This opponent is a classical chess engine — an alpha-beta minimax searcher, not a neural network. On every move it looks several plies down the game tree with iterative deepening, examining the most promising replies first and pruning the rest, while a transposition table lets it skip positions it has already weighed.

It does not just count material and stop. At the end of each line a quiescence search resolves the outstanding captures until the position is quiet, so it rarely walks into a tactic or leaves a piece hanging the way weaker programs do — if a capture can be answered, it sees the answer before committing.

Its judgement reaches past material. Piece-square tables reward development, control of the centre and a sheltered king in the middlegame, then send the king toward the centre once the queens are gone. It favours active pieces, and it knows a material edge grows as the board empties — so it trades when ahead and keeps pieces on when behind, instead of simplifying into a lost ending.

In the opening it follows a short book of mainline theory before it starts to calculate. It recognises repetition and will not throw a won game away by shuffling into a draw. And when its own position becomes hopeless, it resigns rather than drag the game out to an inevitable mate.

Points are calculated using the Lichess system.

Click on the title to start a new game. Your move starts the game; this note gives way to the move list as soon as you play.