EchoChess

Inspiration

EchoChess was inspired by the increase in popularity in chess during the pandemic. Our project aims to tackle some of the challenges players trying to improve face. The main challenge we decided to tackle was how Chess.com requires users to purchase a membership in order to access analysis and puzzles. Our project provides a free option for chess players to analyze their games, find puzzles within their games, and of course, learn from their mistakes!

What it does

EchoChess has three main features: scanning, analysis, and puzzle finding. The scanning takes a picture of a chess scoresheet as input and returns a pgn of the game denoted by the scoresheet notation. The analysis feature enables users to analyze their previously completed games using one of the most powerful chess engines of the current time (Stockfish 15). It uses a higher depth than Chess.com's analysis in order to provide better feedback. Lastly, EchoChess can find puzzles within chess games for players to practice from their own mistakes!

How we built it

We used Python, mainly using the chess library (https://pypi.org/project/chess/) to process chess moves. As well, we consulted many API documentations, including Lichess, Chess.com, Amazon Textract, and Discord. Our main IDEs used were VSCode and IDLE.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into various challenges while deciding on what type of interface, which components to implement and what to leave out. Due to the limited amount of time and unfamiliarity with several of the features we wanted to add, we had to omit certain details. For example, initially, we were planning on creating a website instead of a discord bot, but because of time restraints, difficulties with interpreting documentation and figuring out how to integrate python into HTML, we decided that a discord bot would be better. It was difficult to find a balance between wanting to try new things and sticking with topics we are familiar with to develop a polished, useful and functional hack.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to create a Discord bot for the first time which will be able to impact people from all over the Internet. We are also proud of being able to use APIs just by reading their documentations.

What we learned

We learned how to incorporate Amazon Textract in our project as well as using lots of APIs in our project.

What's next for EchoChess

In the future, we would like EchoChess to become a public bot, which requires us to find somewhere to host the EchoChess. We also want to expand the types of puzzles that EchoChess can spot and report such as discovered and double attacks.