austindavis/lichess-uci

Dataset Card for Lichess.org UCI Dataset

Description

The Lichess.org database has been converted to UCI format and uploaded here. This dataset groups games according to the year and month (yyyymm format) the games took place.

Dataset Structure

Each record in the dataset has the following structure:

{
  "Site": "abcd1234",
  "Event": "Rated Blitz game",
  "White": "player1",
  "Black": "player2",
  "Result": "1-0",
  "UTCDate": "2023-05-21",
  "UTCTime": "13:45:00",
  "WhiteElo": 1500,
  "BlackElo": 1400,
  "WhiteRatingDiff": 10,
  "BlackRatingDiff": -10,
  "ECO": "C50",
  "Opening": "Italian Game",
  "TimeControl": "300+0",
  "Termination": "Normal",
  "Transcript": "e2e4 e7e5 g1f3 b8c6 ... d7d8Q"
}

Field descriptions

• Site: string, unique identifier for the game. Replays can be viewed by navigating to https://lichess.org/<site>
• Event: string, type of event.
• White: string, white player.
• Black: string, black player.
• Result: string, game result.
• UTCDate: date32, date of the game.
• UTCTime: time64[us], time of the game.
• WhiteElo: int64, ELO rating of the white player.
• BlackElo: int64, ELO rating of the black player.
• WhiteRatingDiff: float64, rating change for the white player.
• BlackRatingDiff: float64, rating change for the black player.
• ECO: string, Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings (ECO) code of the opening. See https://www.365chess.com/eco.php
• Opening: string, name of the opening.
• TimeControl: string, time control format.
• Termination: string, reason for game termination.
• Transcript: string, sequence of moves in UCI format. Note: Promotions are capitalized.

Python Chess Gotchas

For those new to the datasets here's a few things to watch out for:

• The python Chess library uses lowercase letters to indicate pawn promotion, but this dataset uses upper-case letters instead (as a natural consequence of using pgn-extract, this also disambiguates bishop promotions 'b' from the b-file (column)). You may want to use str.lower() whenever processing transcripts with the Chess library.
• Empty transcripts are using '0-1' by pgn-extract. (example: lichess.org/AvQ6x3da)

Human versus Bot Players

The source data comes from games played on Lichess.org, an online platform where users from around the world play chess. This database does not distinguish between human-and bot-played games. However, it's reasonable to assume games played before April 2018 were overwhelmingly played by human players since Lichess.org released its bot api on April 1st, 2018.

Citation Information

If you use this dataset, please cite it as follows:

@misc{lichess_uci,
  author = {Davis, Austin},
  title = {Lichess.org Open Database in UCI format},
  year = {2024},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/austindavis/lichess-uci}},
}