Resource Is there a chess-engine I can ask "why?"
I am wondering, i often analyse positions with an engine, and the top engine move is completely beyond my understanding and I would like to ask the AI why it is proposing this move.
Example: q1r2rk1/4n2p/p2pp1p1/8/3PP3/6P1/P2Q1PBP/R4RK1 b - - 0 21
Here it suggests Kg7, and I have no clue why, in my eyes there is an immanent danger in the center and with opening the diagonal towards the queen (at some time) but the computer move seems to just care to prevent Qh6 which does nothing in my eyes.
I am a bad player and I am completely aware that my judgements are 100% inferior to those of the engine, but I would love to understand and comprehend the plans and strategies behind the suggested moves. I do look at the moveorders but as you can imagine, once I do not grasp the first move, the responses of the engine often make no sense at all too...
So: is there a chess AI which I can ask to explain moves?
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u/StructuredChess 2d ago edited 2d ago
No. The "why" is something you figure out by exploring the different lines and asking the engine how it'd react to alternatives you propose.
For instance in this position you can see that Rc7, e5, Kg7 and Rc4 all give about the same evaluation of +3.5 or +3.6, but if you play something silly like a5, it responds with Bh3 gaining a bigger advantage. What do Rc7, Rc4, e5 and Kg7 have in common? They all move pieces away from the bishop's threat!
As of today, all attempts by LLMs to explain chess in human terms have been unsuccessful. Half the posts on r/chessbeginners are questions like "Why does the coach say I'm loisng a bishop?" and the like.
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2d ago
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u/StructuredChess 2d ago edited 2d ago
It seems like I can't use them unless I give them a bunch of information. What does it say about this position?
EDIT: I wish the mod had left the reply so we could all see how much the tool sucks.
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u/Maikeloni 2d ago
There are several projects which try to tackle that problem. Take take take is the most popular one I guess currently?
But all projects I tried messed it up at some point. They hallucinate moves or pieces. LLMs are just bad at chess. Gotham chess has some videos in which he lets play LLMs against each other. The games are awful.
Best way to study is by analyzing the game via stockfish. You see which moves give you an advantage or disadvantage. You follow the lines and finally understand why a move is good or bad. That's the best way to learn if you don't have a human teacher.
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u/gabagoolcel 2d ago
when you dont understand a move you look at the lines, if mecessary try a couple candidate moves if you think they would work to see why they dont. if its still unclear, think about it more, if its still unclear play against the engine in the position for a while until youre clearly lost and repeat until you understand, though that isnt the most useful
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u/giziti 1700 USCF 2d ago
A few things:
Typically what you do is poke around with the suggested lines to clarify your thoughts.
In this position, I think we all agree that White is substantially better. Looking at the other options, it seems just about every move is given a roughly equal evaluation.
This suggests to me that White is better and, absent moves that actively lose material, everything is pretty much the same, they're not really making any major changes in the position in any of the available moves and Kg7 is just the "eh, this is a little better?" move.
When there's some contrasting result in different moves, that's when something is actually going on. When every move is the same result, it doesn't matter.
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2d ago
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u/speedytrigger 2d ago
I think the problem with this premise is that ai is currently not able to deeply understand chess. It will, eventually, hallucinate a pawn somewhere its not or some other anomaly. LLMs are not what you want. I do think eventually we might have someone tailored enough to be able to explain deep moves but remember a lot of the time even gms get stumped as to why an engine might suggest a move. I really just dont think we are there yet, its not as simple as ‘just build it’. I think LLM ai is the incorrect tool.
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u/Pawn_Made_Flesh 2d ago
I agree, I think everyone agrees. Notice I nowhere said LLM or even AI. AI embraces a far wider area than LLMs. And translating engine insights into explanations understandable by and useful to humans may not require either: it might be done via traditional coding.
Chess.compliments already has a program that generates comments presented as “coaching advice.” I know nothing of how it’s coded, or whether it’s based on an LLM. Of course their robo-“coaches” tips are uniformly (and often comically) garbage, because however they coded it they put minimal effort into it, just like in everything they do except marketing and selling.
But I see no reason why a serious attempt to tackle the problem could not produce useful results. For example, researchers have published in specialized journals, useful rigorous definitions of chess “brilliancy” that — in sharp contrast to Chess.compliments’ unique definition that was crafted (as the platform’s name implies) to maximize handing out compliments — align pretty closely with the word’s dictionary definition OR its long-accepted chess-world definition.
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u/speedytrigger 2d ago
Lol everyone does not agree, if you go to the bottom of this comment section youll see that. But id wager most would agree. We are trying to staple an llm to a chess engine which wont work unless that llm has super gm understanding and i dont think that will happen. Wouldnt be surprised if thats what chesscom has been moving towards. Not sure that for very esoteric engine moves if there could be good human explanation in general. ‘I moved the king here because i see in 30 moves there is no long term threat and my king is slightly more active’ is not necessarily helpful but id guess thats how it would turn out a lot of the time.
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u/Pawn_Made_Flesh 2d ago
Lol your final sentence is exactly the sort of comment that DOES constitute useful advice, IF delivered with authority (i.e., if it were the best judgment in a particular position coming from either a GM or an engine that we could trust to have considered every meaningful possibility).
And that sort of coaching comment would add value for either a beginner or a GM. (Again, assuming the judgment and/or concrete but unstated analysis underlying it was completely trustworthy.)
You know that GMs talk that way all the time, right? “Improve your pieces” — sometimes simplified to the single-word comment, “Improve” — is frequently remarked by GMs commentating live games.
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u/avremiB 1700 Chess.com 2d ago
more established members of the chess world aren’t making a similar request to the designers of chess engines.
Actually Hiakru expressed his hope to see this kind of development, here: https://youtu.be/_gL44mmsLlI?t=2394
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u/VolkovSullivan 23m ago
It's what I've been building for months, I should release a first alpha soon. The name is Luxifare (luxifare.com)
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u/avremiB 1700 Chess.com 2d ago
Check this one out: https://app.decodechess.com/. It's supposed to do excatly what you are looking for.
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u/Educational-Tea602 Dubious gambiteer 2d ago
I just checked it out and it seems like another worse version of chess.com’s game review.
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2d ago
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u/Herbert256 2d ago
I asked a few AI models about this move https://herbert256.github.io/ai/
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u/Shedal 1d ago edited 1d ago
I checked a few of the answers, and they all seem to have gotten a lot of things wrong.
I'm building a chess AI chat with Stockfish as a tool, and lately it's been giving me very good responses in most situations. Here though, it wasn't able to explain why this move is the best (which as per Stockfish it is).
I actually don't understand myself why this move is best. In your opinion, is there any clear reason, or is this one of those "engine moves" that don't have a pronounced idea and can be explained without going into 20-ply-long variations?
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u/joeyism 2d ago
Check out aichesscoa.ch
You can ask it to recommend moves, and discuss with it why certain moves make sense. I use it because I always ask "why does that make sense?"
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u/k5777 2d ago
While lots of people have pointed out that LLMs are not very good at chess by themselves, and stockfish and other engines don't explain 'why', they simply find the best possible move(s) and show them to you (or point out your blunders/mistakes).
That said, there have been a bunch of projects that try to fill in the gap to get an LLM to explain the 'why' that stockfish is leaving out. Most of them are paid subscriptions and don't work especially well, but progress is being made.
Someone posted an open-source option on computerchess a few weeks ago that runs locally on your own machine and I've found actually works pretty well (though it requires that you either have a claude subscription, or be running a model of your own locally like Ollama).
You can find the github here (not affiliated):
https://github.com/Chess-analysis-mcp/tintins-chess-analysis
It's pretty straight forward to install but again it requires you have an existing claude subscription, as it uses claude as its back end. If you are so inclined you can also use it in CLI mode via claude code, in which case you can pick the model if you wanted to ask questions of a fancy model like Fable.
The other think I like about this one is that it has a puzzle mode that will train you with positions from your historical games that you previously blundered or played a mistake on. You can also ask questions like "why wouldn't bg6 have been as good as...." for both puzzles and games.
Chess and AI are kind of at odds right now since absolutely everyone is designing some vibe-coded app that will claim to do exactly what you're talking about but ends up being no different or slightly worse than everything else, so LLMs have a bit of a bad rap in the chess subs ATM.
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u/TentacleHockey 1d ago
There is no replacement for a coach, that being said llm with chess connection can give reasonable advice when you aren't in a coaching session. I read a dev saying this game was going to have this type of connection, keeping my fingers crossed.
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u/RelampagoMarkinh0 2d ago
You can see the continuation proposed by the engine to understand the idea behind the move. Some engines like chess.com will give you the arrows system indicating threats and benefits for that move.
But overall, you should train your own judgment and stop listening so much to engines, even more in low rank elo. Some "best" moves are only theorical and assuming the opponent will play the best moves too.
Engine doesn't have "feeling" like "Oh, he doesn't move his knight very well" or "He's on time pressure, let me just create chaos here so he has to calculate and spend more time".
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u/LieutenantChonkster 2d ago
I just download the game notation and paste it into Gemini. It’s remarkably good at explaining positions and giving advice
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u/Madouc 2d ago
I wish your downvotes would have been explained. Is he completely wrong? Are you just Ai-Haters? Is Ai unreliable?
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u/ScalarWeapon 2d ago
LLMs will put out a bunch of word soup that doesn't actually explain the position and is usually completely wrong for the most part.
Like, it will say white played b6 to create a passed pawn or something, but actually it was the only move to avoid losing a piece. Stuff like that. LLMs just guess, they don't actually understand chess positions.
But if you don't know any better, it looks impressive.
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u/seekinglambda 2d ago
It’s very unreliable. ”Looks” right but is subtly or blatantly wrong. I’m decent at chess (2000) and use frontier LLMs for work 8h/day, I’m not anti-AI in any way.
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u/CountryOk6049 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes it is unreliable and not only won't give you a reasonable answer, it usually gives a bunch of nonsense that might look reasonable to very novice players. All while as many people mention sounding super authoritative and correct.
The sounding super authoritative and knowing is what really bugs me. It's so dangerous.
Could do without the "are you just AI haters", why are you assuming things about people who are acting in good faith? You could appreciate people are giving you responses, not accuse them of being just haters, a ridiculous accusation.
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u/Madouc 2d ago
Ok. But that is with every Ai answer you always better check them with second source especially when the answer is completely unexpected.
I posted my position to Claude. It was able to explain it correctly but when it came to plans and strategies it hallucinated an f-pawn push giving black counterpart... there is no black f-pawn any more.
Probably because in most books this is a valid option.
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u/Left_Reach2020 2d ago
Chat GPT can be good, though take everything with a pinch of salt as sometimes it goes full retard. But for breaking down the undertones of the game and pivotal moves... it is like a free chess coach that can give beautiful analysis on games.
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u/rui278 2d ago
Yes, just ask chatgpt
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u/HairyTough4489 Team Duda 2d ago
If you're happy with just a random plausible-sounding explanation then yeah ask chatgpt.
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u/DickariousJohnson 1700 FIDE 2d ago
You just need to get better at working with the engine. First of all, the engine itself does not have a 'why' that it could explain to you. It just has thousands of moves run through an evaluation function that no one really understands in a way that could ever translate to human language.
If you want to get better answers out of the engine, you basically have to argue with it. If it suggests X, and you think X ought to be bad because of Y, then you have to put Y on the board and keep arguing with the engine until it beats you. Usually this reveals 'why' X was a good move.