proposal.org

Chess piece position analysis

What?

This project aims to visualise a relationship between the positions of various pieces and the players skill level. The positions of pieces, in states such as captured, capturing, or checking, can be easily represented using an 8x8 heat map. I also plan to present accompanying statistics utilising multi plots and histograms of events through out a game.

A key plot I aim to produce is a multi plot with ranking on x-axis and piece type on the y-axis. An example of this type of plot can be found here in the seaborn documentation.

Why?

The purpose of this project is to show the positional differences between different levels of play and over time. This is something not often visualised within the community thus I thought it would be a unique take on some common statistic.

How?

Throughout this project I have been utilising a number of libraries such as numpy, matplotlib, and pandas for general computation. Additionally I use the python-chess library to parse and interface with games on higher level.

For more general statistics I will adapt a Chess.com parsing script found here. An example of this script in action can be seen here.

Data source?

Chess games are found freely on the internet from many archives such as PGN Mentor. From here I am able to download thousands of games at mass. However as most games preserved will of famous players there will be significant bias. To help mitigate this I can use the public API’s from Lichess and Chess.com to gather games from friends and players from various ELO’s.

To pull games from Chess.com I use this shell command to gather the PGN files from individual months and write them to a single file as Chess.com does not support downloading of all games at once.

for g in $(curl -Ls https://api.chess.com/pub/player/$PLAYERNAME/games/archives | jq -rc ".archives[]") ; do curl -Ls "$g" | jq -rc ".games[].pgn" ; done >> games.pgn

Lichess easily allows for downloading of an entire players archive at once with a simple curl.

curl https://lichess.org/games/export/$PLAYERNAME > games.pgn

Examples

import chess
import chess.pgn
import chessHeatmap

pgn = chessHeatmap.load_pgn("Dae.pgn")

filename_pawn = chessHeatmap.lost_piece_plot(pgn, [chess.PAWN])
filename_pawn

\newpage

filename_knight = chessHeatmap.lost_piece_plot(pgn, [chess.KNIGHT])
filename_knight