New answers tagged engines
2
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Elo change of engine from pure material to very good evaluation
The difference is huge, worth well over a thousand elo. See SimpleEval, which is Stockfish with a very simplified evaluation function. It's not strong enough to beat top humans, even though Stockfish ...
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1
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What algorithm is used when an engine is branded by a certain player?
I suspect those engine variants are neural network-based implementations, like Leela lc0 or perhaps NNUE on Stockfish (but I'm not familiar with their approach). A neural net engine requires millions ...
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3
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Will writing a chess engine help my chess?
It is the other way around. Being a strong chess player allows you to write a good evaluation function.
The evaluation functions of strong chess engines are known, and the principles they encapsulate ...
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0
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Which top engine is strong on what?
Anecdotally, Leela plays more "humanlike" than more calculating engines like Stockfish (maybe before Stockfish got its own neural nets). What is "humanlike" at 3500+ ELO I'm not ...
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What algorithm is used when an engine is branded by a certain player?
It depends and is likely a combination of factors, decreasing Elo and also making tweaks to try to more closely match a certain players style.
In general, it's difficult to limit an engine's Elo in a ...
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4
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What free programs do exist to comment chess games? For Windows, Linux, and Mac
I have a program called Chess Artist. It is written in python, open source and there is windows executable in case you don't like the python script.
You can access the help by sending the command help ...
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8
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Will writing a chess engine help my chess?
I wrote an engine a while back. I would call myself a "competent inactive chess player," defining that as in the uncomfortable divide where playing people who aren't active chess players is ...
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4
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Will writing a chess engine help my chess?
If you are a beginner, then yeah it would help. As you wrote, "bishop pair gives a small bonus roughly half a pawn, knights do better than bishops when there are many pawns on the board, and that ...
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4
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What free programs do exist to comment chess games? For Windows, Linux, and Mac
I recommend Scid. Even some forks of scid such as ChessDB are popular. If your intention is to comment games, work with chess databases, and so on (rather than engine evaluation, play aginst engines, ...
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2
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Is it possible to get DTM of a position from sygyzy tables?
TL;DR DTM & DTZ measure different things and one cannot be deduced from the other.
DTZ measures the shortest distance to zero the position (zeroing = pawn move, capture or checkmate), without ...
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3
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Will writing a chess engine help my chess?
No. Humans and engines play chess in completely different ways. Being able to conclude that the evaluation function bonus for the bishop pair should be 0.3 rather than 0.2 will have pretty much no ...
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4
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Is there a Correspondence Chess ranking on Lichess.org on 2022?
Although it's from six years ago, the lack of leaderboards for correspondence chess in lichess was explained by its creator in this reddit post.
Quoting from reddit's user ornicar2 (who is labeled as ...
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2
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Is it possible to only generate one color's legal moves?
Yes and no.
In many board positions it is possible, but you will need to check a number of additional moves to verify if a King move is legal. You could essentially treat each square that the king ...
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5
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What free programs do exist to comment chess games? For Windows, Linux, and Mac
Check Lucas Chess and Creatica.
Both are free and run locally on your machine.
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1
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Book recommendation for chess engine building
Chess Programming Wiki (CPW) is a fantastic online resource and has a recommended reading list. It will give you more breadth of information than any book, at the risk of not laying things out in a ...
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2
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Is there a list of approximate ELO ratings for each Stockfish level?
There was some discussion on improving Stockfish levels to play more humanlike https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/3635
dav1312 provides this ELO rating list, but it's not listed ...
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2
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Accepted
How are nodes per second in engines controlled?
According to the readme.
-n <nodes per second> default: 0 (no limit)
Limits the speed to weaken the engine and to use less resources: The
speed of the ...
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7
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Accepted
Why do I get two different ratings for same position (López Opening: Morphy Defense, Caro Variatio) on chess.com?
This is very likely due to a different engine search depth.
The same effect occurs on lichess, when you request an engine analysis after the game directly vs. when you copy it into a lichess study ...
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0
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How does centipawn scoring work?/Why is a higher (positive) score horrible while a lower score is better?
I can go deeper on this part:
I wonder why a score of +4.82 is a blunder while a score of +0.62 is "decent"
As others have mentioned, CP scores being positive or negative reflect the ...
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0
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Are there chess programs that have a notion of a chaotic or volatile position?
Many engines (those with handcrafted eval at least) do this actually, but it might not be what you're looking for. The way they do it is via contempt, which uses the amount of material on the board ...
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4
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Are there chess programs that have a notion of a chaotic or volatile position?
I call this complicated position something that is difficult for humans to analyze. But we have to classify it because one position can be complicated to a weaker player but not for a stronger player.
...
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6
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How does centipawn scoring work?/Why is a higher (positive) score horrible while a lower score is better?
Basic Interpretation:
As mentioned in this answer, the evaluation +0.5 (+50 centipawns) means a half-pawn advantage for White while a –2 evaluation (-200 centipawns) implies a 2 pawn advantage for ...
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6
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How does centipawn scoring work?/Why is a higher (positive) score horrible while a lower score is better?
The score is from white's perspective. So 4.82 is much better for white than 0.62. Also notice that on the next move, white does not play Qa4, and loses the advantage, and the score becomes negative ...
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1
vote
Accepted
Border pieces in Magic Bitboards
The method of magic bitboards basically applies a hash function to the important occupancy, or in other words, all the pieces that could potentially block the currently moving piece.
For example, let'...
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