Questions and Answers
What is Noctie used for?
Noctie is a virtual practice partner and tutor for chess, based on humanlike chess AI.
Noctie can play chess like a human from beginner to grandmaster level, making it the ideal sparring partner for relaxed learning games, for learning openings & for practicing technique in endgames.
Noctie also helps you learn while you practice: you get instant color feedback on each move, and puzzle exercises based on your mistakes, that you can repeat until they stick.
How is Noctie different from chess engines like Stockfish?
Noctie is a chess AI designed to play like a human. Where regular chess engines get their strength from looking at millions of moves, Noctie picks them based on learned humanlike intuition. The result is fun, balanced and instructive games where both sides make natural mistakes.
Noctie also utilizes this humanlike AI capability for analysis: when your moves are graded by Noctie (from blunder to excellent), this evaluation is based on how good the move looks from a human perspective, rather than the objective valuation by engines like Stockfish.
Can I use Noctie as a beginner?
Noctie is a useful tool for practicing chess on your own terms, without stress. This makes it helpful for a lot of beginners. The AI itself is designed to play at advanced beginner strength and upwards, which means for a total beginner you'll have some tough games to begin with, and reason to celebrate when you get your first victory against Noctie!
How strong is Noctie?
Noctie can emulate human playing strength from advanced beginner to super-GM level (~2800 Elo). Noctie isn't designed to be the strongest engine, but the most realistic and fun to play against AI.
How do I set the difficulty of Noctie?
Noctie has the unique capability to estimate your playing strength based on your moves, and adapting to your level. You can try this out by taking the rating test. Your first few games after creating an account, are calibration games that will unlock the appropriate difficulty for the AI. After earning your skill badge, you can level up the difficulty by beating the AI or playing great moves.
What are the ratings of Noctie's difficulty levels?
How does the instant color feedback work?
As soon as you make a move, Noctie's AI grades the move on a scale from blunder to excellent. This is based on how good the move "looks" from a human perspective, rather than centipawn loss or accuracy. That means you won't be punished for reasonable moves that fail due to some obscure engine line. It also means you'll get rewarded for moves which aren't just best, but also really clever!
When identifying mistakes, Noctie will naturally focus on the most instructive mistakes rather than the "biggest" mistakes in terms of engine evaluation.
Because the feedback is instant, your brain will automatically pick up on the patterns and you'll start to develop an automatic feel for which kinds of moves are risky and which are really promising.
What do the different colors mean?
What are flashcards?
Flashcards are chess puzzles in Noctie that you can practice repeatedly until they stick.
After each game, you'll get automatically generated flashcards based on your biggest mistakes.
There are also manually created flashcards such as the daily puzzles and collections of puzzles.
All your flashcards go into your flashcard queue, that uses spaced repetition to present you with the flashcards that need practice the most.
Can I choose what opening to play?
Yes! In addition to Noctie playing realistic human openings, you can also pick what opening to play, or even import your own repertoire.
When you create a new game against Noctie, you're able to select among common named openings, as well as in-built and your own repertoires.
Noctie will follow the selected opening until you deviate. You'll get hints for the correct move when you lift a piece, so that you can simultaenously memorize the opening.
You can import your own repertoire as a PGN as well, including annotations. Use an external tool like Lichess, Chesstempo, Chessbase or Chessbook to create your repertoire, and export it as a PGN.
What are Themes?
Themes are small modules or lessons, teaching you a specific concept. Themes consist of three types of elements: Instructions, Flashcards and Scenarios.
Instruction elements teach you a concept using a position or sequence of moves, text and symbols.
Flashcard elements are puzzles meant to reinforce the lesson.
Scenarios are playable positions against Noctie where you start from a specific position, with a specific objective. For example, a Scenario could be to try to win a King + Pawn vs. King endgame.
Noctie comes with ready-made themes for common endgames, among other things. You can create your own Themes as well! This is useful for making a collection of positions that you'd like to drill against the AI.
How do I increase my Noctie rating?
Your Noctie rating is increased by winning games against the AI at the appropriate difficulty level, with as few takebacks and hints as possible. You can also get extra rating points by playing "above your level" even if you don't win – i.e. if you play a lot of really good moves you'd get a boost for that.