Questions tagged [engines]
Questions relating to chess engines: any computer program that is able to play/analyze chess positions.
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How to use Static Analysis of any chess engine
Probably all chess engine uses static analysis to evaluate the position and find moves.
My question is that how can a human make use of static analysis?
In Stockfish static analysis comes using the ...
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Running out of RAM while generating moves
I'm currently building chess engine in Rust from scratch but I am having RAM problems even on calculating 6 ply.
According to Shannon's calculation there are 119,060,324 possible games after ply 6.
If ...
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How to set depth of GNU chess in winboard?
I have downloaded GNU chess 5.07 in windows 10. I am running it in winboard 4.8.0. When I start GNU chess in winboard, it plays with full strength. However, I want to set particular depth and want ...
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A possibility to beat a chess computer
Related, but outdated: Tips on how to beat a computer?
How to beat a super Go computer:
https://paperswithcode.com/paper/adversarial-policies-beat-professional-level
This of course suggests that the ...
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How to set custom start position in GNU Chess?
I could not find this in the GNU Chess manual by searching, although I might be overlooking it, under a different name.
What I am seeking to do with GNU Chess is quite simple: Specifying the position ...
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What are qualitative differences between different engines playstyles, and also 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 ...
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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 ...
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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 “...
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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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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 &&...
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Engine for Pawn Sideways Chess
Is there an engine I can download or buy that plays the variant described by AlphaZero in which pawns have additional sideways moves in addition to their regular moves? Fairy-Stockfish does not yet ...
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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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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 ...
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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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"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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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, ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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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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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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 ...
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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, ...
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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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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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 ...
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