I know the board’s native engine is Stockfish. Does it require an internet connection for calculating? If so, how does the engine differ with no internet connection?
If you play straight from the board, it doesn’t require an active connection at all. Confirmed as I had no internet when I was testing this 
Currently, you have levels 1-12 for AI difficulty (up to 1200 ELO, I believe) when playing offline against the board itself 
I believe it’ll get higher levels of difficulty later, possibly up to around 2k elo, iirc?
Playing the AI via the Chessup app (internet connected), you have up to 3k elo difficulty to choose from. So, right now the main difference of “offline” on board AI and the chessup app would be 1200 max vs 3k max difficulty.
You can import your game into the app after you play it and analyze it in the app (or export it from there to analyze it wherever you’d prefer).
It will be 2k+ later, iirc. It’s not a released product yet.
I easily beat the current AI on the board and I am about 1500 OTB. They are able to update to the board directly so I imagine it will be able to get stronger. The current on board assistance level is a bit weak as well and will suggest bad moves. If using the app however, then the AI is very good and will suggest strong moves. You can also go up to assist level 6 using the app which is far better than the current board feature which had me sac two knights for a pawn.
Two major updates coming in terms of Ai opponent and Ai assist.
- The Ai assist will be hooked up to stockfish in a future release
- The Ai opponents are all getting bot personalities and a stronger embedded engine.
Both of these will be late November / early December releases.
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Oh man, the new AI assist is great. My 4-year-old beat me handily.
The assist levels 1-6 are back – is that permanent or a legacy feature about to be returned to three levels?
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Legacy - enjoy it for time being. We think the simpler settings are a better design, but this is easy to switch if we turn out wrong
I can understand the reasoning that simpler options might be preferred, but just eliminating assistance levels 4-6 doesn’t seem like the right solution. You’re basically removing the option to provide greater levels of assistance.
The levels that remain are 1,2,4,6.
We are removing 3 and 5. And renaming then “No assistance, beginner, intermediate, and advanced”
Got it, that might be okay. When 4-6 were removed previously, we didn’t have those higher levels of assistance.
*We may keep all 6, mainly we want to make it clearer which level people should use. Most of the time they get it backwards
Ah! Yes now I understand.
Those were out because our on board chess Ai (from ChessUp 1) is not strong enough to do those levels. Two things are changing:
- Now the assistance comes from a very powerful cloud server - sending the hints via WiFi
- We are also improving the on board Ai… but it will never reach the strength of #1.
So 4-6 were only not on the product because it was incomplete.
Got it, makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I can agree that fewer/simpler options can better overall, assuming the remaining options are the right ones for most people.