Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stockfish 19

stockfishchess.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 165 posts

Re: Stockfish 19

#81

Post by strenholme »

Interesting bug or regression.

Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice:

https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move

FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25

Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] It shows that White is 3.53 pawns ahead—i.e. White is clearly winning.

Run the above position in Stockfish 19, however, and Stockfish 19 at depth 25 says that, while White is ahead, it’s only a 1.2 pawn edge—Black supposedly still has good drawing chances.

At a depth of 35 ply, Stockfish 19 sees that it’s a clear White victory (6.79 pawns ahead), but it takes far deeper search for Stockfish 19 to see the win compared to Stockfish 18.

[1] To run the position, I type the following commands:

  position fen b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25
  d
  go depth 25
I also see the issue on Lichess’s GUI by going to this URL:

https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48

Re: Stockfish 19

#82

Post by matsemann »

segmondy wrote: post #72
thomasmg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does it matter if you can see which moves are best if you can't understand it?

You just try it yourself and go down the different lines. "Okay, Stockfish suggests this, but I wanted to do that, let's try my idea, oh, I didn't think of that response to my move". Etc., play along some lines, think about them. Sometimes it's obvious, other times it just sets up something far in the future you must be a grandmaster to see the subtlety of.

Re: Stockfish 19

#84

Post by jokethrowaway »

dogman1050 wrote: post #51
thomasmg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't beat the famous 1k JavaScript version either. I was better when I was younger. https://nanochess.org/archive/toledo_javascript_chess_3.html

this feels around 1000 elo

crazy to see 110mb.com links in 2026 (on the github repo project), it's been a while

Re: Stockfish 19

#85

Post by kuboble »

strenholme wrote: post #81

Interesting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice: https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25 Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] I…

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.

Re: Stockfish 19

#86

Post by matsemann »

dainank wrote: post #75
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.

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…

I've never studied any openings and still have loads of fun with chess. I think you have to be IM level or something to not immediately go out theory.

It can be a bit fun, sometime, to play someone that has studied an opening at my level, but since they aren't that deep into it, they only know the moves for some variations. So me, not knowing the opening, do something from the left-field, and they don't really know how to punish it anyway. Remember one time someone got a bit grumpy, heh.

Re: Stockfish 19

#87

Post by bee_rider »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27
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 :)

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).

This seems like an interesting alternative line of research. Design the a chess engine where the goal is to beat the best human in the minimum number of turns, while still offering ~no chance of human victory.

Re: Stockfish 19

#88

Post by tsoj »

kuboble wrote: post #85
strenholme wrote: post #81

Interesting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice: https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25 Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] I…

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…

Usability for human analysis will likely be more successful going a similar direction Maia is going with the lc0 like net trained to make human moves. SF is inherently so far removed from the human approach to chess (relatively speaking), that it would likely require a lot more work than just tuning it to work well on some positions.

Re: Stockfish 19

#89

Post by Aachen »

Isofarro wrote: post #77
gwd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; It still exists, but it's private / internal, and sometimes used for a few different things. It was used by Kramnik to test the hypothesis whether no-castling chess was viable (basically chess, but disallowing castling). That was a year after DeepMind published the match they ran of AlphaZero versus Stockfish. It was still in use last year, I…

> It was used by Kramnik to test the hypothesis whether no-castling chess was viable (basically chess, but disallowing castling).

Viable in what way? That it's advantageous to never castle if an engine learns to play with that directive? Or that it still makes for a fun game with that new rule?

Re: Stockfish 19

#90

Post by kuboble »

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.

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/

Post reply on HN