Issued 20 October 2026
Ripuranjan Baruah
Founder, Gambits · Independent researcher
| Gambits | Launching | November 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| FERRITE | Accepted for oral presentation, ADASS XXXVI | 2026 |
| PHOTON-3D | Code release | October 2026 |
Venture
Gambits
A chess trainer that studies your own games.
Gambits reads your games from Lichess or Chess.com, finds the mistakes you keep repeating, and builds a short daily practice around them. Your Skill Map only changes when you play real games, never from practising in the app. Every score shows the moves behind it.
| Reads | Your own games, from Lichess or Chess.com |
|---|---|
| Finds | The mistakes that repeat across games |
| Builds | A short practice for each day |
| Measures | Only real games move the Skill Map |
Research · orbital tracking
PHOTON-3D
The 3D shape and spin of a satellite or rocket body, recovered from a single flickering pixel.
A ground telescope sees an object in orbit as one point of light, whose brightness changes as it tumbles. PHOTON-3D works backwards from that light curve to the object's shape and spin axis, by gradient descent through a renderer, in place of sampling methods that take hours per object.
(a)
One point of light.
From the ground, a satellite or a spent rocket stage is too far away to show a shape. The telescope records a point that brightens and fades.
(b)
The flicker is the shape, turning.
As the body tumbles, each face catches the sun in turn. The curve repeats with every turn, and its pattern depends on the shape and the axis it spins around.
(c)
Work backwards from the light.
Start from a rough blob. Adjust its shape and spin, step by step, until the light it would reflect matches the light that was measured.
| Check | Shape overlap (IoU) | Spin axis error |
|---|---|---|
| Synthetic, single pass | 0.999 | 0.01° |
| Synthetic, multi pass | 0.999 | 0.06° |
| Real data: Ariane 5 upper stage, MMT | Spin period error 5.0% · length to width 1.30, against 1.20 | |
Research · space imaging
FERRITE
Lossless image compression for space telescopes, built so one corrupted tile doesn't cost the frame.
Science frames from orbit are compressed before they are sent down, and a few flipped bits can make a compressed file unreadable. FERRITE splits each frame into tiles that carry their own checks, so damage is caught, marked and contained while everything else decodes exactly. It needs no floating-point unit, so it runs on small flight processors and FPGA designs, and gives identical results on any processor.
(a)
A frame, as recorded.
Every pixel counts, so nothing may change on the way down. The frame is compressed without losing a single value.
(b)
Cut into tiles, each with its own check.
Each tile is compressed on its own, and every piece of the file carries a 32-bit check, a short fingerprint of its contents.
(c)
Noise on the way down.
A few tiles arrive damaged. Their checks fail, so they are marked as lost instead of passed on as wrong pixels. Every other tile decodes exactly as it was taken.
| File | Original | fpack | FERRITE | Smaller by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACS, crowded field | 34.34 | 16.82 | 14.65 | 12.9% |
| ACS, sparse field | 34.34 | 9.83 | 8.58 | 12.7% |
| ACS, mixed field | 34.34 | 11.76 | 9.95 | 15.4% |
| WFC3/UVIS, held out | 34.89 | 11.12 | 9.76 | 12.2% |
| WFC3/IR, 8 reads, held out | 17.02 | 12.83 | 7.48 | 41.7% |
| One flipped bit in the pixel data | FERRITE: 0.02% of pixels lost, every loss marked · fpack: 423 pixels wrong, no warning | |||
| Integrity checks | CRC-32C on every chunk header and every chunk's content | |||
| Arithmetic | Integers only; needs no floating-point unit; identical results on any processor | |||
| Speed | Encoding is 3 to 11 times slower than fpack, on one core | |||
Exploration
Kepler-64
We gave the universe the rules of the game, and let it figure out how to play.
A chess engine with no chess strategy written into it. It is given the rules of chess and a small set of physical laws, and learns the rest through self-play, tuning seventeen constants of its universe by gradient descent.
(a) Law 1
Weight bends the board.
A pawn weighs 1. Knights and bishops 3, a rook 5, a queen 9. Each piece dents the board, and everything nearby feels the slope.
(b) Law 2
Two pulls from opposite sides tear a king.
One rook pulling at a king is fine. Two, from opposite sides, stretch it like a moon between two planets. Past 100% the king breaks. In this universe, that is checkmate.
(c) Law 3
Whatever you capture, you keep.
The winner of a capture absorbs 80% of the loser's weight, so a queen that keeps eating starts to bend the board like a small planet.
(d) Seventeen constants
Nobody set how strong gravity is.
Seventeen physical constants are learned by gradient descent through the physics, using self-play. Play a famous game through it.
It plays weak chess. That was never the point.
| Written in | The rules of chess and the physics: mass, capture, finite-speed influence, tidal stress |
|---|---|
| Learned | 17 physical constants, by gradient descent through the physics |
| Training | Self-play, in progress |
| Chess strategy written in | None |
End matter
Record, and what is next
Record
- ADASS XXXVI. Accepted for oral presentation: FERRITE: A Fault-Error Resilient Rice Integer Tile Encoder for Orbital Science Imaging.
- Winter of Code, IIIT Kalyani. Selected through the proposal round. Contributed to Pyre, Open Source Chandigarh, February to March 2026.
- Hack Space 2025. Winner.
Next
- PHOTON-3D code goes public.
- Gambits launches, free during early access.
- FERRITE preprint, with the rewritten codec's results.
- RADiANT moves from design to build.
- A second venture, larger in scope. In preparation.
Also
- HeapGlass. Watch a running C/C++ program's heap live. Leaks redden as they age, and double-frees flash instead of crashing. 1.23% overhead. Hackathon build.
- 1800 blitz on Lichess, before a long break.
- Committed enough to own one, not enough to fix the missing E string.
