Meet Allie, the AI-powered chess bot trained on data from 91 million games

EurekAlert! ^ | News Release 15-Aug-2025 | Carnegie Mellon University

[SunkenCiv]

Yiming Zhang didn't grow up playing chess. Like many other people, the Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student discovered the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" during the pandemic and began playing online. However, he quickly realized how unnatural it felt playing against chess bots.

"After I learned the rules, I was in the bottom 10%, maybe 20% of players online," said Zhang, who is part of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) in CMU's School of Computer Science. "For beginners, it's not interesting or instructive to play against chess bots because the moves they make are often bizarre and incomprehensible to humans."

...Allie plays similarly to a human and can adapt to various strengths, from beginner to expert. It was trained similarly to the language models that underpin modern chatbots, such as ChatGPT. But instead of feeding Allie text from the internet, the team trained it on 91 million transcripts from the popular chess platform Lichess. Exposing Allie to transcripts from chess games played by humans taught it how to make moves a human player would make, take time to contemplate critical positions, and resign when the game is unwinnable...

When asked about future plans, the team explained that Allie is completely open source, and has amassed nearly 10,000 games since its deployment on Lichess...

Allie was presented at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations in Singapore, one of the premier venues for machine learning research. Zhang, Ippolito and Fried collaborated on the project with Athul Paul Jacob, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Vivian Lai, a researcher at Visa.

---

TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Science
KEYWORDS: ai; chess

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

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[kawhill]

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/for-beginners/beginner-vs-master-96056589

[If You Want It Fixed - Fix It]

Big deal, re-hasher.

Try something original.

AI can’t.

[Uncle Miltie]

My nephew developed and runs the #1 Chess Bot in the world managed by a single individual. A few Teams beat him. But no other single person.

He’s got a Chinese girlfriend now, they’re cute as heck, and one hopes on the road to forever together.

[webheart]

Queen’s Gambit was entirely fiction. It was a propaganda piece of gender swapping roles so that girls can be made to feel like they can do anything boys can do. I have yet to hear of a woman chess champion. It would be cool but you can’t make it happen just by making up a story about it in the hopes that some actual real girl is going to like chess enough to make it a lifetime ambition. I only saw a few minutes of different episodes because my wife has a higher tolerance for stupid than I do.

[kawhill]

Thanks for the thread. 8th grade year I played chess against Brian, he only beat me once, last day of school, I didn’t want to play, he talked me into it, he won that day, nowhere to go:

To castle in chess, you move your King two squares towards either your Rook on the kingside (kingside castling) or queenside (queenside castling). Simultaneously, the rook jumps over the king to the square immediately next to it on the opposite side.

[alexander_busek]

To castle in chess, you move your King two squares towards either your Rook on the kingside (kingside castling) or queenside (queenside castling). Simultaneously, the rook jumps over the king to the square immediately next to it on the opposite side.

Cool. You know any other chess rules you'd like to share with us?

Regards,

[SunkenCiv]

IOW, AI *is* a lot like 99%+ of humans.

[SunkenCiv]

:^)

I remember how there was a prize for the first chess program that could beat chess masters. IBM had its Deep Blue system, which was very very good, but wasn’t undefeated.

There’s also this historical tidbit, the 18th c Mechanical Turk chessplaying fake automaton:

https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/wolfgang-von-kempelen/

[SunkenCiv]

It’s always amused me that the move is called castling, but the chess geeks seem to get bent when the piece isn’t called a rook. 😊

I went to college with a kid who’d played in tournaments from what sounded like an early age (been too long to remember numbers) and when a grand master was in town for, I guess, a clinic? a lecture? and set up one of those mass tournaments where he was the opponent for everyone else, this fellow student was the only one who was able to put up a fight. He almost yelled “rook!” into my face when I tried that.

[ChessExpert]

“and resign when the game is unwinnable.”

How about resigning when the game is lost?