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Losing to RandomMoverBot

#10

I was there at the inception of the lichess bot era. My first bot, lichapibot was among the first 40 bots on lichess ( today we have almost 600 ).

I took part in the discussions and I saw that the consensus was that such a bot making random moves can only be unrated and anyway lacked intellectual curiosity, so no one went to create one. They were after fancy ideas like making the worst move in a position. But even this unrated.

I'm a pragmatist. I'm not afraid of doing the "politically incorrect". Sometimes I'm punished for this, sometimes it pays off.

This latter happened with RandomMoverBot.

Simplicity is important. I made a cousin of RandomMoverBot, that is CaptureBot, which has a very simple 0-depth heuristic to make a capture whenever possible, and that being the best capture as far as you can judge at 0-depth. This bot is only moderately successful. I was approached with ideas for more such bots, but I declined, and this was the right decision.

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