Overview

Chess research studies how machines can choose strong moves, model human play, explain strategy, and recognize board positions. Common approaches include tree search and self-play reinforcement learning, neural policies trained on game records, and transformers or language models for move prediction and explanations. Systems are evaluated on game strength, move-prediction accuracy across player ratings, tactical puzzles, and board-recognition benchmarks. A central challenge is balancing strength with human-like behavior and reliable explanations, while testing whether models generalize beyond familiar positions rather than merely matching patterns.

Latest papers

CardsList

31 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, up 133% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. R-CNN-Based Chess Position Recognition

    Oct 6, 2026Paras Govind, Ognjen ArandjelovićChessConvolutional Neural Networks

  2. Towards the Automatic Synthesis of Interpretable Chess Tactics

    Oct 6, 2026Abhijeet Krishnan, Chris MartensGame-Playing AgentsChess

  3. Language Models that Play Chess and Explain Their Moves

    Oct 2, 2026Adithya Bhaskar, Jeffrey Cheng, Danqi ChenChess

  4. Temporal-Difference Learning for Dragonchess

    Oct 1, 2026Jim O'Connor, Annika Hoag, Sarah Goyette +1Game-Playing AgentsTemporal-Difference Learning

  5. Conditional Generation of Creative Chess Puzzles with Diffusion Models

    Sep 29, 2026Aatu Selkee, Severi Rissanen, Xidong Feng +2Masked Diffusion ModelsComputational Creativity

  6. What Counts as Strategic Reasoning? A Systematic Mapping of Chess Research on Humans, Engines, and Language Models

    Sep 16, 2026Paolo Ciancarini, Remo PareschiChessHuman-AI Decision Making

  7. Beyond Search-Imitation: Prior-Directed Exploration for Searchless Chess

    Aug 27, 2026Szymon Miłosz, Piotr Duch, Szymon GrabowskiChessRL Exploration

  8. Discovering High-Quality Chess Puzzles with Offline Reinforcement Learning

    Aug 14, 2026Allen Nie, Anirudhan Badrinath, Nicholas Tomlin +5ChessRecommender Systems

  9. Hallucinations on the Board: Tool-Augmented Evaluation of LLM Chess Commentary

    Aug 4, 2026S. Ashwin Hebbar, Peiyao Sheng, Sewoong Oh +1LLM EvaluationTool-Use Evaluation

  10. Chess_db: A framework for working with large chess game datasets

    Jul 23, 2026Nicos Angelopoulos, Jan WielemakerLogic ProgrammingChess

  11. Communicating Chess Strategies in Natural Language

    Jul 13, 2026Langyuan Cui, Chun Kai Ling, Hwee Tou NgExplainable Artificial IntelligenceChess

  12. Accelerating Skill Assessment in Chess: A Drift-Diffusion-Enhanced Elo Rating System

    Jun 24, 2026Tianyuan Zhou, Zhizheng Fu, Tianming YangChess

  13. Chess-World-Model: A 10M-Game Benchmark for Exact State Tracking from Chess Move Sequences

    May 28, 2026Benjamin Walker, Terry LyonsRecurrent Neural NetworksState Tracking

  14. UniMaia: Steering Chess Policies with Language for Human-like Play

    May 26, 2026Sherman Siu, Lesley IsteadGame-Playing AgentsLanguage Model-Based Control

  15. Chessformer: A Unified Architecture for Chess Modeling

    May 18, 2026Daniel Monroe, George Eilender, Philip Chalmers +2Transformer InterpretabilityGame-Playing Agents

  16. Generalization or Memorization? Brittleness Testing for Chess-Trained Language Models

    May 17, 2026Ethan TangLLM EvaluationLanguage Modeling

  17. PAWN: Piece Value Analysis with Neural Networks

    Apr 16, 2026Ethan Tang, Hasan Davulcu, Jia Zou +1Convolutional AutoencoderChess

  18. Tracking vs. Deciding: The Dual-Capability Bottleneck in Searchless Chess Transformers

    Mar 31, 2026Quanhao Li, Wei JiangInstance ReweightingGame-Playing Agents

  19. Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation

    Mar 20, 2026Zhenwei Tang, Qianfeng Wen, Seth Grief-Albert +4LLM GroundingCoT Distillation

  20. Oracle-Guided Soft Shielding for Safe Move Prediction in Chess

    Mar 9, 2026Prajit T Rajendran, Fabio Arnez, Huascar Espinoza +2Game-Playing AgentsSafety-Critical Control