Six AI models played chess through their CLIs. None of them delivered checkmate.
I build SpaceApp, a self-hosted workspace for running AI coding CLIs side by side. On 18 October I let six models play chess against each other there, each through its own CLI. Nobody won by checkmate. The way they lost is the interesting part. The setup Players: Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 (through Cla
I build SpaceApp, a self-hosted workspace for running AI coding CLIs side by side. On 18 October I let six models play chess against each other there, each through its own CLI. Nobody won by checkmate. The way they lost is the interesting part.
Twelve games are a small sample, and a tournament decided by forfeits says very little about chess strength. What it does show is how reliably a model answers through its CLI when every answer has a deadline: no timeouts, no provider errors, no illegal moves, game after game. That is the property I care about most when agents run unattended for hours, and it is not the same ranking you get from a single-prompt leaderboard.
SpaceApp runs on Linux, macOS and Windows 11 with Node.js 20.11 or newer:
npx --yes run-spaceapp@latest install Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode It is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1. Code, docs and known limitations: https://github.com/oll4com/spaceapp
If you have run something similar, I would like to know which models held up for you, and which rules you would change for a fairer second run.
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