I’ve been on the fence on finally picking up a Chessup 2, but the only thing giving me reservations is that currently the only available AI to spar against is Stockfish (17?) and Komodo (Chess.com bots). I understand we can play against 3 Maia bots on Lichess, but not at a specific strength. I don’t want to name competitors here, but one of your biggest competitors has Maia and Lc0 built in for offline mode, which is part of what is holding me up from immediately jumping for the Chessup 2. Is there any chance you would be adding support for offline bots that are more humanlike, such as Maia or Lc0, in a future update, or at least a means to connect to interfaces like Fritz or Chessbase? Thanks!
(I am going to give a very unfiltered answer - just to preface this.)
FYI - You can play Lc0 via lichess as well:
At the broader point of humanlike bots - Lc0 and Stockfish are both neural net engines (Lc0 in 2018, and as of 2020 with stockfish 12+). With a neural net they do build human like strategic eval capabilities. The problem is they are both incredibly strong. Algorithms to artificially weaken them results in weird play, not human like play. Komodo is a lot more flexible in this regard.
We do not use stockfish below a certain ELO for this reason. Our built in beginner and mid level bots are built with an engine we developed that has the depth of thought that a human player does. I wish we had an online version of them so you could test it out. Maybe we will put that on the to-do list is to have a web test of our bots.
Maia bots are the only ones trained at the neural network level to emulate a person. What is really interesting though is that does not necessarily mean the bots play at that trained elo level. They make moves that resemble players of that level, but across an entire game, their strength actually ends up at 1400~1700 on lichess - regardless on which level of games the maia bot was trained on.
maia 1 is supposed to be 1100, Aug 23rd 2025 lichess rapid rating: 1495
maia 5 is supposed to be 1500, Aug 23rd 2025 lichess rapid rating: 1622
maia 9 is supposed to be 1900, Aug 23rd 2025 lichess rapid rating: 1688
One small contributing factor here is that the Maia bots are forced to play a lot of players not near their rating (anyone can challenge them). That open opponent history has a slight effect on the rating. But to a larger degree, they are actually hard to tune to a specific strength.
And as you mentioned, you can still challenge and play against any of these Maia bots on ChessUp 2.
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But anyways - yes Maia bots are a good bot option for playing human like bots. However, I would make the case our built in bots are perhaps even better at the task of giving human like play across a wide range of skill.
Lc0’s distinction as a neural net engine was short lived - it was no longer distinct as of Stockfish 12 and beyond. However, neither of these engines make good entry level bots. In fact, most smartboards that just lean on the stockfish levels have really terrible bot experiences. ChessUp is the only smart board with its own beginner/intermediate engine. It is a major advantage for ChessUp.
Maia bots would be a way around developing a custom engine, but there are some things that maia fails at - mainly playing at a range of specific strengths. Komodo and the ChessUp engine both do a better job at that.
Competitor X claims they can train an engine based on your opponents - it is pretty much nonsense and just marketing really. All of that maia engine code is open source and public - and they just spin it to make it seem unique to their board. Copying an opponent’s style after 10 games is not accurate. Copying an opponent’s strength and preserving human like play has proven not to work - by Maia on lichess itself. Maia gets the human like play right, but the strength wrong. But it saves competitor X from having to develop an engine.. so they spin it to sound like an advantage. We have tested the Maia bots and because they fail to perform at a specific strength, we do not use them as our default engine. If progress is made, then we will revisit.
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As for integrating Fritz and Chessbase - they were sued for copying Stockfish and Lc0:
It was never a priority of ours to integrate Fritz as it brings nothing new to the table. Now that case did settle and I am not aware of where the work has gone since then. I hope it is more than a stockfish counterfeit moving forward.
As for integrating chessbase more generically - we have not worked with chessbase, but several developers have used our API to work with their tools (chess for android, chess connect)
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A lot of engines claim “human like” because it sells. But mainly they are just saying they use neural network evaluation - which is common to all major engines. If there is something actually new to Fritz, I am open to changing my take on it.
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Our solution to human like play is two parts:
- Our custom engine designed to play with beginner and intermediate awareness.
- Convenient access to 100 million humans on Chess.com - fast matchmaking with similar elo humans.
We feel the best product focuses on true beginner and intermediate bot experiences plus convenient access to chess.com for human play when the player is up for that.
We recognize the limitation of strong engines to play weak - and we recognize the limitation of Maia to play at certain strengths. We continue to watch Maia - it is still an active project.
We feel we have the best solution to this which is our purpose built beginner-intermediate engine. Further, we feel that the Chess.com bots offer a very extensive range of skills and natural play experiences. And further still, we feel the claims of “human like play” from strong engines are mostly non-sense (the exception being Maia - which however struggles to emulate different strengths).
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Thank you for your detailed response. My apologies for mentioning capabilities of a competitor, I only meant it as an example. I wasn’t aware the Chessup had its own engine for beginner and intermediate play, that is a big relief! I did go ahead and order the Chessup 2 bundle last night, and am looking forward to playing some chess! Thanks again!
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Jeff, I just purchased my board and promo pack based on your participation in these forums. That and putting Lichess in. Just wanted to say keep it up. It’s answers like this that give me total confidence in your brand.
Also I now understand why I get my tail kicked by Lichess bots!
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Just got my board today, loving it so far!
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Jeff thank you for the detailed response. I had no idea of all that information about the various engines and bots and after this even more supported to my decision to purchase this set. Haven’t played much of the bots yet but after this will be adding that into some training as it helps my understanding.
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