Hi! First off I want to say lichess is an awesome addictive site; The UI is very clean, responsive and everything just works, I really think lichess is an study case of how to build a beautiful and functional website.
I have one suggestion which I wonder if others have any thoughts upon. I play at a very low level (1300's) and so the computer analysis always looks like the purple and green teletubbie on a rollercoaster ride.
Often it can be very hard to figure out why a particular continuation *not* suggested by the computer is bad; for instance I make an inaccuracy or mistake and the computer suggests a new line, but then I might wonder why that line could not be easily countered by a particular move. Put simply, I have a lot of "what if X was played" questions.
What I then do is to continue play against the computer from that position, however this only allow me to see the good moves for one side, and if I have multiple such questions I have to create multiple games against the computer.
A feature that would be of great help in this situation would be something akin to a button in analysis mode that said "Computer move" which simply executed the best stockfish move in the current board, or showed the top 3 stockfish moves or similar and their evaluation. One could then either make new manual moves, or press the button again to see the next stockfish move and so on. This should be integrated in the game analysis explorer such that one could (as it is now) click on an existing move number to reset the board at that position.
Asides allowing one to figure out why a particular move is bad, I imagine this feature could be used to explore the opening (a problem for a low-level player like me is to simply get new ideas in openings). For instance many openings revolve around allowing the opponent to take pawns which are trivially retaken later -- however how these pawns *should* have been retaken, especially if the opponent make a number of non-standard moves, may not be in some opening books because no good player would make those moves. I think this has the effect of making one play more conservative.
I realize these features are catering mostly to newbies and may be quite difficult to implement, however I think most of the functionality I have mentioned could be bade available by having a box which showed the proposed best stockfish move(s) in the current position and then made it up to the player to actually play these moves or not using the current interface.
Once again, a great thanks for the most exiting computer game I know of.
I have one suggestion which I wonder if others have any thoughts upon. I play at a very low level (1300's) and so the computer analysis always looks like the purple and green teletubbie on a rollercoaster ride.
Often it can be very hard to figure out why a particular continuation *not* suggested by the computer is bad; for instance I make an inaccuracy or mistake and the computer suggests a new line, but then I might wonder why that line could not be easily countered by a particular move. Put simply, I have a lot of "what if X was played" questions.
What I then do is to continue play against the computer from that position, however this only allow me to see the good moves for one side, and if I have multiple such questions I have to create multiple games against the computer.
A feature that would be of great help in this situation would be something akin to a button in analysis mode that said "Computer move" which simply executed the best stockfish move in the current board, or showed the top 3 stockfish moves or similar and their evaluation. One could then either make new manual moves, or press the button again to see the next stockfish move and so on. This should be integrated in the game analysis explorer such that one could (as it is now) click on an existing move number to reset the board at that position.
Asides allowing one to figure out why a particular move is bad, I imagine this feature could be used to explore the opening (a problem for a low-level player like me is to simply get new ideas in openings). For instance many openings revolve around allowing the opponent to take pawns which are trivially retaken later -- however how these pawns *should* have been retaken, especially if the opponent make a number of non-standard moves, may not be in some opening books because no good player would make those moves. I think this has the effect of making one play more conservative.
I realize these features are catering mostly to newbies and may be quite difficult to implement, however I think most of the functionality I have mentioned could be bade available by having a box which showed the proposed best stockfish move(s) in the current position and then made it up to the player to actually play these moves or not using the current interface.
Once again, a great thanks for the most exiting computer game I know of.