Questions tagged [engines]

Questions relating to chess engines: any computer program that is able to play/analyze chess positions.

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14 votes
5 answers
4k views

Is there a way to use Stockfish to see tactics that aren't necessarily great?

Basically - I want to utilize an engine to see tactics through the whole game, regardless of whether they're a good move or not. Sometimes, Stockfish may say a position is absolutely winning, but the ...
1 vote
1 answer
128 views

Examples of Computers failing

Are there any positions where computers would play a bad move, but we humans know of the existence of a better move? By “computer” I mean standard engines such as Stockfish, at full power. Edit: By a “...
1 vote
1 answer
77 views

What is the effect of the processor type for chess infinite analysis using the current version of Stockfish?

To find the best move, the dream of any chess player, chess engines are used extensively. Nowadays, the most popular chess engine is Stockfish. Many chess players, including top chess grandmasters ...
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2 votes
1 answer
48 views

Chess puzzles and gnuchess/xboard

Just come back to chess after a long pause. I want to set up a position -- a simple one -- and then have gnuchess reply to my moves as I try for a mate. But, with a simple Q+K against K alone, ...
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0 votes
0 answers
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Transposition table produces diffrent and wrong search results

I am currently developing my own chess engine in rust. It all was working pretty fine, until I added transposition tables. Where my engine was playing the reasonable move e2e4 at a lower depth, with ...
1 vote
2 answers
83 views

Can chess bots adapt to changes?

If there's a chess bot and I changed how the bishop moves so it can move through pieces can it beat me without the need to change the code?
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0 votes
0 answers
44 views

How to install an engine to Arena chess GUI and play with personality?

As a beginner chess player I'm in love with chess.com personality bots, but free bots are limited, so I found this Rodent 3 engine but I don't quite understand how to use their unique personality to ...
1 vote
0 answers
43 views

Transposition table cut and all nodes

I have written a chess engine over the last year. Inside my search function I have the following struct transposition *e = attempt_get(pos); if (e && transposition_depth(e) >= depth &&...
0 votes
0 answers
24 views

Engine for Pawn Sideways Chess

Is there an engine that plays the variant described by DeepMind in which pawns have additional sideways moves in addition to their regular moves? Fairy-Stockfish does not yet support this variant.
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0 votes
1 answer
61 views

Two different "accuracies"...why?

Ok, I know it's probably not impressive to most, but I'm on my way to a 1000 rating on chess.com. I'm guessing it's because of different engine strengths or something. I recently played the following ...
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3 votes
1 answer
39 views

Is there any UCI GUI for arbitrary variants?

I have a UCI-compatible chess engine which I modified to play a chess variant (gravity chess, where all non-pawn pieces fall towards increasing rank). However, there's no easy way to play against the ...
3 votes
1 answer
90 views

Why is this a “Brilliant Move”?

I don’t understand why chess.com says this is a “Brilliant Move”? Can someone explain please?
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1 vote
1 answer
63 views

"Safe advantage" and "unsafe advantage"

By a safe advantage, I mean it is easy for the side with the advantage to keep it. Winning the game is extremely likely under normal conditions. Example: KQ vs KN is a very safe advantage. By an ...
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3 votes
1 answer
61 views

What is the variability of engine evaluations as a function of depth?

Chess engines such as StockFish provide centi-pawn evaluation of positions. Clearly the longer the engine runs the deeper it can search and thus provide more accurate centi-pawn evaluation. Basically, ...
2 votes
1 answer
186 views

Is there a way to get blunders, mistakes and inaccuracies using Stockfish?

Stockfish provides the best moves/lines but is there a command or technique to get inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders? How is this done by lichess or chess.com? They also have the ability to show an ...
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0 votes
2 answers
107 views

Chess game/gui in C++/SDL. Integrating Stockfish. Mostly all is working, but is it possible to find all legal moves for a specified square/piece?

I've never worked with Stockfish or anything command line based like this before, so it took me a lot of getting used to in send/receiving the messages etc. I do now have a C++ game project set up and ...
0 votes
3 answers
183 views

Some adjustable chess engines below 3000 elo?

Stockfish, Alphazero, Leela chess zero, Komodo have elo above 3300. I need the names of some adjustable chess engines below 3000 level, from beginner level to Grand Master level (2800 to 3000 elo), ...
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3 votes
2 answers
193 views

Lets suppose I develop a chess engine, can I enter it into tournaments? If so, where do I begin?

My question is simple. I recently discovered that chess.com hosts a computer chess championship, and that got me really interested in chess programming. I know its a very difficult field, but let's ...
1 vote
1 answer
60 views

Extract evaluation data from Stockfish in Cpp

I am working on a chess player-rating system based on engine evaluations. As part of this I would like to extract evaluation data from Stockfish for the top 10 moves in a given set of positions. ...
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1 vote
1 answer
93 views

How can I get a chess engine to play custom chess variants?

How can I get a chess engine to play custom chess variants, for example Los Alamos chess, anti-chess, or chess where pawns can only advance one square?
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1 vote
2 answers
85 views

Does a reinforcement learning style model actually need to be combined with a search algo to produce the best moves?

I have recently been studying up on Machine Learning based chess engines and have begun to develop one of my own. I was wondering, realistically, doesn't the board technically contain all of the data ...
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18 votes
5 answers
6k views

Computers: Hardware or Software?

It is well known that both hardware and software contributed to the total dominance of computers. Has there been an experiment to run a very modern program (say Alpha Zero) on a museum computer (of ...
4 votes
1 answer
169 views

Does Stockfish 15.1 view the stage of the game continuously or discretely, if at all?

If I understand correctly, Stockfish (15.1 at the time of asking this) values material differently according to the stage of the game, "stages" being analogous to what we call opening, ...
7 votes
2 answers
859 views

Why is Qf3 losing in this position?

[FEN ""] [startply "16"] [StartFlipped "1"] 1. e4 d6 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. d3 Bg7 5. Nf3 Nc6 6. O-O e5 7. Ng5 O-O 8. Bxf7+ Rxf7 9. Qf3 Why does the engine go from -1....
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2 votes
0 answers
83 views

Which websites have a ranking and/or a rating list for correspondence chess without engine help?

I am looking for websites that have a ranking and/or a rating list for correspondence chess without engine help. Which ones do exist? For example, lichess.org has correspondence chess without engine ...
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1 vote
2 answers
73 views

How to arrange engine games

I have heard in various places that we can make engines play against each other from a certain given position. I want to know how exactly to do that. Is there a website where I can put a position and ...
0 votes
1 answer
153 views

What is the Depth reached by chess-AI agents on a regular computer?

I'm looking for some reference for the number of lookahead steps typically used by chess agents (Stockfish / Leela Chess Zero / others?) From a quick search I found that: the answer depends on: ...
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3 votes
1 answer
177 views

How do you program a chess bot with specific style?

There are these cute chess.com bots against which you can play, which not only have different strengths but supposedly different playing styles. I haven't researched exactly how "limiting engine ...
0 votes
2 answers
243 views

Why does stockfish give "-28.8" as the evaluation number for this position?

[FEN "5K2/8/5k2/5b2/6b1/5b1b/4b1b1/7b w - - 0 1"] This game is an immediate draw by insufficient material (Doesn't Stockfish know this?). I am wondering what the reason behind the score &...
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1 vote
1 answer
75 views

Where can I get a free engine to play Hexagonal Chess?

This question asks about the rules for Glinski's hexagonal chess. If I want to play a game of Glinski's hexagonal chess against the computer where can I get a free downloadable engine?
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2 votes
3 answers
159 views

Is the decline in chess strength in a GM as they age similar to their ascension or different?

I mean, given that GMs or other strong players (I choose strong players because their peak rating vs low has "more data" than that of weaker players but it probably relates to weaker players ...
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7 votes
4 answers
1k views

Is there an engine for Duck Chess?

Is there a chess engine for the chess variant Duck Chess? If not, is there a known plan of development of such an engine?
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3 votes
1 answer
139 views

Factors that contribute to slow move generation in building chess engine

I'm building a toy chess engine. I have a correct but slow move generation. Doing perft on starting position to depth 6 with my engine takes 8 seconds and but takes stockfish 0.5 seconds on my ...
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3 votes
2 answers
154 views

Is contempt factor used as a way to make engine games more interesting?

Chess is believed to be a theoretical draw. So top chess engines, which are not too far off from theoretical optimum, tend to reach drawn positions, which are not too exciting. My understanding is ...
12 votes
2 answers
3k views

Is it the case that in practice making moves only decreases your positional score according to computers?

It occurred to me that presumably every chess engine's score is based on the best available continuation move, and thus every other move must be worse (or at least no better). i.e. if there were a ...
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4 votes
1 answer
157 views

Understanding why alpha-beta cannot be naively parallelized

I have seen it suggested in various places (e.g., on Stack Overflow posts) that alpha-beta pruning cannot be "naively" parallelized. To me, an intuitive parallelization of alpha-beta with n ...
18 votes
8 answers
9k views

Why don't chess engines take into account the time left by each player?

Firstly, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong the way engines are implemented at the moment, by analyzing only the current position regardless of time left by the players. This is great ...
0 votes
1 answer
83 views

What engine evaluation does the average randomly generated legal position have?

Would it be accurate to expect a random legal position to tend to evaluate to a white advantage? How does the distribution of evaluations look like?
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3 votes
2 answers
148 views

Comparative Advantage of Engine Improvements

I am implementing a chess engine in Python for the first time. Right now, my engine uses a standard alpha-beta search with fixed depth and a simple evaluation function that uses the weighted average ...
2 votes
0 answers
166 views

Has any researcher tried adversarial examples against chess engines?

Even with all the compute in the world, chess engines cannot compute very deeply. So, they have to make use of pruning heuristics and discard moves from the analysis. Seems possible that even the ...
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21 votes
2 answers
6k views

What is the deepest Stockfish evaluation of the standard initial position that has ever been done?

Letting Stockfish (14+ NNUE) run for several minutes with lichess' analysis tool on the initial position of a standard chess board lets it reach depths beyond 30 moves, I suppose letting it run for ...
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5 votes
0 answers
90 views

Is there an engine (setting) that favours "reckless" moves?

How I'd define a "reckless" move is that a perfect chain of response moves will quickly put the engine at a disadvantage, but any slightly suboptimal response will make the engine win very ...
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6 votes
2 answers
310 views

What unusual engines do we have?

Almost all current engines are similar and built for the same tasks (stockfish, lc0, slowchess, comodo...). And I only heard about a few unusual engines Crystal: based on Stockfish but used for ...
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7 votes
3 answers
171 views

Can chess engines recognize equivalence between two positions?

The positions [FEN "8/4kn2/4br2/8/8/3Q4/4K3/8 w - - 0 1"] with white to move [FEN "8/8/8/2Q5/1K3bk1/5rn1/8/8 w - - 0 1"] with white to move [FEN "8/2nk4/2rb4/8/8/4Q3/3K4/8 w ...
2 votes
0 answers
120 views

Alpha-Beta Pruning and Depth skews checkmate evaluation

I am currently working on a chess engine in golang. I have implemented and tested move generation, making and unmaking. I am working on search and evaluation using Negamax with Alpha Beta pruning, ...
0 votes
2 answers
137 views

Best human plan vs best computer plan

Suppose that in a given strategic position, every grandmaster agrees that plan A is better than plan B, and for the first few minutes the strongest computer engines calculate that A is best and B is ...
1 vote
1 answer
103 views

What is the best Chess Engine to practice latter Middlegame and Early Endgame

I have taken a break from chess for while now, and I am hoping to make a comeback soon. I want to brush up on my latter Middlegame and Early Endgame. I want to start by analyzing recent GM games. What ...
0 votes
1 answer
82 views

Workaround for strange behavior of Windows chess engines in Linux GUIs? [closed]

There's no problem with native Linux engines or with JAVA engines, only with Windows engines started using wine. All Windows engines behave the same, both win32 and x64, both UCI and XB. Windows ...
1 vote
0 answers
85 views

Creating or editing shredder .bkt opening book

I want to create an opening book for Shredder or edit an existing one. the way I want it is like how Lucas chess works, giving a certain value (weight, percentage, etc) to a specific move. This is an ...
0 votes
1 answer
106 views

Can an engine function implementing UCI except without always reading stdin?

According to the UCI protocol, an engine implementing UCI should always be able to respond to stdin. I thought of two ways to accomplish this in an engine of my own: Implement threads like Stockfish ...
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