node.js ko
Chess@home
Chess@home
by Joshfire
Let’s break the Guinness world record for largest chess AI !
Do you think you’re good enough to beat the cloud? Give it a try.
Not a Chess GrandMaster? Join the machine uprising! To be a part of the compute grid, just visit Chess@home or any page with a <script> we provide (include it in your blog!). People with a few idle CPUs can also launch a worker with npm.
(We plan to invite an actual GrandMaster along with a Guinness official in a few weeks and coordinate online so that we all break the current 2070-node record and make Node.js a part of History! ;–) Follow us on @chess_at_home to be kept updated)
Judging Instructions
Playing chess works best in Webkit (Chrome/Safari/..), quite well in Firefox and is not available in IE yet.
If the game hangs (no computer move in 2 minutes), just reload the page and the game will resume. But it is expected to take at least 20 seconds per move like a human would (official tournament game time is 90 minutes)
Who
tbassetto — Paris, France
nathan-appere — Paris
sylvinus — Paris, France
mcouzinet — Paris
How
Npm modules:
- dnode
- node-webworker
- node-qunit
- sharedjs
- express
- connect
- ejs
- mongoose
- node-browserify
- underscore
- node-uuid
Assets:
- Oxygen icons for the globe
- Twitter bootstrap (for the layout)
- GarboChess (starting point for the AI and pieces icons, agreed by the NKO team)
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(175)
caseycrites
contestant
AudreyLojudgeVery detailed, clean design and ambitious mission. I can tell that you have an experienced team as well. The only thing that I would suggest is to make your homepage less wordy. Overall, I love it. Great work!
cruciallyjudge
b00giZmjudgeI really, really, really suck at chess, but the idea just blows me away :) Building a giant “clustered” chess AI with some lines of Javascript is pure awesomeness.
The companion website looks pretty much polished (although it’s “just” Twitter bootstrap under the hood).
Overall a really great achievement for 48 hours.
tiffanykjudgePolished product. Spent the most time playing this entry over any other. Chrome hung towards the end, despite dropping from 22 to 14 computers I was playing against. Leaderboard and other social / gamification elements would inspire replay vs. expected outcome against bots. Rooting for Joshfire and your ambitious D-Day goal of inviting an actual Grand Master.
- contestant
thanks a lot for your review!
if you reload the page the game will resume where it hung. We’ll definitely take the advice on gamification. Also watching matches was an often-requested feature.
cheers!
NiDi
contestantsingles
contestanttornak47
contestantGreat idea – definitely a good demonstration of the power of NodeJS + Cloud computing. Everything looks polished, nice design, and I’d be very interested to see if I could adapt it to suit my own needs.
atsuya
contestanti think concept is not that new, but execution is great. UX is awesome. want to make me work at joshfire.
milani
contestantdeluxeroyale
contestantThis is awesome, really love the concept and the idea of beating the world record! Just wish I could be better at it! Great job!
rahimsjudgeLove the crowd approach to chess. In other news, I suck at chess.
jerrysievertjudge
willconantjudgeI’m pretty much blown away that this was accomplished in 48 hours. I suck at chess, so I think it would be cool to see reporting about games my nodes helped win. I’m giving high marks on Utility/Fun for the very cool browser-based cluster concept.
Jaciones
contestantI love the idea of breaking the world record, that is definitely something to shoot for. I think that is so cool.
ryanmcgrath
judgeThis is excellent.
I was on the team that did MapRejuice last year, and I was wondering if anyone would try a distributed computing project this year. What you’ve done here is awesome! It’s a human-relatable representation of distributed computing. Major respect points.
I am interested in what browsers you support with the <script> tag method; we chose to ignore running MapRejuice on Mobile browsers, for instance, as it’d contribute to draining the battery. Ethical questions, yo.
lovehasnologic
contestantIt’s chess. Not much room for innovation there, however, you found an angle, and a good one at that. Let’s build a super computer to beat those snobby chess champions and show them who the real chess masters are once and for all. </hyperbole>
I had a game hang on me, which was a bummer, though I knew I was going to lose so maybe the computers had mercy on me. My only issue with the design is that it’s a bit of information overload. Granted, you can’t do a full UI study in 48 hours if you expect to build anything, but there’s definitely room for improvement there.
- contestant
thanks for your review! If you reload the page your game will resume, there’s nothing lost.
We’ll definitely try to polish the UI after NKO! thanks for the ideas
cheers
paularmstrong
contestant
chinacceleratorjudgeFor some reasons I couldn’t access the website and decided to give it a break, then went back at it… and then magic happened! :–)
The interface is pretty slick and the experience seamless, and overall everything works the way it should.
The idea of using SETI’s concept is really cool and I happily got my ass kicked by 23 computers (does that includes mine since I am supposed to be computing? That would be quite a betrayal), who were thinking pretty fast and evil. And of course, we’ll get that record, won’t we?
Minor bugs: nothing happens when I click on the red button ; I got frozen once ; I wish there was an “undo” button because I KNEW he was going to do that move!!! ;–)
Downside: you have to like chess and never win at it
Looking forward to see the fight against Kasparov and his clone army!
mtoymil
contestantCool idea, I hope you can realize the dream of beating a grandmaster. You easily beat me (~1500 haha) with 26 computers. Chess engines aren’t the newest things, but your execution seems pretty darn solid.
EDIT: 2 stars for innovation was pretty weak.
burntojudgeWell the 26 computer nodes definitely kicked my chess newbie ass. Though when I reached “checkmate” I kept getting alerts. One would have been enough!
I dig the concept a lot, and I had a lot of fun playing. Can’t wait to see how the match against a GrandMaster turns out.
The *@home thing has been done with node before (last year’s nko I believe), so I’m knocking off one start for innovation. Sorry! I do like seeing it applied to gaming AI.
Visual design is solid and consistent, but not groundbreaking. Interactions feel good. Hangs together well.
Feels very complete overall. Polished, good attention to detail especially in the chess playing interactions.
TrevorBurnham
contestantGreat concept. Way better than the chess thing I was thinking of doing. ;)
travhimself
contestantEven the most rudimentary chess AIs can wipe the slate with me, but this is very cool. :) Unfortunately my game locked up just a few moves in.
- contestant
Hi!
We had to restart the service a few times on monday, maybe that stopped your game. If you reload the page the game will automatically resume where you left so nothing should be lost.
cheers!
travhimself
contestantAh okay, I’ll give it another shot. Gotta say, this a really cool idea.
electronicwhisper
contestantGreat idea!
Sometimes my game seems to hang though.
But when it plays, the AI is pretty good (better than me anyway :P).
Good luck beating the grandmaster!
- contestant
Hi!
We had to restart the service a few times on monday, maybe that stopped your game. If you reload the page the game will automatically resume where you left so nothing should be lost.
thanks for your review!
cheers!
jolieodelljudgeInteresting concept, but there’s still quite a bit of lag in gameplay. Good luck with your goal!
- contestant
Hi Jolie,
Maybe that wasn’t clear enough in the website but the AI actually runs all over the Internet and is not designed for “instantaneous” play but for tournament play of 90 minutes (goal being of beating a grand master)…
So playing times of 15-90s are what this AI is designed for : it’s also the time a human player usually would take to make a move.We can’t ask you to reevaluate your rating but we just thought that maybe would you have felt differently if that was clearer. Cheers!
pascalh1011
contestantVery impressive technical entry. Great example of the power of distributed node.js!
krisoft
contestantReally nice! Only problem that I don’t play chess :)
ricardrobin
contestantReally impressive ! Such a great piece of work !
davidmoffitt
contestantThis is such an incredible idea (and great showpiece for JavaScript as a whole). Not a lot to “see” but what’s going on under the hood is astounding in concept.
carsonmcdonald
contestant
patmeenanjudgeI love the concept and the implementation looks reasonably far along but the actual gameplay side of things is a bit glitchy (though it looks like it reloaded itself to recover).
I’m particularly interested in the possibilities of using a snippet for large scale distributed computing. The challenge will be to see if there is a problem set that can be broken down into small enough work units that can be worked on in the few seconds that someone is browsing a site (and dealing with a high loss of work units).
therazorbladejudgeThis is pretty impressive. The game itself is a bit buggy (e.g. when dragging pieces they show up all over the place), but works well.
mattsoldojudgeVery cool concept – using Node for distributed computing.
Some design feedback: Give an indication of whose turn it is. Also, if there was some cool way to visualize all of the many computers chomping away at all the decision space – it would help to convey the innovation you have done behind the scenes.
mahemoffjudgeGreat idea and nice to see such visual polish (except the wipe+redraw on each turn, which could be fixed easily). You might consider building a browser extension too (e.g. using Chrome’s background feature).
fredyatesivjudgeSeems like a fun idea, especially for chess lovers.
I’m awful at chess but still found myself curious about how I could possibly beat 30 computers.
As a designer, I would have liked to see the actually playable chessboard on a separate page so I didn’t have to deal with the rest of the homepage content congesting my view.
Legogris
contestantGreat initiative making great use of web workers and challenging the server/client thinking of the web.
victorkane
contestantGreat use of node.js and most useful middleware; and the fact that it is social and while being a web-app transcends the single client and even server, creating a community of clients and servers.
I really like the idea of this and will probably install the worker at some point, but I had some troubles with the game itself. The game told me it was over because of checkmate when it clearly wasn’t and the dialog kept popping back up after I dismissed it. Fix those small issues and my completeness score would be 5 stars.
I took a screenshot of the game telling me it was over because of checkmate. You can see it here: http://imgur.com/1jGB9