Maia Chess

Most chess bots that are designed to not play at full strength fail because an engine is an engine, and the only way to make it play like a lower rated player is to tell it to make blunders from time to time.

I just read about Maia, which is a project which purports to play much closer to the way a human plays.  It's a neural net network, but it was trained to play with databases of those rated 1000-1999.  And so they trained nine bots -- one each to be rated 1100, 1200, 1300, ... up to 1900.  Just google maia chess for more info.

Has anybody tried that before?  Has anybody here heard about it before?  Or tried to play a game against one of those bots?  (free on lichess, from my understanding)

Thoughts, anyone?

(My own thoughts: as an intellectual exercise I think it's a cool idea.  I wonder how well it works in execution.)

So I played a mini match against MAIA 1500 rated. I’m 4/1. Thanks for the heads up. I like it, and will play more against it, maybe move to the higher rated version. It’s a bit hard to tell exactly how it is different from other bots in the middle and endgame, here for instance. It played more like a 1400 rated bot here. One thing I did notice, and I liked, is it plays unconventional in the opening- not ‘booked’. I’ve been pushing d4 lately, and it makes the opening ’mistake’ of popping the queens knight right onto c6, taking away the ‘better’ plan of pushing the c pawn and challenging the center with the help of the queens knight on D7. I am aware that there is an defense opening that does that-the Chigorin, but the Chigorin comes with a specific plan of rapid piece deployment- here, it was seemingly trying to play conventional queen pawn defense schemes, but the knight on c6 is a real disadvantage in that case. So I had fun punishing that mistake a few times, and had not had the pleasure of that with any other bots or computer programs dumbed down. In short- I see a difference, and like it!

I discovered maia when trying to find a good app for my android mobile phone. And I came across chessify which has on option of playing against maia. Great, this engine seems to be the perfect one for me. But, is it possible to use it inside scid vs pc? At first glance, not. Seems like it works other way. But it's open source, so maybe it's doable. Maybe it needs some work to be done.

I played Maia chess quite a bit. It plays the middle game in quite a human way. The engine *does* have an opening book, which I think is a little lazy. The bots know WAY too much theory for their rating. When you play the Leningrad Dutch, for instance, Maia goes into t he main lines always. But if you look at the way humans actually play at lower levels, they don't know Dutch theory and don't play main lines. The way the dev team should've done it is do the most common responses by rating to book moves instead of just giving Maia an opening book.

Maia also is too precise in the endgame, but in the middle game her play is quite human.

Dumb question here: where does one find Maia to play her?

I hosted several tournaments where maia 1100 and Stockfish 1350 played against each other. It turned out that maia presents same level as Stockfish 1350 (with default multiPV value, no neural network). After having played 8 matches 50 games each, it achieved average result 54% (ranging from 41% to 66%).

So this sentence really holds true:

Note also, the models are also stronger than the rating they are trained on since they make the average move of a player at that rating.

https://github.com/CSSLab/maia-chess#how-to-run-maia

So currently for me maia is too strong, for blitz. If I want to defeat stockfish 1350 elo (also being too strong), I run it with higher values of multiPV. The progression 4, 6, 8, 10, 500 gives us 5 virtual levels of stockfish strength. The bigger the pv value, the greater chance of choosing a poor move, the weaker playing strength. Values 1-4 are equivalent, internally they are made 4.

I am writing this because in a search for a weaker engine (1100 could be less than 1350 ), I actually found a stronger one. Good to know this.

I came across Maia earlier this year. To play it, just go to the relevant level Maia on lichess and click the challenge button (the crossed swords icon). I tried Maia level 1, which is supposedly 1100 but is definitely far harder than that. Agadmator (Antonio) has a YouTube video playing against the bot and also rates it far higher than 1100.

Anyway, to answer your question... Yes I am a chess noob but did certainly feel like Maia plays more human. The chess.com bots will play 5 lines of straight opening theory and then just play one move which makes no sense whatsoever. Again, my chess knowledge is very low but when I play chess.com bots at my rating, their moves just "feel" ridiculous and my games are nothing like those against real people. 

I played Maia 9 on Lichess, which is supposed to be around 1900, but I beat it easily and I am much lower rated

https://lichess.org > COMMUNITY (Players) > Online Bots

Thanks, @Yurijs -- I'll give it a try!

One solution is to go over to lichess.org. All Maia versions are available as bots. The ratings over there are inflated, however.

The Maia engines are also preinstalled in Lucas Chess.

maia 1100 is higher than 1100 there, coz if you average a playerset the blunders tend to fade out (basically all 1100s blunder at some point but not all at the same point, so maia would blunder less)

and 1100 here is better than 1100 there anyway... just play the bot, it has a dynamic rating anyway