Issue 2
Engine Version 6, and Halloween Cursed Game Modes
Hello, chess lovers!
Welcome to the second newsletter of Snap That Piece! We finally released the next major version of our algorithm, and that’s the major news.
Version 6. We train our custom machine learning models on real chess images, and this is the sixth version of the training pipeline. Faster, more robust, much better on partially occluded and blurred images. And we added something very important that was missing: the ability for our models to recognize printed chessboards.
During the last month, you sent us lots of new quirky and weird boards. Please keep them coming!
Two new game modes for Halloween. Yes, our app actually has multiplayer games, and now you can play them in two new modes: Memory Loss and Fog of War. Memory Loss hides your opponent’s pieces on their turn, so you only get to look at the whole position on your own turn. Fog of War is much more fun. It shows only where your pieces can go, and to win you have to capture the king. This completely changes the dynamic, and it’s not like your regular chess. Go and try it.
Time odds. We also introduced time odds, meaning you can play with uneven time controls. That’s what we’ve been doing a lot at home, but no other app let us do it. Now you can do it with Snap That Piece. Set 2 minutes for yourself and 15 minutes for your kid, or your friend, and have fun.
A million other changes. On top of that, there have been a million changes to how the app looks, how it feels and how it works. No need to list them all, but we really hope you enjoy them.
Keep scanning. If you scan a board and it turns out completely wrong, just send us more. Our algorithms will pick it up, and within one or two weeks the updated model will most surely be able to recognize those pieces. We’re still looking for more photos of Latvian, Dubrovnik and other rare sets, so if you have them, please use the app to scan them as much as possible.
That’s it for this edition of the newsletter. Thank you all so much!
– Nik