Student Builds Chess-Playing Robot That Humiliates Opponents

He even had a flashy trailer made with music from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

At the Open Sauce exhibition in San Francisco, a participant named Noah Davis showcased his development based on the Raspberry Pi Pico - a robot designed to play chess with an integrated ChatGPT.

The creator built the robot out of frustration with his own poor skills: he wanted the machine to play for him and do it well. There's nothing new in this idea, so Davis decided to diversify the concept by adding a chatbot. ChatGPT was useful for generating language - and not just any language, but a selection of insults. Because what kind of chess game is it if you're not humiliated for silly moves?

To allow the robot to move the pieces, a magnet is attached to the bottom of each piece, and Hall sensors are fixed on the underside of the board. The computer is connected to the rows and columns of sensors like a keyboard, reading occupied and free squares.

Clearly, with this setup, the computer cannot know where each piece is located. To fix this, Davis wrote code to track the movements of each piece from a known starting position. This took quite a bit of time because the creator could only dedicate a few hours in the morning before school to programming the project.

The LED strip on the side of the board indicates whose turn it is. If it's blue, you can move; if it's red - wait until the robot takes a winning idea from Stockfish to outsmart you.

There is no talk of a commercial release for the device: it's just an experimental robot built for the exhibition. Would you play against it?