Stockfish 19

Evaluation doesn't matter as far as I understand. If 19 beats 18 in a match on billion playouts then it's a feature.

Any usability of stockfish evaluation for human analysis is collateral.

Unfortunately there seem to be no serious fork of stockfish that would care about usability for human analysis.

I was recently doing some larger study and I stumbled upon a bug/feature of stockfish where it accepts small number of invalid cache reads for a lot of speed.

It would result in infrequent blunders which however affected my analysis, so I removed this optimization in my fork.

However, Stockfish 19 has gotten better at understanding fortresses:

https://lichess.org/analysis/1b3r2/8/4P3/2pP2k1/3nB2p/3P3P/5... (now finds 1...Rxf2 = immediately, the evaluation is closer to 0.0)

https://lichess.org/analysis/8/kp2q3/1Np5/pPPp1b2/P2Pp1p1/4P... (finds 1.Nc8+ = quicker (let it ponder four lines), the evaluation is closer to 0.0)

https://lichess.org/analysis/rk6/1p1b4/pBp5/PPPp4/3Pp3/4Pp1p... (The evaluation is closer to 0.0, though still far away)

https://lichess.org/analysis/7k/4p3/5p2/1p1p1p2/1PpP1PpB/1pP... (Evaluation is closer to 0.0)

  position fen 1b3r2/8/4P3/2pP2k1/3nB2p/3P3P/5PP1/5KRR b - - 0 1
  d
  go depth 35

> I also see the issue on Lichess’s GUI by going to this URL:

> https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48

When I go to that link it shows Black is winning with -1.9 eval at depth 32 with SF19 1MB NNUE! It looks like it got this evaluation from the cloud database.

For me (having written my own tiny 400 line chess engine, that now I'm not able to beat - sure I'm not a good player, but still), the reason to have Stockfish is not really to play against it, and then inevitably lose, but to use it to show which moves are best. I assume that's how most (hobby and professional) chess players use Stockfish nowadays.

TIL: En Croissant https://encroissant.org/

It’s oddly fun to put maximum Stockfish in play against some horrible position and to be murdered by it.

Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).

Losing faster to Stockfish 19 it'd mean youre an insanely good player, hundreds of times better than even Magnus.

Magnus cannot even beat his phone. We're long past the point of humans being able to compete with the `fish, any version, any platform.

That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you don't need to play thousands of games to grasp those ideas.

Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy.

Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

(Disclaimer, I’m the founder of chess67.com)

There is a very tangible benefit to people playing in chess that has nothing to do with the game itself. One example is for kids - I think kids playing chess (particularly over the board) learn quite a lot from the game. For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose. In chess you lose a lot. Asymptotically vast majority of players will lose approximately 50% of their games. Learning how to lose (respectfully), learn from your mistakes, then overcome them is really great process to learn. Doing this in real life rather than over the screen is also completely different.

Combine that with the game being fun and the social aspects (meeting new people, making friends)… chess very much transfers to real life in my view

Reminds me of: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Paul Murphy.

I agree. I think in general, any game that is 'turn-based' (in this case chess), with a limited set of options, quickly boils down to pure theory and in my opinion 'dumb intelligence' of just remembering many things and patterns (the AI of now). As soon as a game is in 'real-time' with many-many options, it reaches a level of complexity where you cannot ONLY remember theory and outsmart your opponent. It is far more about applying logic on the fly with the limited time and overwhelming set of options you are supplied. This skillset applies to almost everything in life and serves me personally very well thus far in life. Yes, I understand that chess has different modes that severely limit time per turns which transform it more into the 'real-time' games and value, but it is still turn-based and still has a limited set of options when compared to true 'real-time' games.

I don't play games for them to "transfer to real life". I play games for fun. Chess can be fun, it has an interesting history and the strategy of various kinds of play open up to you as you play/learn more, it has a structured competition community so you can go places and play with other real people and win fabulous prizes (not really; even some of the best professional players also have real jobs). It's played worldwide, so no matter where you are, you can find people to play with in the real world. It's popular, so there's always someone online you can play against.

Some folks find chess fun and interesting enough to play it and study it all their lives. Other games can also be fun, though it's rare for a game to hold someone's attention throughout their whole life.

Compared to chess, Magic: The Gathering ability transfers much better to real life. MtG has:

- dealing with imperfect information

- bluffing

- thinking ahead with an enormous number of possible moves (especially when you consider deck construction)

- tracking board state

- mentally implementing "triggers"

Main thing I took away from chess when I used to play is it's just another exercise to work parts of your brain. I preferred 3+0 and 5+0 chess because of the low time commit, ease to move next, and the tradeoff between most correct move and most optimal move to cause the opponent to expand more of their time trying to figure out what you were doing.

I hit about 2k Elo on lichess playing the 3+0/5+0 and I have no regrets!

Real life is a game of risk/reward rather than a game of deep calculation. You can't "calculate" life because there are too many variables and unknowns. You have to simply pick a path and either accept the risks or mitigate them.

> play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption

To each their own.

If you like the competitive aspect of chess, you may enjoy physical sports too. I started to find video games pretty boring compared to pushing myself physically.

Zugzwang is everywhere.

Why would you play 22000 games if you didn't enjoy it? Are you saying you went through all of that because you thought it would be good for you?

I play chess and I'm basically with you

It's just a board game

I think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way:

- it teaches resiliency in bad situations.

- it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it.

The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too.

To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.

Before transferring to life, it doesn't even transfer to a game like Poker.

Shameless self promotion:

If you’re a Mac user and want something with native look and feel, there is also The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton (TestFlight beta):

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY

There are also iOS and watchOS versions, but those can’t run 3rd party engines like Stockfish.

I have tried En Croissant and its personally its a nice GUI and easy to use. It allows you to download stockfish and others right from their GUI.

I really like ChessX ( https://chessx.sourceforge.io/ ). Pychess was always unstable and slow for me.

Anyways. Now I can use an even better Stockfish to benchmark my own engine..

If you like uncomplicated GUIs: http://mayura.com/chess/

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They could but it's pretty much meaningless. You're bound to find outliers in favor of either engine, and the landscape is pretty chaotic

> AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure)

Pretty much. DeepMind never released their code or models, just the main ideas of their techniques and training.

Leela, which came out of the go-ai world, implemented the paper(s) and became the de-facto version everyone used for a while until other projects improved over it on both go (mainly katago) and chess (mainly stockfish).

Alpha Zero Chess never made their code or models public. Leela is based on the same ideas as Alpha Zero Chess, but its model and code are public and uses crowd sourcing to generate and refine the model.

Stockfish uses a combination of classic Alpha-Beta pruning along with a type of AI called NNUE to evaluate positions.

The next closest is probably Torch currently

Depending on your feelings on being spoiled on the general techniques, and an approach to implement them, Sebastian Lague made a great two-part series on building a chess engine. It's specific enough that you have an idea of the techniques involved, without dwelling enough with the details to make implementing your own futile.

https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk

Join the Stockfish discord server! There is a very active community who builds their own chess engines there.

(If you ever end up going for it, don't use AI it takes away a lot of the fun)

Wouldn't be that hard in my case

I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time.

The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.

From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)

Naive monte carlo on a phone from 10 years ago is likely enough unless you're quite good at chess

It's a fun project, start here: https://chessprogramming.org

This sounds plausible. But otherwise, there are "tournaments" like the TCEC which is for bots only and the way it works is, the bots are adjusted to play a specific opening and they're on their own after the Nth move.

Stockfish has been dominant for a long time. And a later version of Stockfish would outperform an earlier version given the same time control.

I believe this is not the case. The first reason is the optimization of the Transposition Table in stockfish. https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...

Basically this optimization means that stockfish will sometimes take a bad read from a cache (so it will take an evaluation of the position from cache which was calculated for a different position). It's fairly random when this will trigger a bad play, but if you brute force vs any deterministic setup you will find it eventually.

But even withtout it - you can just implement a kind of a brute-force heap of positions using stockfish's own eval and you can find wins from almost any position even on fairly high playout count.

I got as far as 32M from different even starting positions, but I spent compute to find as many games as possible rather than as deep as possible.

Example game: https://lichess.org/XVUjezMr#134

the collection of the games I found (vibecoded gui) https://kuboble.com/chess_ideas/

The post literally says

> against Stockfish 18, this new release brings an Elo gain of up to 44 points, and wins more than three times as many game pairs as it loses.

A faster engine is still very useful in practice, for example for position evaluations in game review.

Not that an engine evaluation will always be helpful (the line in question making a position strong or weak might be effectively unplayable/impossible to find by a human), but it’s useful for studying nevertheless.

Is doing something you love, and practicing to the point of expertise, wasting your life? Replace chess with playing an instrument, or basketball. This quote is just exclusionary.

My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.

Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.

I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.

The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.

I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...

Technically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.

On average, yes. Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like. But on a game to game basis Lc0 can still win some games, depending on the starting position. It's rare that Lc0 can win both black and white starting from the same position, tho.

There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.

yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have

AlphaZero does not exist, as far as modern computer chess is concerned

> like AlphaZero?

Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming out very slightly ahead.

That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.

It's widely believed so because Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper.

Like a red headed stepchild.

It's probably quite challenging if you want to avoid chess information to be in the training data.

But as technology progresses and becomes more advanced, it does seem to set goals in all directions in that seems inevitable if we continue to 'collaborate' with modern technology. I mean, we no longer develop tools to help us out really, if you think about it. We develop tools to get ahead of other tools, to be faster than them, to protect ourselves from still other tools.

I'd argue that as we condition ourselves into a state of constant development, we shouldn't even call these things "tools" anymore, but pieces of an organism that spurn us to upgrade and complete it at every step.

Tools working for us only applies to local, simple tools that one person or a small communiity can basically understand and make, like a hammer. That's a tool. I wouldn't call a computer a tool any more just like I wouldn't say that our brain is merely a tool. It's more: it's an extension of us and even an integral part of us that modifies our very instincts and desires itself.

Presumably a lot of it is in a better evaluation function. That is, when searching the tree, a better analysis of whether a specific position is beneficial and by how much. After all most of the tree searches do not end in checkmate, just in minute improvements which accumulate over many moves.

How do you get better when you're already amazing?

When you're amazing, you understand what you're doing and where to improve. For very complex systems, the improvements will be in confined areas (not rewriting everything but noticing a bug or reading about another project which found that some other hyperparameter works better). Or even if you have no idea, the simplest way would be making random tweaks and seeing which ones are advantageous

Yes. The ways to improve are: faster search (which lets you search more deeply) or better evaluation of a position or better heuristics.

As a joke project, it would be nice to add a LLM module that adds a commentary bullshiting an explanation of why it is destroying the human player.

yes

Is this an ad? How's this relevant, does it run the new Stockfish or a competing engine or something?