23
votes
Accepted
Computers: Hardware or Software?
The answer is software is more important. You can test this yourself actually. Get your favorite top engine today and your favorite top engine from 10 years ago, and run both of them against each ...
- 26.1k
19
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to lose to "Worstfish"?
Here's an example found by googling "lose to worstfish chess" and following the first hit that comes up (a reddit thread)
In case of link rot the game is below. I note WorstFish opens with ...
- 4,357
16
votes
What is the status for EIGHT piece endgame tablebases?
Marc Bourzutschky's Google Drive with progress information
Bourzutschky's first email regarding his progress
Bourzutschky's second email regarding his progress
Kirill Kryukov's Endgame Tablebase ...
- 645
14
votes
Is it possible to lose to "Worstfish"?
There is a significant difference between making the worst move assuming best play and the worst move assuming worst play. The former is what Worstfish does (as far as I understand), but the latter is ...
- 2,346
12
votes
Accepted
Why does stockfish give "-28.8" as the evaluation number for this position?
Computer programs are great at performing the specific tasks they've been designed for and useless for anything else. Chess engines are no different. It's just not worth it to design an engine so that ...
- 16.3k
12
votes
What is the status for EIGHT piece endgame tablebases?
We are still far away from the solution. Estimates for the size of the completed tablebase are around 10 Petabytes. Compare that to the 140 Terabyte hard drive (later trimmed down to 18TB in the ...
- 319
10
votes
Computers: Hardware or Software?
I develop mobile chess apps to the App Store. The very first version of the apps were built on the iPhone 3GS. That was many years ago, but even then the apps could play at the GM chess level.
There ...
- 22.4k
10
votes
Is there a way to use Stockfish to see tactics that aren't necessarily great?
If you use Stockfish via some sort of GUI, like Scid, Scid vs PC, Fritz or Chessbase, as most people do, then your GUI will have an option to show not just the best sequence of moves but the best n ...
- 94.5k
9
votes
Why is Qf3 losing in this position?
White is a piece down for just a pawn in this position. Taking the rook would give them a reasonably balanced position, but by refusing to take they get a totally lost one.
There are also some ideas ...
- 16.3k
8
votes
Accepted
Examples of Computers failing
A good example is the following position from a study by William Rudolph (which is also in the posting linked to by ASTA):
3B4/1r2p3/r2p1p2/bkp1P1p1/1p1P1PPp/p1P4P/PPB1K3/8 w - - 0 1
1. Ba4+! Kxa4 2. ...
- 762
7
votes
Accepted
Understanding why alpha-beta cannot be naively parallelized
I think you underestimate just how much pruning gets done in modern chess engine. They do not only use alpha-beta pruning alone - they prune nodes that seem unpromising using a variety of heuristics, ...
- 388
6
votes
Accepted
Lets suppose I develop a chess engine, can I enter it into tournaments? If so, where do I begin?
You will need to create a chess engine, and then announce it out on talkchess. There will be independent testers who will run your engine in their own tournaments. You will see your engine appear in ...
- 22.4k
5
votes
Is Houdini 6 a Stockfish clone?
Looks like the answer to the title question is "yes". Stockfish sued Chessbase (a distributor of Houdini) for violation of GPL, and in the settlement, Chessbase concedes that they "used ...
- 26.1k
5
votes
Has any researcher tried adversarial examples against chess engines?
Yes. Antifish was an attempt in 2018 to train a LC0 style network specifically to beat stockfish. It turns out that even when searching specifically for weaknesses, chess engines are really strong.
- 1,088
5
votes
Accepted
How do you program a chess bot with specific style?
Evaluation Function
That measure is called the evaluation function. Each bot can have a different evaluation function depending on how you want it to behave. Will it favour dynamic play or will it ...
- 5,965
5
votes
Accepted
What is the Depth reached by chess-AI agents on a regular computer?
Up to date reference is practically impossible to give, since engines and hardware change on yearly basis.
You identified most important conditions, but I would like to add two more:
Presence of ...
- 811
5
votes
Why is Qf3 losing in this position?
It seems like white played Bxf7, and after Rxf7, instead of taking the rook with Nxf7, white played Qf3. Now black -among others- can play the simple Rf8 and are a piece up for a pawn.
The fact that ...
- 2,104
5
votes
How can I get a chess engine to play custom chess variants?
Your best bet is Fairy-Stockfish, which is built on Stockfish 14 and supports dozens of piece and board variants, including custom variants! For example, here is how the "Indian Great Chess" ...
- 3,587
5
votes
Why is this a “Brilliant Move”?
Whites bishop on g5 is hanging, after Bxg5 Nxg5 Qxg5 black is up a piece. However this would remove the defense of the c7 pawn allowing for Nxc7 by white forking the king and the rook on a1 leading to ...
- 91
5
votes
Is there a chess program that profiles its opponent?
Not really
Because these days, every engine developer tests their engine against itself. The process is to write a patch, then test the patched engine against the original. If the patched engine is ...
- 26.1k
5
votes
In a completely lost position do chess engines attempt to bait their opponent into mistakes, or just play for the longest survival?
Chess engines always consider the "best move" possible for both side. What the "best move" means, is the best move found from the engine according to its evaluation function, ...
- 51
4
votes
Why does stockfish give "-28.8" as the evaluation number for this position?
Chess engines are made for regular chess playing not for solving unexpected chess problems that have no very little relevance to chess strength. In fact, an engine that is able to understand an ...
- 22.4k
4
votes
Accepted
Is there a way to get blunders, mistakes and inaccuracies using Stockfish?
Common methods for engine annotation include a strict evaluation model or the expected points model. In the strict evaluation model, engine annotations require user-defined parameters to classify ...
- 3,695
4
votes
"Safe advantage" and "unsafe advantage"
What you are looking for is the term "sharp". A position that is sharp requires accurate play to maintain the evaluation; there may only be one good move for either side. From there defining ...
- 91
4
votes
Is there a way to use Stockfish to see tactics that aren't necessarily great?
No. Stockfish is designed to always assume optimal play, so it treats all the moves it finds "equally" without any consideration for difficulty. Keep in mind that engines are a tool to ...
- 16.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Is there a way to use Stockfish to see tactics that aren't necessarily great?
Created a script that will detect the following tactical themes.
pins
forks
double check
undermine
It will read the games in the pgn file. Visit each position in the game and run stockfish at ...
- 3,885
4
votes
Accepted
Unknown "Mystery" Engine
On July 13th, chess.com revealed Mystery as its new closed-source engine, Torch:
Announcing Torch: New #2 Chess Engine
Torch is a brand-new chess engine built from the ground up by top chess engine ...
- 3,587
4
votes
Accepted
Why is Leela Chess Zero rated low on CCRL leaderboards?
They test under CPU-only conditions. CPUs are not a good platform for neural network inference (because they are designed to do well on a large variety of workloads, as opposed to more specialized ...
- 762
3
votes
Where can I get a free engine to play Hexagonal Chess?
This page on the chess-variants website has links to various hexagonal chess playing engines. I particularly like Hexodus which you can download from this link.
- 94.5k
3
votes
Is the decline in chess strength in a GM as they age similar to their ascension or different?
I wouldn't like to believe that these have any correlation. Ascension to a GM title is quite sharp, but the person typically has to have started quite young and had great and unrelenting passion for ...
- 31
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible