Uci

Chess Bot

two chess projects live in this codebase, and honesty requires separating them up front. the first is a from-scratch javascript engine (in arcade/references/chess/js/, built following the classic bluefever software series): 120-square mailbox board, hand-rolled move generator validated by perft, material + piece-square evaluation, alpha-beta with quiescence, a principal-variation hash table, and iterative deepening. the second is voice chess (code/private/chess-bot/, published as github.com/abaj8494/ollama-voice-chess): there i did not write the engine — stockfish plays the moves over uci — and the engineering is in the wrapper: skill throttling, an ollama llm that provides spoken commentary without being allowed to hallucinate moves, neural tts, and spaced-repetition opening training. one project teaches you how engines work; the other teaches you what to build around an engine. 𐃏

Read more >

Digits

The scikit-learn digits dataset: 1,797 tiny 8x8 greyscale images of handwritten digits, and the workhorse of every sklearn tutorial that needs a multiclass problem which loads instantly and fits in L2 cache.

Provenance

The data is the Optical Recognition of Handwritten Digits (optdigits) set from the UCI machine learning repository, created by E. Alpaydin and C. Kaynak at Bogazici University and donated in July 1998. It originates in Kaynak’s 1995 MSc thesis on combining multiple classifiers, and the companion paper is Alpaydin and Kaynak, Cascading Classifiers, Kybernetika 34(4), 1998.

Read more >