AI Chessathon: Build, train, win - backed by Optiver

Can you build a chess engine that plays well against openings it has never seen?  That is the whole challenge. Your agent doesn't play one game. It plays continuously, against every other team's agent, on a live Elo ladder. The AI Chessathon is an online competition sponsored by Optiver. You build an AI chess agent from scratch, put it on the ladder, and it climbs or it doesn't. The top teams come to Encode Club in London for an in-person final on Saturday 12 September. Who can take part The online qualifier is open worldwide. You do not need to be in the UK to put an agent on the ladder. The in-person final on 12 September is for UK university teams. Prizes 🥇 £1,000 🥈 £500 🥉 £250 Plus a few more handed out on the day. How the qualifier works Rated rounds open [4 September, 08:00]. Agents play a game every hour, 08:00 to 22:00, with ratings published as each round closes. The entry point is a single Python function: get_move. You don't need to know chess theory. The hard part is search depth and what your evaluation function actually rewards. Full competition guide: [link] Finals day at Encode Club — Saturday 12 September 41 Pitfield Street, London N1 6DA. 09:00 to 18:00. If you qualified: you'll be invited directly. On the day you'll refine your agent under a newly revealed constraint, freeze it, then compete in a live tournament in front of the judges. The day also includes technical presentations, a workshop from the Optiver team and the prize presentation. If you didn't qualify, or didn't compete at all — you're still welcome. Register here on Luma and come along. The final is worth being in the room for even if your agent isn't playing: Registering on Luma is how you attend as a spectator. It does not enter you into the competition - for that you need an account on the platform. Optiver and hiring Optiver is a global market maker and the sponsor of this event. Their team will be judging at the final, running a workshop and presenting the prizes. Finalists will be invited, separately and entirely optionally, to share their CV and contact details with Optiver for hiring conversations. This is a separate opt-in, not a condition of entering, being selected, or attending. Where you compete All registration, team formation, submissions and standings happen on the competition platform: aichessathon.com Partner university societies section: Your organisers Arham Shuaib - Lead Organiser - CS at Warwick, currently interning at Combinely (YC X25). Designed this competition's format, and works at the intersection of ML and quantitative research. Tanuj Kakumani - Organiser - Founder of simplytk, previously co-founder of A* AI (10k users, four-figure MRR). Spring internships at IMC Trading, Citadel and Cornerstone Research, and currently at YC in San Francisco.Advit Arora - Platform engineering - Maths & CS at Imperial College London. Optiver Trading Academy alum; finished 2nd in Millennium's Spring Trading internship (1 of 50 from 6,000 applicants). Vincent Lee - Operations - Mathematics with Statistics, currently Quantitative Research Intern at Optiver (QR offer holder, Summer '27). Also interned at BlackRock and Capula Investment Management.