ChesSMS Puzzles

Access and solve hundreds of chess puzzles over SMS!

Comment 2

Inspiration

Text 613-704-4683 to try it out!

Solving chess puzzles is a big part of getting better at chess especially for beginners. I thought it would be really cool if it was possible practice some simple chess puzzles by only using texts. So I decided to try it out.

What it does

Allows users to solve chess puzzles by texting 613-704-4683 the following commands:

commands
puzzle
<move>                 # Examples: "e2e4", "e4", "Qxd8", "Qxd8#" (not case sensitive)
hint
answer

Conversational Flow

  1. Start by sending puzzle this will randomly select 1 of 500 puzzles for you to solve
  2. Send your solution. Your move can be in PGN form, or if you're unfamiliar with PGN form you can write the name of the start and end squares e2e4 which also works.
  3. If you got the answer wrong try asking for a hint by sending hint. This will tell you the type of piece you need to move.
  4. If you still can't figure out the answer send answer
  5. Only after getting the correct answer or sending answer will you you be allowed to access a new puzzle.
  6. Ask for another puzzle by sending puzzle

How I built it

  1. Setup SMS using Twilio

  2. Setup a REST API that Twilio can use as a callback. I used a Linux VPS on Vultr for deploying the REST API, and re-used an old domain name for setting up HTTPS.

  3. The REST API and entire backend was written in Go. I generally enjoy using Go, and I found a nice chess library that allowed me to do everything I needed including creating SVGs of chess positions. Those SVGs could then be converted into PNGs so that they could be sent using Twilio.

  4. Creating the chess positions. I found a dataset from Lichess of 200,000 games that were played online. I filtered this down using Python to the top 5000 highest elo games that did not end in a draw. Once I had those 5000 games I filtered out games that did not end in checkmate meaning a player decided to resign. This was actually around 75% of those games (high elo players know when to resign :D). I then picked the top 500 games, and converted them to JSONs containing: the PGN notation, the last move, the last piece moved (for showing users hints), and who's move it is. puzzles.json

Challenges we ran into

  • In order to receive text messages, the REST API needed to be accessible to Twilio. This required me to ssh into my VPS in vscode so that I could develop efficiently
  • Designing the flow of the conversation was tricky. I needed to plan how I wanted the conversation to be before implementing it or things would have been a mess

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • I've been playing chess for over 10 years, and really enjoy it so I think that made this project special

What I learned

  • How to use the Twilio Messaging API
  • How good the software/tooling for programming around chess is. I'm super impressed
  • I still really enjoy using Go, and it was a great fit for this project

What's next?

  • Improve the quality/difficulty of the puzzles by implementing multi-move puzzles. Currently the puzzles are all checkmates in 1 move. This would add a lot of complexity.
  • Write some documentation :)
  • Maybe continue maintaining it and getting another VPS to host it

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