Comment by autocorr
5 hours ago
Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.
Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!)
I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump
Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces
Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that.
When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it),
I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!