Torch on PicoChess !?!.... Yes.

[Andrea Gatti]

Hi, as you probably know, Torch is Chess.com's closed-source very strong chess engine, which is not released to the public as a UCI engine.

However, a guy, in June this year, managed to "download" (lacking a better expression) the engine since it runs in the user browser, when visiting the chess.com web site.

Here it is: https://github.com/Felixk45/Torch-4-UCI-chess-engine/releases

As I'm not (yet) too familiar with how to incorporate such jewel into PicoChess, I would leave this step to those more experts than me. :-)

Cheers

AG

[Andrea Gatti]

I'd like to go back to this thread of mine, not just to solicit engagement on this topic, but because I'd engage myself in it.

The real "news" is that over the past weeks I kept the promise of going off and studying a number of things to get me closer to Linux, Picochess and other stuff.

Until now I reached a basic understanding and usage skill of git; github; github Copilot; Copilot's environment and its agents (Ask, Plan and Agent); Visual Studio Code. Next up is GPT's Codex and GPT's Work.

I've used VSC and Github Copilot to make progresses on my "elorate" bash script, and will soon look into Torch.

Happy Coding everyone :-D

[Johan Sjöblom]

Hello Andrea

Happy coding indeed. Those are great skills to have when developing picochess. I use Visual Studio Code on my Debian Linux laptop to develop picochess.  We need to know how to open an issue in git, can be bug or improvement etc. From there you can create a feature branch, checkout that feature branch, code the solution and then open a PR for that feature to be included in the master branch. That is "kind of" the standard procedure for joint development. The current setting is that when 2 developers have approved a PR (Pull Request) then it can be merged into master for everyone to use.

A small note on using AI supported coding.

I have maintained AGENTS.md files in the repository. They represent AI instructions, design principles and architecture decisions. Its important that AI reads them. Codex will read those automatically. If you use github copilot, or Claude Code, you need to instruct them to read the AGENTS.md files. Maybe we can improve that by adding copilot and Claude instructions to the repository that states that AGENTS.md files are the ones to read for instructions.

And on the note on AI I am experimenting with the MCP technology that allows an AI to talk to the picochess server. Its this PR: https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess/pull/491

Thats an example of a PR, to test a PR you have to check what git branch its based on, checkout that branch locally, and test it. You can also make code fixes to that branch. Any developer can do that. But to do that I can to invite you to the picochess github repo so that you become a collaborator. For that I would need your github account name so that I can find you in github.

Happy coding, Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

I am a absolute total beginner on creating videos, but here is how to create an issue an a feature branch... Not so pretty, but a first example on what kind of instruction we could make...

[Andrea Gatti]

(A bit off-topic)

Hello Johan, first of all thank-you so much for the video and the warm welcome to the ever-growing community of those who - at least in my case - try to get a bit closer to github & company.

Yes, I came across that specific thing about the AGENTS.md markdown file, even if just incidentally.

I have a free GitHub (with GitHub Copilot) account, and a paid GPT Codex one.

Until now, I've used git and GitHub even if just for myself, as I only have one private repository (elorate, the picochess project to assign realistic elo ratings to engines running on an Rpi under picochess). You can find me on GitHub under https://github.com/agatti1970.

I've staged changes, created commits, but never worked on a different branch or PR, since as I said, I'm working alone on my project. So your video and suggestions on how to move the first steps in the direction of a collaborative approach, are very welcome.

Thanks!

AG