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Stockfish 19

stockfishchess.org

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Re: Stockfish 19

#61

Post by not-so-darkstar »

fileeditview wrote: post #41
tweakimp wrote: post #13

Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.

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 optimi…

To me, the most interesting part is the architecture of the engine. How you encode a position or a move, how you design the move generator, etc.

Something as simple as encoding the 64-square board in a 64-bit number leads to a rabbit hole that can last years.

After that point, the "AI" part is already solved and you just need to implement it (alpha-beta + all the heuristics).

Most of the recent chess engines simply implement a neural network (by copying Stockfish) and suddenly are at 3000 elo with no effort! Such a waste.

Re: Stockfish 19

#62

Post by toasty228 »

k2xl wrote: post #52
jan_m_savage wrote: post #42

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

(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…

> For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose.

That's valid for pretty much every kids sports/games though

Re: Stockfish 19

#63

Post by olooney »

jan_m_savage wrote: post #42

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

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...

Re: Stockfish 19

#64

Post by Waterluvian »

nevi-me wrote: post #18

To show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)

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

Re: Stockfish 19

#65

Post by ajkjk »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #54

This may be a dumb question, but how do these engines get better when they're already amazing? Is it simply that they look further down the tree of possibilities?

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.

Re: Stockfish 19

#66

Post by lxgr »

RivieraKid wrote: post #59

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position. Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw. I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.

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.

Re: Stockfish 19

#67

Post by VPenkov »

RivieraKid wrote: post #59

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position. Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw. I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.

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.

Re: Stockfish 19

#68

Post by tvelichkov »

jan_m_savage wrote: post #42

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

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.

Re: Stockfish 19

#69

Post by xdavidliu »

k2xl wrote: post #52
jan_m_savage wrote: post #42

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

(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…

i used to play poker casually, and the part that I found most interesting and most useful was not the reading other peoples' body language / tells or the probability calculations, but rather the practicing of regulating my own emotions

Re: Stockfish 19

#70

Post by zkmon »

Game engines, AI, robots and machines in general are establising a "goal horizon" for humans. This is unnecessary and counter productive way of using tools. Tools are supposed to work for us, not set goals or direction for us.
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