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2021 has been one other huge yr for Lichess – with continued progress, tons of latest options, and a good bit of structural change as an organisation. Thanks to everybody who made this doable!

New Features

We had simply launched puzzles v2 on the finish of 2020, so now it was time to make use of the brand new puzzle set. First with the puzzle dashboard, permitting you to analyse your strengths and weaknesses, then with new fixing modes, Puzzle Storm, Puzzle Streak, and at last by introducing aggressive fixing with Puzzle Racer.

2021 additionally noticed many enhancements to evaluation instruments, with Stockfish NNUE now obtainable for evaluation within the browser, later up to date to Stockfish 14, annotations for inaccuracies/errors/blunders on the board, Wikibooks integration, and the opening explorer (lately restored after a knowledge heart hearth) now with an up to date grasp recreation database and filterable by participant.

We upgraded broadcasts, with the intention to extra simply observe occasions dropped at you by the brand new broadcast staff, and launched group blogs for much more chess content material.

Also try the changelog (up to date simply now) for a lot of extra options and bug fixes, together with a brand new setting to cover all scores on the location with the intention to take pleasure in chess with out worrying about numbers.

Content and Events

It’s been a busy yr for chess, and as in earlier years we’ve hosted our personal occasions and lined among the greatest occasions of the yr – and Lichess has continued to develop, with a number of data smashed. We’re all extremely proud, even with the expansion typically inflicting some issues.

The Lichess Titled Arenas have continued fortnightly over the previous yr, with a complete of $26,000 paid out in prize cash, immediately supporting chess gamers and the chess world normally, and our streamer battles proceed their reputation and competitiveness! The twice weekly Lichess Bundesliga usually has round 500 groups and 5,000 gamers competing collectively in 49 leagues. In 192 editions since March 2020, there have been a complete of just about 1,000,000 participations. Our “Lichess Plays” streams the place you may play prime gamers whereas they stream on our Twitch channel have additionally been widespread, with persevering with progress, we’re glad you are having fun with them! The group run variant world championships additionally continued with model, thanks to the organisers! There’s been a terrific turnout of very excessive degree gamers and commentators – providing a terrific introduction to the variant chess world for viewers.

In addition to protecting our personal occasions, Lichess additionally lined varied occasions within the chess calendar in 2021. Most notable, maybe, was the World Championship 2021 performed between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi. Lichess recapped every recreation, with annotations of your entire match offered by GM Nijat Abasov and made into a research.

During the match, what appears to be essentially the most correct recreation ever performed in World Championship historical past was performed – with the article and findings Lichess got here to, being picked up by famend statistician web site, fivethirtyeight.

Lichess additionally lined every spherical of the Chess World Cup, with on-site commentary and streams offered by IM Laura Unuk, who additionally interviewed gamers from lots of the rounds.

Away from chess occasions, we’re proud to have had the staff behind Maia, a human-like neural community chess engine educated on video games performed on Lichess, share their work and analysis. Maia is at present the engine that performs in essentially the most human-like manner, with 53% of its strikes matching first selection human strikes for the score vary chosen.

We had been completely happy to help Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero (Lc0), by protecting the abuse of their free/libre open-source licenses by ChessBase. Lichess is all the time glad to help the open-source group, as a lot as it could possibly. Even when it includes the much less enjoyable exercise of drawing consideration to corporations disrespecting the authorized rights of open supply creators!

Lichess was additionally the primary to critically cowl the sponsorship deal organized between FIDE (and particularly ladies’s chess) and a breast implant producer. The sponsorship provoked widespread controversy not simply in chess, but additionally in mainstream media world wide, with many citing and referencing our work – a testomony to the excessive normal of our content material. Lichess was glad to have performed its half in trying to make sure good governance in chess organisations, and never deliver the game into ridicule; just about no mainstream media was supportive of the sponsorship deal.

And lastly, while not particularly content material in its ordinary type, Lichess lately instituted a large rewrite of its Terms of Service (TOS), efficient twenty eighth December 2021. Multiple sections had been up to date, with new unofficial insurance policies and guidelines which had developed over time being centrally codified.

Organisation

Growing as an organisation could also be much more difficult than writing scalable software program. Lichess now has an expenditure of round $33,000 monthly to maintain all the things working (a price of $0.0002 per recreation). Bearing in thoughts that Lichess began as one French developer’s passion undertaking, it humbles the staff how far we proceed to go, totally funded solely by person donations, with no adverts, trackers, and being free and open supply for everybody. We could not do that with out our group – thanks a lot on your ongoing help and encouragement!

An enormous quantity of labor behind the scenes goes into preserving Lichess working easily. Thanks to the help we have had, we have been capable of rent extra individuals than simply the one developer we have traditionally had, to make sure the work that must be accomplished to take care of and develop Lichess could be accomplished. These have been in all areas; builders to take care of the code, repair bugs, and create new options; moderators to maintain the location clear from cheaters and people who breach our TOS; content material and group, to help our person base, streamers, lecturers, coaches, and create written and visible content material for us to share with you; and administration – obligatory evils like finance, authorized, and our inner coordination and operation. 

As a part of this, we additionally moved our inner communications from Slack and Discord to Zulip (extremely really useful open supply device for distributed groups!), becoming a member of our whole staff on a single self-hosted communication platform, and supporting fellow tasks within the free software program group within the course of! Nevertheless, all the time maintaining with all the things that occurs is almost inconceivable at our present dimension, so we’re at present exploring and enacting new methods of working to make sure our group and volunteers are empowered to make the choices they’ve the specialised information to make. 

Moving on from internals, we have additionally progressed on working with different organizations. We obtained an endorsement from the US Chess Federation for our truthful play methodology, permitting us to host US Chess occasions.

Outreach included carefully working with colleges and academic organizations, among the work we have accomplished there may be:

• Evaluated and up to date our knowledge safety insurance policies to make sure ongoing compliance with GDPR – we’re at present scoping out COPPA to see how a lot is already lined;
• In cooperation with Hautes Études des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (HETIC), Lichess gave steerage to a gaggle of MA Design college students for every week, earlier than serving to grade their closing submissions – which had been all Lichess themed!
• Several pre-schools, colleges, schools, and libraries throughout the US have accepted our knowledge safety compliance to be adequate or past their wants – and use Lichess, solely free of charge, to show their college children, college students and communities find out how to play chess;
• Being GDPR compliant and primarily based in France, EU and UK (for now…) primarily based colleges, schools, and universities proceed to make use of Lichess, or have signed up for Lichess in 2021, to show their college children, college students and group teams find out how to play chess, solely free of charge;
• We have attended varied conferences, seminars, and discussions to find out find out how to higher help children studying chess, the instruments coaches and lecturers might have, and wider entry to chess;
• Ongoing help for U18 tournaments (in addition to to different tournaments, too) – each new and previous.

Additionally, we have begun being supported by some family names who wish to assist us do what we do:

• In recognition of Lichess as a public curiosity internet property, Cloudflare is now graciously sponsoring supply of static recordsdata as a part of Project Galileo – many because of the Cloudflare staff for his or her advocacy and help of the work we do;
• As a recognised French charity, AWS has kindly offered us with free credit score which meets a few of our computing wants;
• Our long-term internet hosting supplier, OVH (primarily based in France!) additionally kindly recognised the work we do as being within the public curiosity, offering us with wonderful help and enabling us to cut back our server prices;
• Huawei additionally continued their historical past of supporting free software program / open-source tasks, with Lichess.org being chosen as a Speed Dial associate web site from June – December 2021. 

Our software program, as in earlier years, supported all the things from passion tasks to main industrial releases. We love listening to about how our code has been tailored and used, and the way it helps new tasks – be happy to inform us about it, or share how your present undertaking has grown! 

Technical Updates

After struggling to scale up our infrastructure with the expansion in 2020, we had been nicely ready for many of 2021, regardless of new report numbers in video games performed, early within the yr.

The first emergencies of 2021 had been MongoDB crashing in manufacturing as soon as, and later once more after dropping help for deeply nested objects. We had been utilizing these to retailer the tree of variations in research, in order that we needed to rush a rewrite to a flattened storage format. Before these incidents, and since then, MongoDB has been dependable as ordinary. In the course of the rewrite, we additionally moved research right into a separate impartial database.

Next, there was a while to consolidate. Fixing small bugs, including kind annotations to remaining untyped JavaScript code, switching from CommonJS to ESM for reasonable bundle dimension financial savings, changing the PHP-based OAuth server with a extra strong Scala implementation (now permitting public shoppers through PKCE), and shifting expendable collections out of the principle database to an unreplicated MongoDB database, in order that secondaries of the principle database can sustain extra simply with the oplog.

Now, in the direction of the top of the yr, we’re once more hitting new all-time highs, not in variety of video games performed monthly, however in numbers of spectators watching the World Championship broadcast and the World Rapid and Blitz broadcasts, in addition to concurrent gamers and spectators in Agadmator’s CakeDeFi Christmas Arena, posing new challenges. We began by optimizing and punctiliously parallelizing the beforehand sequential processing of match occasions. Better scaling with the numbers of spectators would be the first technical purpose of 2022.

Epilogue

We hope you loved Lichess in 2021 and need you a contented new yr!