analysis (hint: it's way fewer than you think)"
Just a Vietnamese dev mixing ML, psychology, and chess into one weird project. Currently in a committed relationship with TensorFlow and a casual fling with the Queen's Gambit. Based in Saigon, where the coffee is strong and the AC is cold.
Tags: #Chess
#SoftwareDevelopment
#AI
#StartupLife
#ChessImprovement
#TechnicalDeepDive
#DistributedSystems
#CostOptimization