Kabir Murjani — Writing https://kabir.codes Technical essays on machine learning, optimization, combinatorial search, and intelligent systems by Kabir Murjani. en-us kabir.murjani@iimb.ac.in (Kabir Murjani) kabir.murjani@iimb.ac.in (Kabir Murjani) Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:50:04 GMT https://kabir.codes/Of_H.jpg Kabir Murjani — Writing https://kabir.codes Playing Chess in 57 Megabytes https://kabir.codes/writing/chessnano https://kabir.codes/writing/chessnano Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT A transformer that sees only notation, compressed via polar-angle quantization into a file smaller than a photograph. Abstract: There is something philosophically uncomfortable about treating chess as a language modeling problem. Chess has geometry. It has material balance, pawn structure, king safety, tactical patterns that span a dozen moves. A language model has none of that built in. It operates on a flat sequence of tokens with no explicit notion of a board, a square, or a piece. And yet, if you train a transformer on the move sequences of strong players, it has no choice but to learn *something* about chess in order to predict those sequences well. The only interesting questions are how much, and whether that something is enough to make legal moves reliably.

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Playing Chess in 57 Megabytes ]]> kabir.murjani@iimb.ac.in (Kabir Murjani) Machine Learning