Questions tagged [engines]

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

31 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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9 votes
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Highest depth ever achieved

I saw a guy that went into depth 70 with no search moves at 41, 192, 897, 168, and 184 nodes from the starting position on Stockfish a few years ago. I would like to know if this is still a record or ...
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7 votes
0 answers
452 views

What Elo rating does The Chessmaster 2000 have?

A recent agadmator video pitted The Chessmaster (NES) against Stockfish 14 NNUE. What is more impressive to me is that this chess engine, released originally in 1986 and written by David Kittinger in ...
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7 votes
0 answers
272 views

How do you set up two engines to play each other on a cloud server?

I am exploring a semi-novel idea in the London system, where I play 2...b5!? after 1. d4 Nf6 2. Bf4 A main line goes 3.Nf3 Bb7 4.e3 and now: 4...a6 5.Bd3 e6 or Nh5 4...a6 5.c4 bxc4/b4 4...b4 5.Bd3 e6/...
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6 votes
0 answers
297 views

Stockfish position evaluation component terms in Python?

I saw the excellent Javascript-based guide to how Stockfish evaluates (non-NNUE). Is there a python version out there, perhaps using python-chess? What I am trying to do (in case you have other ...
5 votes
0 answers
91 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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5 votes
0 answers
164 views

Why does Stockfish change evaluations and best moves depending on the number of displayed variations?

No matter whether I test it online on lichess or locally: Stockfish shows different variations and evaluations depending on the number of variations displayed. Where does this behaviour come from, and ...
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5 votes
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118 views

Why do these convergent lines evaluate differently?

I recently analyzed alternative lines for this puzzle on chess.com. [Event "French Championship"] [Site "Val d'Isere FRA"] [Date "2002.08.23"] [Round "5"] [...
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4 votes
0 answers
111 views

Stack data structure to store chess positions?

One method I thought of for storing chess positions is a stack. This is because when you go one move deeper in the search, you add that position onto the stack, and delete the node when finish, this ...
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4 votes
0 answers
248 views

Are engines impaired by the 50-move rule?

Are we missing too much from the 50-move rule implementation to engines, whether HCE (Hand-crafted evaluation) or/and NN (Neural Network)? We know that certain endgames are a win without the rule. ...
4 votes
0 answers
161 views

Setting up Stockfish for Droidfish

I would like to set up Stockfish for the android app Droidfish. How do I set up a server for a Windows machine (my linux machine is too weak) using SF13?
3 votes
0 answers
212 views

How engines accomplish calculation speeds of 1000kN/s per Core and above?

I am developing a chess engine to improve my Cpp. It works, which means it generates legal moves and it can play them out. I optimized a bit and now achieve ~20k N / s, which is way better than my ...
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3 votes
0 answers
166 views

Debugging my PERFT coding

I'm stuck debugging my move generation and do move function. I noticed that the castling as actually the problem in my code, but I think I have implemented everything right. I installed some java ...
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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2 votes
0 answers
167 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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2 votes
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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, ...
2 votes
0 answers
85 views

Issue with connecting engine to lichess bot (uci communication)

My engine is responding correctly to the first inputs from the GUI (as above), but when it receives go movetime 10000 it just crashes and I don't know why. When I test my engine manually in CMD I get ...
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2 votes
0 answers
162 views

Understanding Null move pruning

I have trouble understanding null move pruning. I understand the concept of a free move for the side that just played a move, but what I don't understand is the code part: int score = -negamax(-beta,-...
1 vote
0 answers
23 views

What are qualitative differences between different engines playstyles and human playstyles?

I remember GM Daniel Naroditsky commented that you can tell that you're playing a computer if you do calculations and none of your plans work because specific moves that were done 3-4 moves ago start ...
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 &&...
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 ...
1 vote
0 answers
134 views

My engine's alpha-beta search returns negative score eval. on odd depths and positive on even. Dont understand what is causing this bug

I've been working on implementing/improving my engine's search function the past few days, but yesterday I decided my current search implementation was a mess and that it would be much better to ...
1 vote
0 answers
147 views

Is this a possibly faster way to find pinned pieces using magic hash?

Okay so this is something that I came up with while working on my own engine, but I am not sure if anyone has ever tried. Basically I am using a separate set of magic hashed longs to store pieces and ...
1 vote
0 answers
216 views

Clear Stockfish hash table after every move conveniently

When analyzing a game with Stockfish I sometimes find it confusing that evaluation of a given position changes depending on what positions I had analyzed previously. I understand that this is because ...
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1 vote
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215 views

Why is futility pruning causing an Elo drop in my engine?

I'm getting weird results when introducing futility pruning into Blunder. On the one hand, I'm getting a pretty sizeable reduction in nodes, and I'm searching a full ply deeper for some positions (e.g....
1 vote
0 answers
281 views

Relation between Elo and search depth for basic minimax

If we use the most basic approach to a chess engine (for example, for a codegolf): minimax to a fixed depth with the material count as static evaluation, then how strong is this algorithm? This of ...
0 votes
0 answers
42 views

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 ...
0 votes
0 answers
46 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 ...
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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239 views

Scid vs. PC: a hint needed

I have now installed Scid vs. PC and I have made my first move with White with 1. e4. Now the engine computes the position tree. How can I stop it and make it move with Black after some fixed time ? ...
0 votes
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112 views

How to validate chess moves with a server? Winboard and Unity 2020.3

I'm looking for advice on how to implement online chess move validation using a winboard chess engine. I am creating a mobile battle chess game in Unity 2020.3. Right now I have the possible moves for ...
0 votes
0 answers
85 views

Where to find a list of the computer stored in the FICS Games Database?

According to the FICS Games Database there are currently 1,525 "computers stored". Such accounts are indicated by a "(C)" after the username. However, this suffix does not seem to be recorded in the ...
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