Chess Cat
1. Sometimes I’m playing a game of chess thinking about cats.
2. Mittens is a chess bot on chess.com.
3. Shahriar Rakib Rabbi Wrote this about the chess cat.
In the last few days there has been a lot of confusion about chess.com's bots, in particular, about Mittens, because chess.com decided to give him a low rating despite being very strong so I'm going to explain a little bit how bots in the platform work.
Chess.com bots don't use Stockfish, they use another engine called Komodo which is by default weaker than Stockfish 11. They also run in your browser so if you want to have better chances, play on your phone ;)
Komodo has 25 levels of strength, when you select the 3200 maximum bot, the internal strength of the engine will be set to 25 (the same number that appears in the bot profile picture) and the bot will use the "default" Komodo personality and a balanced opening book. When you play against Mittens, the strength will also be set to 25 and the personality will be set to "positional" and again, the book will be balanced.
Both the "3200 engine" and Mittens are the only bots that use the maximum engine strength, other bots like Hikaru, Vishy, Kramnik, Ian, Fabiano... have the strength set to 23. The weakest bots (the ones that have skill set to 1) are: Martin (obviously), Wayne, Fabian and the engine set to Beginner.
As you know some bots make comments during the same, some phrases are even used to hint you that you are about to lose (the bot has a forced mate), for example, Mittens will say: "Meow. You are not long for this game. Hehehe." and Hikaru will say: "Can you calculate this out?". But at the same time, if you have a forced mate, Mittens will say: "*ominously* DO NOT CONTINUE. I BEG YOU…er…meow! Hehehehe." and Gotham will say: "Yeah, you have me... assuming you can calculate X moves ahead.". If you spend more than 15 seconds, 1 minute or 3 minutes on a move, the bots will also comment about it, for example Gotham will say: "3 minutes on one move? What do you think this is, a FIDE tournament?" , Aman will say: "Eric just texted me - let me know when you have played your move." and Giri will say: "I'm going to tweet some emojis at Carlsen - be right back.".
