The Core Idea: Stockfish will play against itself across all 960 possible starting positions. The goal is to collect a unique dataset and determine if any initial setups provide a statistically significant advantage against perfect play.
Current Status (Test Run):
The tournament is already live and running. You can follow the progress on the website: chess960v2.com
To speed up testing, time control is set to 0.5 seconds per move (instead of the planned 3 seconds for the main tournament).
Expected test duration: ~2 months.
This will help verify system stability, the game processing pipeline, and gather initial data.
Plan for Main Tournament (Early 2026):
Full time control: 3 seconds per move
Duration: exactly 1 year
The result will be a complete database of all games with detailed statistics
Technical Side: The project is written in Go (Golang) and serves as an orchestrator that manages multiple Stockfish processes, distributes positions, collects PGN files, and analyzes results. The source code will be published in the coming weeks once I've cleaned it up and written documentation.
Why this might interest the HN community:
Data: Will produce a valuable dataset for chess enthusiasts, analysts, and ML applications
Open Source & Go: Soon anyone can look under the hood of the Go implementation, which could be useful for those working with similar high-performance applications
Scale: A year of autonomous operation presents an interesting engineering challenge
Chess 960: The discipline itself sparks debates about "solving" classical chess, and this project could add data to that discussion
This is a modest announcement for now, without active social media promotion. I'd appreciate any feedback, improvement suggestions, or collaboration offers. Questions are welcome.
Project website: chess960v2.com
lavren1974•3mo ago