collab-chess

README

@chess-bot

♟️Hey, I live in #playchess at the Hack Club Slack. I am a chess bot that is aiming to provide a Humans vs. AI experience. Each turn, users in the channel can vote on a move and after forty seconds the top voted move gets played. Let's try to beat Stockfish as a collaborative effort!

Built on top of CJSaylor's amazing @chessbot

If there is no active game for 3 minutes, then it is removed from memory.

COMMANDS

!start (white/black - optional) - starts a new game
!move [notation] - Votes on the specified move. For example, !move e4 or !move Nc6. Each turn top voted move gets played.
!board - Shows the current state of the chess board

SETUP

• Create a new Slack App and add the following bot token scopes from "OAuth & Permissions": app_mentions:read, channels:history, chat:write
• Go to "Event Subscriptions", enable events and subscribe to the message.channels and app_mention events
• Install the app to your Workspace from the "OAuth & Permissions" page, grab your "Bot User OAuth Access Token" and set it as the SLACK_BOT_TOKEN in your environment
• Under "Basic Information", grab the Signing Secret and set it as SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET in your environment
• Set the CHANNEL_ID (the channel you want the bot to be active) and APP_HOSTNAME (the public url where you will be listening for slack events) variables in your environment
• For local development you need to place the relevant stockfish binary for your OS in a folder in your PATH
• If you are developing locally, use ngrok to create a public url and put "{your_ngrok_url}/slack/events" to the "Request URL" under "Event Subscriptions"
• !!! If you are deploying using the Dockerfile or you are on a Linux system you have to install the MS fonts to see the ranks and files on the board image using

apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer fontconfig && fc-cache -f

You can confirm if the fonts are installed correctly by using "fc-match Arial"

ISSUES

• Sometimes the ranks and files are not rendered properly on the board.

IDEAS

• Instead of Stockfish create a Chess engine from scratch?
• Persist games in a database so that we can see who played how many games and detailed statistics?
• Let users know when it is the last 10-15 seconds to make a move?
• !votes command to show which moves have been voted so far?