Student Bot beats Crazyhouse World Champion

Students of last semester's Deep Learning course developed a crazyhouse bot as their class project. Crazyhouse is a chess variant, in which captured pieces can be re-inserted into the game, yielding a much more dynamic game. The bot of Johannes Czech, Moritz Willig, and Alena Beyer played an informal 5-game match against the 2017 Crazyhouse World Champion GM Justin Tan (aka JannLee) and won 4-1.

As is known from AlphaZero-variants, the bot excelled in favoring intuitive play over exact calculations, inclucing, for example, a missed mate-in-three.

However, the most beautiful move of the encounter was an immortal Qd6!! which won the second game for JannLee. A detailed account including all games and live video commentary from JanLee can be found here.

Congratulations to both, human and computer, for an amazingly entertaining match!