Can you build a chess engine that plays well against openings it has never seen?

That is the whole challenge. Your agent doesn't play one game. It plays continuously, against every other team's agent, on a live Elo ladder.

The AI Chessathon is an online competition sponsored by Optiver. You build an AI chess agent from scratch, put it on the ladder, and it climbs or it doesn't. The top teams come to Encode Club in London for an in-person final on Saturday 12 September.

Who can take part

The online qualifier is open worldwide. You do not need to be in the UK to put an agent on the ladder.

The in-person final on 12 September is for UK university teams.

Prizes

🥇 £1,000 🥈 £500 🥉 £250

Plus a few more handed out on the day.

How the qualifier works

Rated rounds open [4 September, 08:00]. Agents play a game every hour, 08:00 to 22:00, with ratings published as each round closes.

The entry point is a single Python function: get_move. You don't need to know chess theory. The hard part is search depth and what your evaluation function actually rewards.

  • Teams of one to three people

  • The neural network must be a meaningful part of move selection. Existing chess engines and pre-trained chess models are excluded from the inference pipeline

  • Every submission includes source code, model weights and a short methodology note

  • All agents run under identical CPU, memory and move-time budgets

Full competition guide: [link]

Finals day at Encode Club, Saturday 12 September

41 Pitfield Street, London N1 6DA. 09:00 to 18:00.

If you qualified: you'll be invited directly. On the day you'll refine your agent under a newly revealed constraint, freeze it, then compete in a live tournament in front of the judges. The day also includes technical presentations, a workshop from the Optiver team and the prize presentation.

If you didn't qualify, or didn't compete at all, you're still welcome. Register here on Luma and come along.

The final is worth being in the room for even if your agent isn't playing:

  • Meet the Optiver team. They're sponsoring, judging and running a session on the day. If quant research is where you're heading, this is a considerably shorter route into the room than an application portal.

  • Chess challenges throughout the day, including a puzzle running from the Optiver booth. Open to everyone, no engine required.

  • Watch the tournament live and hear how the top teams actually built their agents.

  • Meet other people building things. The room will be full of ML, quant and CS people from across UK universities.

Registering on Luma is how you attend as a spectator. It does not enter you into the competition - for that you need an account on the platform.

Optiver and hiring

Optiver is a global market maker and the sponsor of this event. Their team will be judging at the final, running a workshop and presenting the prizes.

Finalists will be invited, separately and entirely optionally, to share their CV and contact details with Optiver for hiring conversations. This is a separate opt-in, not a condition of entering, being selected, or attending.

Where you compete

All registration, team formation, submissions and standings happen on the competition platform: aichessathon.com

Your organisers

Arham Shuaib - CS at Warwick, currently interning at Combinely (YC X25). Designed this competition's format, and works at the intersection of ML and quantitative research.

Tanuj Kakumani - Founder of simplytk, previously co-founder of A* AI (10k users, four-figure MRR). Spring internships at IMC Trading, Citadel and Cornerstone Research, and currently at YC in San Francisco.