Feature request: allow using external devices to analyze games • page 1/1 • Lichess Feedback • lichess.org

Hello, to explain this feature, let me explain my situation first, I play chess from my quite old laptop that has an i5-6200U processor, and I have an android Poco F3 phone that has a snapdragon 870 processor. So when I analyze games on my laptop I don't have a lot of computational power and the analysis is quite slow, while when I analyze on my phone the analysis speed is much better because the CPU is more powerful. I'm asking to add feature to allow my laptop to use the computational power of my phone to analyze my games without having to switch to my phone which has a smaller screen and doesn't have a keyboard and a mouse, at least not out-of-the box like my laptop.

This feature could also be extended to allow players to buy a VPS and host stockfish on it to ease analyzing their games. I know this could seem like not something Lichess would like to do as a completely free service because Lichess already has its servers and does allow registering one's VPS to be used to analyze games, so this feature kind of gives the option to the people who are sharing their servers to stop doing so and use them just for themselves, but at the same time not adding this feature to avoid this would be forcing those people to either share their servers with everyone else; and if the server is not really powerful those people wouldn't notice a big difference in the analysis speed in spite of their contribution, or to not be able to benefit from their servers. I think the right thing to do is to add this feature so that we can prioritize those people's analysis since they're the ones who are hosting the server and then use the server to analyse other people's games when that person is not analyzing. In addition, as I said this would also allow third-party services to sell servers that host stockfish, that could feel like what chess.com does by offering their cloud servers, but I think the fact that this feature is opt-in, meaning that people who don't pay would still get to use the servers available today, is what makes this different, so I think this would be overall a positive improvement.

Hello, to explain this feature, let me explain my situation first, I play chess from my quite old laptop that has an i5-6200U processor, and I have an android Poco F3 phone that has a snapdragon 870 processor. So when I analyze games on my laptop I don't have a lot of computational power and the analysis is quite slow, while when I analyze on my phone the analysis speed is much better because the CPU is more powerful. I'm asking to add feature to allow my laptop to use the computational power of my phone to analyze my games without having to switch to my phone which has a smaller screen and doesn't have a keyboard and a mouse, at least not out-of-the box like my laptop. This feature could also be extended to allow players to buy a VPS and host stockfish on it to ease analyzing their games. I know this could seem like not something Lichess would like to do as a completely free service because Lichess already has its servers and does allow registering one's VPS to be used to analyze games, so this feature kind of gives the option to the people who are sharing their servers to stop doing so and use them just for themselves, but at the same time not adding this feature to avoid this would be forcing those people to either share their servers with everyone else; and if the server is not really powerful those people wouldn't notice a big difference in the analysis speed in spite of their contribution, or to not be able to benefit from their servers. I think the right thing to do is to add this feature so that we can prioritize those people's analysis since they're the ones who are hosting the server and then use the server to analyse other people's games when that person is not analyzing. In addition, as I said this would also allow third-party services to sell servers that host stockfish, that could feel like what chess.com does by offering their cloud servers, but I think the fact that this feature is opt-in, meaning that people who don't pay would still get to use the servers available today, is what makes this different, so I think this would be overall a positive improvement.

ProgramFOX

#2

This feature could also be extended to allow players to buy a VPS and host stockfish on it to ease analyzing their games.

this you can already do using https://github.com/lichess-org/external-engine - run this tool on a device of your choice that can run it (so say a desktop, or VPS - unfortunately for your situation not a phone), then switch to another device where you are logged in and you can select the external engine from the dropdown in the engine settings.

> This feature could also be extended to allow players to buy a VPS and host stockfish on it to ease analyzing their games. this you can already do using https://github.com/lichess-org/external-engine - run this tool on a device of your choice that can run it (so say a desktop, or VPS - unfortunately for your situation not a phone), then switch to another device where you are logged in and you can select the external engine from the dropdown in the engine settings.

yassine00

#3

okay thank you so much, we could have a mobile app that allows to have the same for a phone, but that's already a start

ProgramFOX

#4

I think it's technically possible to make such an app, using the API described at https://lichess.org/api#tag/External-engine (this is what the tool I linked above uses).