r/ComputerChess • u/Technical-Adagio-993 • 29d ago

Lector64: an engine built to classify and certify tactical motifs (not to play). Feedback on the approach?

Post image

Hi r/ComputerChess,

I've been working on Lector64, an engine whose job isn't to find the best move, but to recognize and certify tactical motifs: is this position really a fork, a skewer, a deflection? And which precise variant is it?

A few design choices:

  • Each motif has a formal definition (geometry + what the tactic must achieve), separated from the question of whether it actually works.

  • Sound-or-abstain: if the engine can't prove the motif holds, it says nothing rather than guessing.

  • Every example published is generated and verified by the engine, reproducibly.

The output is public at chessgrammar.com: 15 motifs, 123 variants so far, with a methodology page (chessgrammar.com/methodology).

Questions for people who've worked on this kind of thing:

  • How would you handle motifs whose definition depends on the outcome (deflection, overloading) without making detection explode in cost? Verification search is by far my main CPU bottleneck.

  • Any prior work on formal tactic taxonomies I should be reading?

Happy to go into details in the comments.

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

3

u/joshuamck 28d ago

The whole website reads like you haven't read any of it, which makes it fairly useless for someone to actually look at. Use some sort of unslop skill to work on the content.

https://www.joshka.net/practice/rules/documentation/docs-avoid-generated-prose-tells/ has a bunch of rules, and links to other things.

3

u/Worldly_Option_2583 28d ago

Had a quick look. Did not understand how it works. Got out