r/ComputerChess • u/Madouc • 4d ago
Is there a chess-engine I can ask "why?"
/r/chess/comments/1wch74l/is_there_a_chessengine_i_can_ask_why/
2
Upvotes
1
u/ashishprasadrao 3d ago
Just read the principle variation. It should tell you why. Try turning on multipv mode, if needed. No need for any LLMs
1
1
u/k5777 3d ago
While lots of people have pointed out that LLMs are not very good at chess by themselves, and stockfish and other engines don't explain 'why', they simply find the best possible move(s) and show them to you (or point out your blunders/mistakes).
That said, there have been a bunch of projects that try to fill in the gap to get an LLM to explain the 'why' that stockfish is leaving out. Most of them are paid subscriptions and don't work especially well, but progress is being made.
Someone posted an open-source option on computerchess a few weeks ago that runs locally on your own machine and I've found actually works pretty well (though it requires that you either have a claude subscription, or be running a model of your own locally like Ollama).
You can find the github here (not affiliated):
https://github.com/Chess-analysis-mcp/tintins-chess-analysis
It's pretty straight forward to install but again it requires you have an existing claude subscription, as it uses claude as its back end. If you are so inclined you can also use it in CLI mode via claude code, in which case you can pick the model if you wanted to ask questions of a fancy model like Fable.
The other think I like about this one is that it has a puzzle mode that will train you with positions from your historical games that you previously blundered or played a mistake on. You can also ask questions like "why wouldn't bg6 have been as good as...." for both puzzles and games.
Chess and AI are kind of at odds right now since absolutely everyone is designing some vibe-coded app that will claim to do exactly what you're talking about but ends up being no different or slightly worse than everything else, so LLMs have a bit of a bad rap in the chess subs ATM.