A ~2700 Elo neural chess engine vibe-coded on a home PC
A browser-playable chess engine trained at home.
Credits
- Reddit poster Adam_Jesion Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Autochess NN is a neural chess engine of about 2,700 Elo, playable in the browser, built on one RTX 4090 at home to understand AlphaZero-style systems by making one.
AI did much of the research and coding in a loop of reading papers, prototyping, ablating and optimising. The current version is a 16-million-parameter network combining a residual CNN and a transformer with learned thought tokens, trained on over 100 million positions: supervised training on strong Lichess games, endgame tablebase fine-tuning, then self-play. It runs on the CPU with a shallow lookahead in under 2 ms.
The browser app lets you play it, edit positions, replay games, solve puzzles and see how its top-move probabilities shift as it thinks. The rating is the maker's own estimate.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Vibecoded on a home PC: building a ~2700 Elo browser-playable neural chess engine with a Karpathy-inReddit poster: Adam_JesionPublished
The maker's post in r/ClaudeCode describing the model, training pipeline and browser app.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: Vibecoded on a home PC: building a ~2700 Elo browser-playable neural chess engine with a Karpathy-in (opens in a new tab)