ChessMS

Tracks

Innovating with AI (Chess bot)

Side Tracks/Challenges

Best Use of CockroachDB, Most Creative Use of Twilio

Inspiration

We were inspired by texting plugins like GamePigeon, which allow users to play turn-based games right in their text message history.

What it does

Users can text the dedicated ChessMS phone number and engage in a text-based game of chess right in their messages. Users can set the difficulty of the bot they play against, and keep track of their lifetime wins/losses.

How we built it

User messages are sent and received using Twilio's Python API. We store the game states of all users in a CockroachDB database. The chess bot moves are made using Python's Stockfish library. The codebase is run as a Flask web app on an ngrok server.

Challenges we ran into

Inconsistencies between the interfaces of the two chess libraries we used
Setting up Twilio to relay messages correctly
Deciding what database schema to use and how to relate it to Python-side user information
Displaying the chess table with Unicode characters of consistent widths