Suggestion: Integrate stockfish with game analysis

Hi! First off I want to say lichess is an awesome addictive site; The UI is very clean, responsive and everything just works, I really think lichess is an study case of how to build a beautiful and functional website.

I have one suggestion which I wonder if others have any thoughts upon. I play at a very low level (1300's) and so the computer analysis always looks like the purple and green teletubbie on a rollercoaster ride.

Often it can be very hard to figure out why a particular continuation *not* suggested by the computer is bad; for instance I make an inaccuracy or mistake and the computer suggests a new line, but then I might wonder why that line could not be easily countered by a particular move. Put simply, I have a lot of "what if X was played" questions.

What I then do is to continue play against the computer from that position, however this only allow me to see the good moves for one side, and if I have multiple such questions I have to create multiple games against the computer.

A feature that would be of great help in this situation would be something akin to a button in analysis mode that said "Computer move" which simply executed the best stockfish move in the current board, or showed the top 3 stockfish moves or similar and their evaluation. One could then either make new manual moves, or press the button again to see the next stockfish move and so on. This should be integrated in the game analysis explorer such that one could (as it is now) click on an existing move number to reset the board at that position.

Asides allowing one to figure out why a particular move is bad, I imagine this feature could be used to explore the opening (a problem for a low-level player like me is to simply get new ideas in openings). For instance many openings revolve around allowing the opponent to take pawns which are trivially retaken later -- however how these pawns *should* have been retaken, especially if the opponent make a number of non-standard moves, may not be in some opening books because no good player would make those moves. I think this has the effect of making one play more conservative.

I realize these features are catering mostly to newbies and may be quite difficult to implement, however I think most of the functionality I have mentioned could be bade available by having a box which showed the proposed best stockfish move(s) in the current position and then made it up to the player to actually play these moves or not using the current interface.

Once again, a great thanks for the most exiting computer game I know of.

+1

What your looking for is the refutations, and its usually supported by engines. They output refutation lines during the uci info output.

What you're looking for is something that really doesn't need to be integrated into the site itself. There is PGN download support. If you are looking for move-by-move and alternate line refutation, i.e. extremely in-depth analysis, I highly recommend you get the free-to-download Chessbase Reader software or something of that ilk. It comes with the Fritz engine, but you can also download other engines and use them for kibitzing during your analysis, and not only will it show the best continuation and an alternate line it's considering, it will also allow you to go through and make as many alternate lines as you wish in your analysis. The only thing the free Reader doesn't support is saving your annotated games, but you can upload them to Chessbase and then download the new PGN with your annotation if you really want those.

This kind of software is designed specifically for what you're wanting to do, and it's the reason most chess websites don't include tons and tons of analysis features, because if you want in-depth analysis you can download your games and spend as much time as you like in said software to do so.

If you want to be better at chess STOP THE ENGINE !!! At least until you are a 1800+ player. You can't play the positions that engine suggest at this level, only bad is this for you, use your mind and you will see progress.

Anyway if you want so bad to continue, use scidvspc and critter or stockfish and try your ideas there by playing the moves you are thinking.

The site analysis is great as it is (PS: Also don't trust the analysis, its only too look closer at certain moves.)

Thanks for all the feedback. I (sort of) agree with the arguments against this feature; though I still think it would be nice, I agree with KingDeathGR this feature would not be likely to improve my play, with the possible exception of getting ideas in the opening (remember I am a very lowly rated play).
What I realize is that since a main motive for this feature is to satisfy curiosity after loosing complicated positions, and a better focus of lichess is to give a good chess-playing experience vs. curiosity-satisfying experience, the argument for this feature is weaker than I first thought. Thanks to everyone on this thread for their feedback.

I agree, I think that a great feature would be the support of playing out alternate lines in analysis mode against stockfish, instead of having to "continue from here" in a new game (if you want to try out many alternate lines throughout the analysis of a game, this gets very cumbersome).

In addition to this quite often I just want to see the right move in just one specific position, sure I'll never know that there were tons of unimaginable computer-only combinations throughout the game, but I doubt seeing it helps me in blitz games. Also it will consume less resources than analysing whole game (especially ones where the victory is clear but dozens random moves are made in hope opponent will lose on time).

I think It is an excellent suggestion, I do the same I play against the computer just to check some analysis moves.

+1 always wanted this feature.