Feature Suggestion: New Tutor Coach Modes: Hand & Brain

[Dirk]

In my last couple of chess club meetings (we are just a small group that regularly plays chess in a café), we played some so-called “hand & brain” chess games (two teams of two players against each other).

And — oh man — that was fun and even allowed weaker players to join the party.

See for example:
https://www.chess.com/terms/hand-and-brain-chess

and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdP50Me1CgQ&list=PL1aNaTk8HxQr5ow7J51SIx6RbBsj5sgIA&index=1

“Hand and Brain is a popular format, especially for streaming, because it's a way for players of all abilities to get involved on the same ground.
The player naming the piece (the ‘brain’) has a specific move in mind, but the player making the move (the ‘hand’) may or may not realize what it is. But that's part of the fun.”

I immediately thought: this would be a cool addition to our PicoChess tutor!

And honestly, this concept fits PicoChess perfectly.

Hand-and-Brain chess is a small didactic gem.

The “brain” focuses on strategy and ideas, while the “hand” learns patterns and concrete move execution.

In practice this often leads to implicit discussions about candidate moves and plans — making it a surprisingly effective learning tool.

Implementing the Hand-Brain coaching system in PicoChess

This feature is designed to enhance the learning experience for users by providing insights and guidance during chess games, in addition to standard hint moves.

Similar to the real Hand & Brain playing mode for humans:

Two teams play against each other. One player takes the role of the “brain” (suggesting the piece type to move, e.g. pawn), and the other plays the role of the “hand” (executing the move with that piece type).

For PicoChess this means:

We play against the engine as one team, but play Hand & Brain together with the tutor/coach (either the coach is the brain and the user plays the hand, or vice versa).

=>

Adding two new coach modes: “brain” and “hand”, in addition to the existing on / lift / off modes.

BRAIN

(Coach plays the role of the “brain” — usually the stronger player)

When it is the user's turn, the coach automatically displays the piece type (pawn, bishop, knight, rook, queen, king) of the best calculated move for the user.

This could be displayed after ~5 seconds to ensure that analysis data for the current position is available.

Instead of displaying the full move, the tutor would only show the piece type, e.g.

“The brain says: Bishop.”

The user must now move a piece of that type.

Then the computer calculates its next move.
After the user has executed the move and the computer has responded, the coach again displays the next piece type after a short delay — and so on.

HAND

(Coach plays the role of the “hand”)

The user decides which piece type should be moved.

This could work by lifting a piece of the desired type, waiting for the “set pieces” message, and placing it back on the board again.

This action triggers the coach calculation (similar to the current “lift” mode when the king is lifted).

The tutor then calculates the best move for that specific piece type (e.g. the best pawn move), displays the move, and the user must execute it.

Implementation Detail Suggestions

Although I tried to implement this myself, I was no longer able to do it easily because of all the many code enhancements and changes in v4 for the cool new features. But I have a few ideas:

1. Enhancing the menu to include the two new tutor coach modes should be straightforward.
2. Enhancing the existing function that is triggered by lifting and putting back the king should also be manageable.
   Instead of lifting the king, the user could lift any piece to indicate the piece type to be used by the coach.

• 3. Adding a new coach hint routine that is automatically triggered after e.g. 5 seconds (waiting for analysis data) might be a bit more tricky. After showing the piece type (e.g. “The brain says: Knight”) we must ensure that the user actually plays a move with that piece type. Otherwise the move would effectively be illegal in this game mode.

[Dirk]

I have created an "feature suggestion" issues in Johans GitHub repository for this if one is willing to implement this...

https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess/issues/352

Feature suggestion: New Tutor Coach Modes – Hand & Brain #352 

[Randy Reade]

That does sound like fun, Dirk. Another option for the user as 'Brain' could be using a USB microphone with voice recognition, possibly with vosk.

Randy

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[Ro Bert]

Has anyone a working installation with that whole bunch of mame engines?

Willing to share this as an image?

Robert

[DJ Dekker]

This is certainly a fun feature, nice to have in PicoChess! This is what BRAIN mode can look like on a screen (it's in testing phase now).

In BRAIN mode PicoTutor tells you which piece type to move. You may select which piece, and to which square. See the examples below.

Example 1: pawn move

PicoTutor says "Play a pawn move" and all White pawns are indicated with a green circle. This means: you must play with a pawn, but you may choose which one and to which square. In this case, I played 10. d4xe5. Any other pawn move would have been allowed, too.

Example 2: king move

Sometimes there aren't many pieces to choose from, for example when you've got to play the king. In the position below ("Play a king move" and circle around the king) I played 6. 0-0. PicoChess would have accepted any other king move as well.

[Dirk]

That looks really cool.

Looking forward to test this during the next days…

Thanks DJ