February 14, 2026
Pawn-sized brain, king-sized drama
Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB
Tiny chess bot, big drama: missing rules, AI rumors, and a “bytes vs Elo” battle
TLDR: A tiny 2KB chess engine called Sameshi claims ~1200 Elo, impressing many with minimalist design but skipping rules like castling and promotions. Commenters split between admiration and skepticism, debating fairness, readability, AI-assisted coding, and a tongue-in-cheek “Elo per byte” challenge—showing how far tiny code can really go.
The internet’s losing it over Sameshi, a bare‑bones chess bot that squeezes into just 2KB—about the size of a short text message—yet plays around 1200 Elo (a common skill rating). Praise rolled in for the sheer audacity of it, but the comments quickly turned into a spicy street fight over what counts as “real” chess and who (or what) wrote this thing.
On one side: code‑golf fans cheering the micro‑miracle. On the other: skeptics side‑eyeing the fact that Sameshi skips big rules like castling, en passant, and promotions. That lit up the fairness alarms: if Stockfish—the famous grandmaster‑level engine—tries to castle or promote, does the match even make sense? One commenter’s question became the thread’s rallying cry for rules‑lawyers. Meanwhile, practical devs begged for a readable version of the code, wondering if the one‑line, single‑letter style is just for the 2KB trophy.
Then came the meme‑y hot takes. A user floated a wild metric: “1:1 ELO:bytes”—can every extra byte buy extra brain? Another winked: “Codex or Claude Code?”, sparking armchair forensics about whether an AI co‑wrote the tiny titan. Others day‑dreamed: what happens if you double it to 4KB—does the Elo skyrocket? And is 1200 closer to chess.com’s casual vibes or serious tournament ratings?
Call it diet chess or a pocket‑sized prodigy, the community can’t decide if Sameshi is a brilliant minimalist flex or a clever stunt with training wheels. Either way, it’s the smallest drama bomb you’ll see this week—and it fits in your cache.
Key Points
- •Sameshi is a minimal chess engine implemented in a 1.95 KB header file.
- •It uses a 120-cell mailbox board, negamax search with alpha–beta pruning, material-only evaluation, and capture-first move ordering.
- •The engine performs full legal move validation for check, mate, and stalemate but omits castling, en passant, promotion, repetition, and the 50-move rule.
- •Sameshi runs at fixed depth 5 with a maximum of 60 plies per game under constrained rules.
- •In 240 games against Stockfish (levels 1320–1600), Sameshi’s estimated strength is ~1170 Elo (95% CI: 1110–1225).