What Is Mittens the Chess Bot? Why is it Crushing GMs?

Every once in a while, online chess sites create and develop chess bots to challenge their players and keep them on their toes. Chess bots can be very powerful, which intrigues good chess players to challenge them to see if they can win. Mittens the chess bot is the newest born of these bots.

Mittens is a chess bot created by the developers of Chess.com. It gained popularity among online chess players, grandmasters, and chess streamers in the past couple of months. It’s known to be insanely powerful, challenging, and almost impossible to win. 

Now let’s talk about the so-called “satanic bot” in a bit more details, because it gets very funny very quickly.

What Is Mittens the Chess Bot?

The newest chess bot in the online chess community is called Mittens. It was made available on January 1st, 2023, as a New Year’s event on Chess.com, along with four other engines: Scaredy Cat, Angry Cat, Mr. Grumpers, and Catspurrov.

The five engines all have cat names and different power levels. It’s well known that Mittens is the most potent of them all. Being the most challenging opponent in the January slot, many players had to bear the weight of defeat live after challenging it in their streams.

Mittens gained a lot of exposure because of chess streamers’ videos and a social media marketing campaign, causing it to become a phenomenon in the chess world. 

Chess.com decided to give this little kitten written content as well! A team headed by writer Sean Becker gave this tiny evil thing its personality. As you play, Mittens interacts with you in the chat, saying phrases like “I like playing chess,” “I exist on this chess board through all times and realities,” and, of course, the expected “Meow” every once in a while.

However, these phrases are not always nice. Believe it or not, Mittens can trash talk! The engine uses a variety of speech lines to criticize you as you play.

Robert Oppenheimer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, and Thanos are among the people whose famous quotes appear in these lines. Needless to say, this is very funny as it does a very good job of making a lot of chess players quite angry and frustrated as they get demolished by a trash-talking kitty.

How Is Mittens Designed?

Will Whalen, a student at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, thought of giving the world a real challenge and came up with the idea for Mittens. Unfortunately, neither the back-end creators of the engine nor chess.com provided any additional details regarding the software that powers it, but some people think it’s based on Komodo Dragon 3.

Like Anatoly Karpov’s playing style, Mittens’ main aim is gradually wearing the opponent down. According to Becker, the design team thought the engine playing this way would be “much more discouraging and humorous.” This was close to Nakamura’s feedback about how it “misses really good moves” as it mainly relies on humiliating its opponent.

How Strong Is Mittens?

You can say that Mittens is the Thanos of online chess. It’s so powerful, evil, and insanely challenging to win. But, of course, you know exactly what I mean if you have already played against mittens! But what if you haven’t?

It’s safe to say that Mittens is the strongest chess bot created after Stockfish. Even though it’s only 2-months old, multiple grandmasters and popular chess players have challenged it with no pleasant results. In the MILLIONS of games it has played while testing, Mittens won 99% of them.

When Hikaru challenged Mittens a month ago, he gave us new hope that not every game with mittens should end in a loss. He drew the game in his latest video after the bot successfully crushed other good players in multiple games. So, maybe Mittens has met its match!

What ELO Is Mittens? 

Mittens has an ELO rating of 1 on Chess.com. But, of course, this is a part of the whole wicked mocking style this bot is designed to have (Although some consider this to be smurfing). I believe the designers decided to keep it at one, so it’s even humorous when you, a 2000+ player, lose against it.

Can you believe that Benjamin Bok, Hikaru Nakamura, Eric Rosen, and Levy Rozman have struggled while playing against Mittens, the one-ELO-rated “player”? Well, they have. 

Bok managed to defeat it successfully, and Nakamura was able to make a draw while all the others painfully lost. However, Rozman didn’t give up and finally defeated it with the help of Stockfish in this hilarious video!

As a result of its ability to defeat bots at a similar level, Mittens’ real rating is estimated to be between 3200 and 3500 ELO. When it was challenged by Stockfish, the 3700-rated bot, it lost all the rounds it played.

Can Mittens Beat Stockfish? 

Mittens have yet to beat Stockfish. Stockfish was able to beat Mittens in every round played. So, maybe Mittens is not undefeatable! No human chess player has ever been able to defeat Stockfish, and it appears that no wicked bot can either.

Check out this amazing game with Levy Rozman, where Stockfish allows Mitten to checkmate itself!

Conclusion

Mittens is a cutting-edge chess bot developed by Chess.com, designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence in the game of chess. Very quickly, Mittens has become a formidable opponent for even the most skilled human players, challenging them to their limits.

The bot’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent months among online chess players, grandmasters, and streamers alike, as they attempt to test their abilities against its unbeatable skills.

Regardless of what you think of chess bots, It’s definitely entertaining to watch grand masters like Hikaru get crushed by a kitty.

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