CHSM8: A Chess Transformer that Follows Natural-Language Style Prompts
We present CHSM8, a 210M-parameter chess transformer that plays moves conditioned on a free-text description of a playing style, e.g. "go for the Sicilian Defense", "solid, safe, risk-free chess" or "You are Magnus Carlsen in his prime". The model is pretrained without search on 1.07B filtered Lichess games, using a factorized move representation and legal-move masking. It reaches 1837 Elo against a strength-limited Stockfish and, in 1,000-game matches, beat every other public model we tested that was likewise trained without preference tuning, rewards or search, including one with 13 times as many parameters. We then fine-tune it to follow text on a synthetic dataset: Gemma-4-31B describ...
| Authors | Ilia Badanin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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