This Ain't No Content

Introducing Chess Guesser

Chess Guesser is a pretty simple application that I wanted for a while and finally got around to implementing. The aim is to allow you to play through an arbitrary game, guessing the moves that you want to guess, and going forward when you don't want to guess. There are other sites out there that allow you to do something similar, notably chessgames.com's "Guess the Move" feature, but I like mine better.

Notable features:

A few words about those "interesting parts". They're labelled "First Mistake" and "Critical Moment". In both cases, they are after the winning player has got a significant advantage, as judged by an engine offline. The "first mistake" is short for "first serious mistake" -- it is when the losing player makes a mistake that they never recover from. The "critical moment" is short for "last critical moment" -- it's when the winning player makes a move which makes the biggest evaluation jump.

The source for the application is on Github. Like all my recent personal projects, it benefits from AI assistance, mainly Claude as mediated through Cursor. I have lots of opinions about the AI, but it does get me over the hump of reluctance to take on things that aren't as much fun. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am opinionated, so I revert if things aren't going in a good direction. Still, you can find plenty of false starts and mistakes if you look in the published git history. What is there is definitely not perfect. I think the biggest misfeature right now is how well it works on mobile devices, particularly Android. However, it's beyond the "brown paper bag" phase, so I'm happy for anyone to take a look at it if they're interested.