Image to a playable chess board
Chesslord takes a flat picture of a chess position and gives you the same position on a board you can play. This page says what it does and what it cannot do.
What it looks like on a real image
The diagram below is a real page, and the position beside it is what Chesslord read out of it. Nothing on this page was typed in by hand: the board is the recogniser’s own answer, and it plays. Choose a side, move a piece, turn the engine on.
The position read out of the printed diagram, playable. black bishop on c8, black pawn on d7, white king on e7, black pawn on h7, black pawn on c6, black pawn on f6, white bishop on d5, black king on e5, black rook on b4, white pawn on g4, white knight on a3, white knight on c3, white pawn on e3, white rook on b2, white pawn on d2, white rook on f2, black bishop on a1, black queen on b1.
white to move
Viewing from white.
The image is the input
Most positions worth studying are already in front of you as a picture. A diagram in a book you photographed, a page out of a PDF, a screenshot from a stream or a group chat. You upload that file. There is no board to set up and no squares to retype.
The position comes back as notation
FEN is the single line of text that every chess program uses to write down a position. Chesslord reads your image into one, and that string is what the board and the engine both work from.
The board stays live
What comes back is a board, not a screenshot of an answer. Play the engine’s move, or ignore it and play your own, and keep going until you can see why the position holds or wins.
What it reads, and what it refuses to guess at
- Diagrams printed in books and magazines
- Pages exported from PDFs and ebooks
- Screenshots from streams, apps and analysis boards
- Position images pasted into chats and posts
- Photographs of a physical board, at any angle
- Video, or a position that is still moving
- Handwritten scoresheets and move lists
A photographed 3D board is a harder problem with a worse answer, so Chesslord does not pretend to solve it. Flat diagrams it can be held to.
Questions about reading an image
- What kind of image can Chesslord read?
- Flat pictures of a position: a diagram printed in a book or magazine, a page exported from a PDF or ebook, a screenshot from a stream, an app or an analysis board, and position images pasted into chats and posts.
- Can Chesslord read a photo of a real chessboard?
- No. Photographs of a physical board are out of scope at any angle, and so are video and handwritten scoresheets. A photographed 3D board is a harder problem with a worse answer, so Chesslord does not pretend to solve it.
- What happens if a square is read wrong?
- You read another image. There is no per-square repair, so the recovery for a bad read is a better picture: a sharper scan, a tighter crop, a screenshot instead of a photograph of a screen. The board carries a control that takes you back to the dropzone, and it says how many moves you would lose before it goes.