Chess.com Visits Spike with New Cat-Themed AI Bot Named 'Mittens' (deseret.com) 29
On New Year's Day, Chess.com launched five chess-playing bots — each with a cat persona. But the Deseret News reports that something unexpected happened with "Mittens"...
Interest generated by Mittens is outpacing the surge that came on the heels of the wildly popular, chess-centric Netflix miniseries from 2020, "The Queen's Gambit". Chess.com has averaged 27.5 million games played per day in January and is on track for more than 850 million games this month — 40% more than any month in the company's history, per the Wall Street Journal.
A Chess.com team developed a special passive-aggressive personality for Mittens, according to the article. The team "thought it would be 'way more demoralizing and funny' if, instead of simply smashing opponents, Mittens ground down opposing players through painstaking positional battles, similar to the tactics Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov used to become world champion, per the Journal."
The Journal adds: "This bot is a psycho," the streamer and International Master Levy Rozman tweeted after a vicious checkmate this month. A day later, he added, "The chess world has to unite against Mittens." He was joking, mostly.
Mittens is a meme, a piece of artificial intelligence and a super grandmaster who also happens to reflect the broader evolution in modern chess. The game is no longer old, stuffy and dominated by theoretical conversations about different lines of a d5 opening. It's young, buzzy and proof that cats still rule the internet....
"I am inevitable. I am forever. Meow. Hehehehe," Mittens tells her opponents in the chat function of games....
Getting absolutely creamed by Mittens might get old. But her surprising popularity speaks to an underlying current in the chess world as freshly minted fans flow in: people are endlessly curious about new ways to engage with the ancient game. Facing novelty bots is just one of them. There has also been a new wave of interest in previously obscure chess variants. Chess960, for instance, is a version of the game where all the non-pawn pieces are lined up in random order on the back rank.... Other variants include: "Fog of War," where players have a limited view of their opponents' pieces; "Bughouse Chess," which is played across two boards with captured pieces potentially moving from one to the other; and "Three Check," where the objective is simply to put the opposing king in check three times.
The wackiest of all is the chess variant known as Duck Chess. It looks mostly like regular chess — 64 squares and 32 pieces. But it also has one rubber ducky on the board. After every move in Duck Chess, the player moves the titular object to a new square of the board where it blocks pieces in its path. Good luck moving your bishop when there's a duck squatting on its diagonal.
A Chess.com team developed a special passive-aggressive personality for Mittens, according to the article. The team "thought it would be 'way more demoralizing and funny' if, instead of simply smashing opponents, Mittens ground down opposing players through painstaking positional battles, similar to the tactics Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov used to become world champion, per the Journal."
The Journal adds: "This bot is a psycho," the streamer and International Master Levy Rozman tweeted after a vicious checkmate this month. A day later, he added, "The chess world has to unite against Mittens." He was joking, mostly.
Mittens is a meme, a piece of artificial intelligence and a super grandmaster who also happens to reflect the broader evolution in modern chess. The game is no longer old, stuffy and dominated by theoretical conversations about different lines of a d5 opening. It's young, buzzy and proof that cats still rule the internet....
"I am inevitable. I am forever. Meow. Hehehehe," Mittens tells her opponents in the chat function of games....
Getting absolutely creamed by Mittens might get old. But her surprising popularity speaks to an underlying current in the chess world as freshly minted fans flow in: people are endlessly curious about new ways to engage with the ancient game. Facing novelty bots is just one of them. There has also been a new wave of interest in previously obscure chess variants. Chess960, for instance, is a version of the game where all the non-pawn pieces are lined up in random order on the back rank.... Other variants include: "Fog of War," where players have a limited view of their opponents' pieces; "Bughouse Chess," which is played across two boards with captured pieces potentially moving from one to the other; and "Three Check," where the objective is simply to put the opposing king in check three times.
The wackiest of all is the chess variant known as Duck Chess. It looks mostly like regular chess — 64 squares and 32 pieces. But it also has one rubber ducky on the board. After every move in Duck Chess, the player moves the titular object to a new square of the board where it blocks pieces in its path. Good luck moving your bishop when there's a duck squatting on its diagonal.
Or maybe Youtube algorithm (Score:1)
CowboyNeal Chess variant (Score:1)
I'm waiting for the official rules to come out for CowboyNeal Chess.
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Ok, with no evidence for this whatever, I boldly claim that CowboyNeal likes to keep things simple. With this in mind:
1. no confusing concepts like checkmate, stalemate or check; there's no prohibition on moving into check;
2. if you take your opponents king you win;
3. if you can't move you lose.
All other rules are the same as chess except that castling has to be reworded in order to avoid using the check concept.
Note that this is chess, except that stalemate is a loss for player to move. It is similar to "k
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there's no prohibition on moving into check
Alleluia! I'm fucking ALWAYS doing that.
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Then this is your variant. If your opponent has even a minute portion of a chess brain, you'll lose immediately. The pain of losing, being greater than the pain of being asked to take your move back, will quickly educate you into not moving into check.
Cats... (Score:2)
Re: Cats... (Score:1)
Play lichess (Score:3, Interesting)
Lichess [slashdot.org] is a free/libre, open-source chess server powered by volunteers and donations. Try it out! IMO lichess is qualitatively superior to chess.com. I made an account once at chess.com only to learn making an account is just a way for them to let you try out features not-at-all to a couple of times and milk you for cash.
Re: Passive-aggresive time wasting (Score:2)
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I'm just getting back into chess. Very rusty, inspired by youtube content (I quite like Gotham Chess, and occasionally some Botez craziness). I'm quite happy to play against the bots, easier ones mind you, not mittens, until I get the knack of not blundering my Queen.
Appropriate (Score:2)
It's a cat-themed chess program that plays with its food.
Real interactions over PC sandbox. (Score:1)
So you build an army of mean chess bots but instead of scaring players away they get to love it. What does it tell you? Perhaps that real people prefer real-like interactions, with all that real life has to offer, including potentially toxic behaviours, rather than a doctored politically correct sandbox that most social media platforms try to force us into these days?
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They forgot chessboxing . . . (Score:3)
"Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid sport that combines two traditional disciplines: chess and boxing.[1][2] Two combatants play alternating rounds of blitz chess and boxing until one wins by checkmate or knockout."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Obviously difficult. (Score:4, Funny)
Have you ever tried playing chess with mittens? :-)
It's really hard to grip the pieces *and* w/o knocking everything over.
Re: (Score:2)
Hamster, meet wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who is a FIDA Master, 2300+ peak rating, a real character of the game. He convinced me to join a local chess group and for a good six months I played on chess.com as well as at our weekly meetup.
Everything went fine, until it didn't. I realized that I couldn't stand most of the other members of the group at all. Ditto for 99% of chess streamers and youtubers. Without being judgmental, there appears to be something about Chess that attracts people with personality disorders. In addition, getting slightly better at the game made me hate it. I felt, as Bobby Fischer did before me, that the fun, creative, attacking part of chess had been utterly destroyed by memorization and opening book play, which is something the personality disorders seem to be fantastic at doing.
It probably isn't unique to Chess, I see it in video games that have a professional scene and a couple of the more obscure sports, but something about Chess seems to really bring these horribly damaged people compensating for their lives of misery to the forefront.
The difference is that there is a level of video game playing that's casual that is also more or less universal. The vast majority of people I know who've picked up Hearthstone or Minecraft or League just play for fun and don't have ambitions of 'getting good.' In the chess world, that fun element just isn't there. It appears to be, more or less, an elaborate series of miserable struggles exacerbated by the computer chess era, specifically engines capable of running on a smartphone.
So I think it's a little bit farcical that various people / companies are trying to make chess cooler and more accessible. There's very little cool or fun about it, except for winning... and the people who care most about that are... drumroll please... the personality disorders.
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You do not need to memorize openings and such, you can still play for fun with other people that have skills similar to yours.
I do not really know any of the proper openings etc and it is still fun to play once in a while.
If you care about getting better and playing at a high level, you will need to learn the theory at some point, but that is true for pretty much everything.
I felt, as Bobby Fischer did before me, that the fun, creative, attacking part of chess had been utterly destroyed by memorization and opening book play
I think this is true for other things as well, like video games. Too much optimization at a high level makes it not as fun. But, at lea
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I've heard similar things. It's one of the reasons for there being women's chess clubs and leagues.
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Everything went fine, until it didn't. I realized that I couldn't stand most of the other members of the group at all
Ok, maybe they were a weird group.
Ditto for 99% of chess streamers and youtubers.
Ok, that's on you. The problem is you.
Without being judgmental, there appears to be something about Chess that attracts people with personality disorders.
And now you are being judgemental, and just plain wrong. I'm starting to see what your problems are.
Fix your own personality disorders. Your life will be better.
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Speaking in absolutes is a dead giveaway of borderline personality disorder, which you definitely have... thanks for playing
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Sure, sure, it's always someone else's problem. Never yours.
Talk to a therapist. Fix yourself.
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I know what you mean about memorizing opening moves. I use to play chess in highschool and was pretty good. Then went to a tournament and got destroyed when someone played the sicilian defense against me. Lost in around 10 moves. I then knew I had to memorize opening moves if I wanted to move up in the rankings, but had no interest. So eventually gave up on playing chess. Still like the game, but rarely if ever play now.
What does it mean to "Visit Spike"? (Score:2)