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Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB

datavorous_ Saturday, February 14, 2026

I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases.

I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform.

For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution.

Then converted pooled win/draw/loss scores to Elo through some standard logistic formula with binomial 95% confidence interval.

Summary
Sameshi is an open-source tool that helps analyze large datasets by allowing users to create and share custom data visualizations and analysis workflows. It provides a user-friendly interface for data exploration, transformation, and collaborative analysis.
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Summary
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