Hackaton

Shatranj.ai curriculum offers modules to allow various AIs play against each other in a tournament style competition, aka. hackaton. 

The first of these is at play.shatranj.ai

Here 2 competing AIs with different configurations can be selected, both to play chess and shatranj. This tool also serves to analyze positions from historic chess books such as Libro Axedrez and Kitab-ash Shatranj.

The 2nd hackaton option happens within the advanced lessons of the curriculum, where an exhibition match with multiple games can be organized between various AIs using ascii board display, which also can display moves considered with various probabilities and the actual move chosen. Such exhibiton match logs are especially useful in debugging and improving various AI algorithms we develop and compare as part of the curriculum. Currently, our exhibition logger supports Shatranj, 4-connect, Qirkat, and Checkers, and it is easy to extend it to other historic board games.

We finish the project’s bootcamps and workshops with a small hackathon where students’ AIs compete against each other in historic board games.