MereGurudev

Yes, they're distinguished: the pieces you place there manually ("fixed pieces" are opaque and thus should have the same color, off-white or dark-grey, no matter the background square.

The pieces the AI adds when you press generate, are translucent (and as such will be affected by the background color). Then you can press "Lock in" to convert the generated pieces to fixed pieces, in which case they will become opaque.

I realize that for anyone less used to the color scheme than me, this distinction is problematic since there will be no less than six different piece colors (white, black, translucent-white-on-light, translucent-white-on-dark, translucent-black-on-light, translucent-black-on-dark)

Thanks for the feedback! It's a simple modification to guarantee things like this – for this prototype I thought it interesting though to expose the "raw" output of the neural network, including crazy things like sometimes placing two kings of the same color. I even force the neural network to place more pieces than it intends, if you put the piece slider on max, to see what happens (and often the result is very bad)

Thanks! Ah, sorry for that. Just to clarify, do you mean for the semi-transparent pieces (the generated ones without "locking in") or even the manually placed pieces?

Hey, you're right, adjust piece count is a local modification, so opening the same dreamId in multiple windows would let you view the position with different piece counts (and the link to Noctie uses the local state)

Thanks! Good idea, I could add FEN / PGN export in addition to lichess. I haven't tried conditioning the network on opening but given my training data, that should be possible. For now, you can simulate openings somewhat, by trying to fix pawns and pieces in their typical positions, but it would be better if I could do it like you suggested "QGA, 15–20 moves" etc. I might try this out!

Hey, that's really cool, will check it out! The backend was experiencing some issues leading to laggy play by Noctie, I hope it's working better now.

Thanks! Yes, the traffic from here exposed a few issues & bottlenecks in the backend infrastructure. I have resolved most of them and it seems to be running OK now (?).

To answer your questions: Noctie takes every move into account. Especially in short games or very one-sided games, a lot of the rating estimate will come from your opening play. If you play a bad opening, Noctie adapts and you will get an easier game, which may lead to simpler positions where you have less risk of making a mistake that would lower your rating. So what opening you play definitely has a big impact when trying to judge the rating from one game only.

If you create an account and log in, Noctie will accumulate information from several games to give a more balanced difficulty and more accurate rating estimate (and show how it changes over time).

Noctie's involvement isn't strictly required for the rating estimate although it creates good conditions for it by making the game balanced, not dominated by time trouble or trying to flag the opponent, etc.

Good suggestions, thanks.

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

If the opening is rated as sufficiently bad, it would adjust its play accordingly and perhaps not challenge you sufficiently to be able to change its rating estimate. I.e. if you get a very easy, tactical game after that, the game might not be testing your abilities enough to revise the estimate from one game.

I think you were just unlucky with the opening! When I'm testing it's about 60/40 1...e5 vs 1...c5. The first opening moves should be quite close to what a 1600 FIDE player plays in online blitz.