Top 12% at the AI Chessathon: One CPU Core, Four Dead Neural Nets, and the Residual That Finally Earned Its Elo
A tournament report from the AI Chessathon: a pure-Python numba chess engine on one CPU core, four replacement neural evaluators that all lost to classical piece-square tables (one 0-30), the residual NNUE that beat them (+224 Elo, confirmed at tournament time control), a time-management bug found by post-mortem forensics mid-event, and the promotion gates that kept an AI coding agent honest. Final: 58th of 465, rating 2207.