We’ve been working hard on some major changes during the past several months, and today we’re releasing a beta website to preview what’s coming soon to NCM:
New Features
- More Engines. We’ve simplified how engines are distributed throughout NCM’s infrastructure to make it easier to add new engines.
- More Lc0 Networks. We’ve improved support for third party lc0 networks such as the much requested Sergio-V and jhorthos networks.
- Stoppable Calculations. Pro users can press the “Stop” button to send a stop command to the running engine and get an immediate result.
- Real-time Calculation Display. Pro users see moves output in real-time as the engine progresses in depth.
- Free Access to All Engines. Five second calculations for all engines running on single core CPU hardware are now free to all users.
Important Notes
The Beta website uses a separate and temporary user database. You’ll need register a new account on the beta site to access all of the new features. We will erase the beta website and all beta website accounts after we officially deploy to production.
The Beta website only uses single CPU core hardware. At this time the beta website performs calculations on single core CPU hardware regardless of which type of hardware is selected.
Technical Details
Next Chess Move has grown considerably in recent years, and due to NCM’s particular way of handling HTTP requests, it has started to show signs of outgrowing what Ruby on Rails can offer out of the box. So we rewrote NCM in Elixir.
In October of 2020 we completed rewriting the software that powers our backend servers – the servers responsible for running chess engines. We added a thin proxy layer so that the old Ruby on Rails frontends can communicate with the new Elixir backends without the need for any frontend code modifications.
The beta site released today includes the rewritten (Phoenix+Elixir) frontend web servers which communicate directly with the backends to provide the new features.
Please let us know what you think!
Please give the beta a try and let us know what you think. Either post a reply here, contact me directly at chendry@nextchessmove.com, or open up a support ticket. Any and all feedback – both positive and (especially) negative – is welcome and encouraged!