🤖♟️ Can you beat this tiny chess engine? | The Kilobyte's Gambit | Chess Chats #15
#kilobytesgambit #tinyengine #chesschats
On today’s Chess Chats I’m going to showcase a pretty amazing TINY chess engine that’s written in Javascript and only 1024 bytes (yes, BYTES! 😲) in size! I’d previously played against my childhood chessbot nemesis, CHESS88, a DOS program from the 1980s and comparatively, it’s gargantuan at 9 kbytes!
The Kilobyte’s Gambit is available online for free and is inspired by the hit Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit. I’d only discovered it this year and, in the video, I mistakenly thought that it was released in 2025. Further investigation while writing the article identified that it was actually released in 2021. The engine is adapted from code written by Oscar Toledo G who seems to have a passion for writing these tiny programs!
Now, I thought that a 1024 kb engine was impressive, but on his website one can find Toledo Atomchess, which is compiled in x86 machine code and is a staggering 326 bytes! And his code includes the logic for basic chess movements, with a search depth of 3! To put this into context, that is less data than the size of the text in this paragraph! 🤯
But back to The Kilobyte’s Gambit. How well did it play? I would argue that for a 1 kb program, it is enormously impressive! It played a tricky and offbeat opening (the Goldsmith Defense), and the engine punished my mistakes, and admittedly, I (arrogantly) played the game in a pretty haphazard manner. I think that the engine would have definitely beat me when I was a kid! The engine is prone to making mistakes and blunders though, so any time I played more solidly would result in me accruing an advantage.
The Chess.com game review shows this well. I regained the advantage each time I made a serious mistake.
Anyway, what do you think? Have you tried playing against this tiny chess engine and how did you find it? Let me know in the comments below!
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