Chess@Home
Chess@Home was a short-lived BOINC volunteer computing project that set out to build a large, machine-evaluated database of chess positions as the first step toward training a classifier able to estimate which side stood better in a given position. The project was run from chess.qugate.org and was maintained by Michal Stanislaw Wojcik, a Polish BOINC community member, with early technical support from the Poland BOINC Foundation.[1]
.png){kind=icon}
Overview
The project's stated goal was to construct a chess winning-position classifier, or score estimator, built on simple positional features such as material count, the number of squares controlled by each side, and the number of checks available in a position. The first phase aimed to establish how well relatively cheap evaluation methods and standard data mining techniques, including logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines, and decision trees, could perform at this task. A longer-term goal was to apply more advanced machine learning methods to approximate different levels of human chess proficiency, by tuning a search heuristic between more and less thoroughly trained states.[1]
To build the underlying dataset, the project first assembled a large collection of positions taken from games played by titled players, and planned to add further positions from weaker amateur games sourced from the Free Internet Chess Server games archive, in order to represent a wider range of playing strength.[1] Each position was to be evaluated by Stockfish, an open-source chess engine, with the resulting centipawn score (or mate distance, where a forced mate was found) and best move recorded for later analysis.[1]
Scale of the task
The project's own estimate, published on its about page, illustrates why the work needed distributed computing rather than a single machine. Evaluating one position to a fixed node budget of five million nodes took roughly five to six seconds on a single core running at approximately 2.5 GHz. Applied across an initial collection of 25 million positions, that works out to:
on one CPU core alone, and the project expected its full dataset, once amateur games were added, to grow to hundreds of millions of positions.[1] By the time of the 8 February 2014 snapshot of the project's homepage, volunteers had already evaluated 30,301,792 positions.[1]
Technical details
The BOINC client application distributed to volunteers was named chessathome, for example chessathome_1_windows_intelx86.exe on Windows, and served as a wrapper that launched the bundled Stockfish engine to perform the actual position evaluation; Stockfish's search was the sole consumer of CPU time on the volunteer's machine.[1] Completed tasks were credited at 9 BOINC credits each, corresponding to roughly ten minutes of work on a 2.5 GHz core.[1]
History
Chess@Home was announced to the BOINC community on 10 January 2014, described in the announcement simply as a new project related to the game of chess.[2] Its administrator described himself as new to running a BOINC project and credited Krzysztof Piszczek of the Poland BOINC Foundation as a mentor who helped set up the project's server.[1]
The project's active life was brief. By 17 March 2014, a volunteer reported that the project had been offline for more than a week; another community member confirmed that the project had finished, adding that the administrator himself was not certain whether further work would be issued in the future.[2] No further tasks were subsequently issued, and the project is understood within the BOINC community to have concluded at that point.
Relationship to Chess960@home
Despite the similar name, Chess@Home was not connected to the earlier, unrelated project Chess960@home. When Chess@Home was announced, a member of the BOINCstats community asked directly whether the two were related; the response confirmed they were separate projects, and that permission to use a similarly chess-themed name had been sought beforehand.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 About Chess@Home. Chess@Home. Retrieved 19 July 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Thread 'Chess@Home'. BOINC combined message boards. Retrieved 19 July 2026.
- ↑ Forum::New projects::Chess@Home. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 19 July 2026.