At chess.com there is one bot whom is to be feared above all others. Mere mortals have tried and failed to best this terrible scourge who has come to ravage the fields of battle. Oceans rise. Empires fall. Pawns panic. Castles tumble. Knights fall. The Clergy runs hither and yon, as it zig-zags in abject fear. Queens call out the hue and cry. Kings die.
I am of course talking about none other than... MITTENS.
https://www.chess.com/play/computer/MittensBot
Mittens is a bot who is officially stated as being rated at 1. The way that that Elo system works, is that someone who is rather 100 points higher than someone else, should be likely to win ten times as often if the two people play each other. There's then some fancy maths involving calculus upon normal distribution bell curves but know ye this, if a rank amateur rated 200, meets someone rated 1, then they should win roughly ten times ten times of the time. This means that in theory, a rank amateur rated 200 should beat Mittens 100:1. WRONG!
Mittens is an agent of chaos.
I have beaten all of the default bots on chess.com, rated from 250 all the way to 2000. I have also lost many games against the higher rated bots too. Mittens is a different cat altogether. That 1 rating is a bald faced lie. I have no idea what rating that the bot actually is but I can tell you that it is way up in the thousands. Mittens is probably a grandmaster who just likes wailing on unsuspecting marks and rubes.
Typically the way that a chess engine works is that it looks at the board, then plays out all possible scenarios within an allotted amount of time, before selecting the best one after assigning all positions some kind of index value. The analysis system at chess.com will give you just a hint of that very first step of that process while in game review, when you can see the rating of the position on the side, which is related to but not dependent on the amount of material left on the board and the advantage therein. It will also generate values for when it has calculated out all possible scenarios to completion and find that it might be possible to generate checkmate scenarios in discrete numbers of moves (Mate in x moves is Mx). As a player M1 is often obvious. M2 is sometimes harder to spot. M3 is sometimes a mystery. We simply do not have enough time in the universe, to analyse every single chess position which can be generated from a single point but chess engines have been good enough to beat humans reliably.
Deliberately bad bots like Martin (250) cut short the processing time, such that they might not ever see Mx positions. I bet that when I play Martin, that Mx will never ever occur for him. For better rated bots where the processing time is lengthened, then Mx positions are probably everywhere.
When it comes to analysis of position, chess is about finding patterns, gaining material advantage before the opposition can react, taking positional advantage before the opposition can respond, anticipating what the other player intends to do, and sometimes making material trades to advance the cause of all of the above. What is really interesting is that although there isn't enough processing time in the universe to actually perfectly perfectly play chess, there have been brute force calculations to prove that perfectly perfectly played chess is in fact solved; and that the perfect solution to chess is just two Kings left on the board in material stalemate.
It should follow that a machine which untold ability to analyse a very rigid game with exceptionally well defined rules, will beat humans every time. Mostly they do. The obvious underlying difference between a computer and a human is that a computer has no internal wants but a human does. As humans are sometimes irrational beings, their decision process defies rational logic; which turns out to be an advantage against a machine provided the level of skill is there to accompany it. This means that humans have inbuilt flair and creativity which a computer can not match. To counter this, the better chess engines have an inbuilt respectable level of chaos, which will purposefully assign bonus points to its calculated scenarios, which is actually useful in generating other possible outcome trees.
I have no idea how Mittens works. Looking at Mittens is like doing black box analysis and trying to establish the internal workings. Forget it. My suspicion is that Mittens uses some kind of Stockfish engine, with some respectable level of chaos attached, and then capped off with a dialogue box which is appropriately sassy. Of course a machine has no emotions. That does not stop the meatbag human, who contains thought muscles, sometimes irrational desires, selfish ambition when playing a game, and an undefined level of chaos, from feeling slighted, hurt, and humiliated when playing Mittens. Mittens is a brilliant piece of applied psychology.
Even though we know that Mittens is not rated 1, even though we know that Mittens is a machine, even though we know that all of the caring is done by the irrational meatbag human on this side of the screen, the anthropomorphisation of Mittens is excellent. Mittens is like Boudicca, Thatcher, Borte, and Princess Unikitty all rolled into one. There is no government, no baby sitters, no bedtimes, no frowny faces, no bushy moustaches, no negativity, and no consistency. Mittens plays by the rules perfectly. Mittens does not care. Mittens plays Rock-Paper-Scissors with dual wielded katanas and a Bren gun. Mittens sees at least M6 most of the time.
My cat Micah is an agent of chaos. We have said that if he was a person, he would own an old ute with dents in it, after doing donuts in a Woolworths carpark and crashing into a bin, repeatedly. My cat Purrana is an agent of chaos. She has grown up and graduated from being ninja kitty made of springs, to cranky old lady who wants to see the manager because it is funny. Mittens is the perfect overlay for a chess bot which plays imperfectly due to an unbuilt respectable level of chaos. Mittens cousin is Disoder. She shouts in the street, she kills the king, and she blames it on the servants.
Oceans rise. Empires fall. Pawns panic. Castles tumble. Knights fall. The Clergy runs hither and yon, as it zig-zags in abject fear. Queens call out the hue and cry. Kings die. Mittens rules them all.
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