A Science of Chess ?
Chess is more than a game—it’s a living laboratory for studying strategy, complexity, and intelligence. Today’s engines play far beyond human ability, revealing patterns and ideas once hidden from view. By learning from them, we can search for the game’s universal features—those that define its very structure—and others that illuminate its inner workings as a complex system. This quest continues a vision once expressed by Richard Réti: the dream of a true science of chess.
This page is under construction, I am happy to hear your comments and suggestions
News & In the Press
New paper about how much engine evaluation is useful for human brains
Blog article on chessable.com written by Karel van Delft and Dries Wedda
Blog article about the fragility of positions on chess.com
Article "How a new science of Chess is emerging" Discover Magazine (28/10/24)
Article "Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games" in Ars Technica
Papers
Chess variation entropy and engine relevance for humans
M Barthelemy
Fragility of chess positions: Measure, universality, and tipping points
M Barthelemy
Phys. Rev. E 111, 014314, 2025
Statistical analysis of chess games: space control and tipping
M Barthelemy
Blogs and websites
On chessable many resources about scientific approaches to chess are available:
- https://www.chessable.com/science/
- chessable blog: https://www.chessable.com/blog/
Other few blogs exist:
- Interesting references can be found on the site https://www.chess-science.com/en/chess-and-science/
- A blog on scientific approaches to chess: https://lichess.org/@/NDpatzer/blog
Interesting podcast on France-Inter (in French) about Chess and AI -Interview of the GM Laurent Fressinet
Data
The standard format for games is the Portable Game Notation (PGN) format, which includes metadata (e.g., date, location, opponent) and the moves in algebraic notation (e.g., a2a4, b7b8). Useful sources are:
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pgnmentor has many games that can be downloaded either by player of by opening: https://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html
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The week in chess allows to search by events: https://theweekinchess.com/chessnews/events/
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The Chessgames website contains the pgn files for numerous games: https://www.chessgames.com
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Lichess has also a downlable database of games played online: https://database.lichess.org/
Codes
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A nice python chess library that can be found at: Python-chess library. https://pypi.org/project/chess/
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A python package to implement the Stockfish engine can be found at: Python package for Stockfish. https://pypi.org/project/stockfish/
- The python code computing the fragility score and the interaction graph can be downloaded here