On the heels of resurrecting the chess territory and reviewing the book Neuromancer I am announcing the launch of my latest Chess FOSS project: Mute Chess.

• Fork or run your own instance here (AGPLv3)
• Play here

What has Neuromancer got to do with chess? Well, the name "mute" is a nod to Wintermute, the AI of the book. Mute chess is a Lichess fork and consists of 10,000 bot accounts powered by the human-like Maia3-79M model developed by the University of Toronto, all of slightly different settings and ELO, waiting in the pool to play against humans (and to play against one another as a means to keep their ratings established).

The aims of the Mute Chess project are:

• Play human-like bots in the pool the way you would play humans on Lichess.
• Opponents that don't cheat, rage quit, or abuse you.
• Aim for ratings that roughly match Lichess. See our rating goal.
• Play like your YouTube heroes with brilliant moves and multiple stacked premoves. See Open Brilly Finder for the work behind it.
• Maintain a fun cyberpunk theme and vibe.
• Tightly integrate Maia for both play and analysis.
• Keep it simple: games, puzzles, analysis and a forum. No variants.
• 100% FOSS. Play at mutechess.org, fork the project, or run your own instance.

The identity/log in are also Nostr only. You generate or use your existing Nostr keypair to log in and maintain an identity on the site. No emails or other PII, thank you.

I am launching this project because something has compelled me to do it. Because AI and FOSS has made it possible to do these kinds of things. Because I love and am fascinated by chess and FOSS and Nostr and AI and I cannot stop thinking about these things either individually or how they might be combined.

This is not intended as a Lichess competitor. Lichess is my goto to play against humans and the project owes a huge debt to Lichess. I first played Maia over at Lichess. But Lichess doesn't have bots in the pool (and some like playing against bots), doesn't have Maia analysis integrated, doesn't have Nostr identity, doesn't have brilliant moves or multiple stacked premoves, so I created this site because why not?

Feel free to check the site out and give me feedback here, on Github, or on the site's forum.

I will be using the site to post puzzles to the territory. I like the Maia integration because it helps me to find puzzles whereby the "correct" move is not the most likely human move, so hopefully they will prove interesting and instructive. For those who don't want to make a Nostr keypair you should be able to participate anonymously and I will probably post screenshots too for those who don't want to click on the url. (I'm not collecting IPs but Cloudflare might be)