Modern chess engines take a lot of effort to hide this problem. For example, an engine might know from a table that it can win a king+rook vs king+pawn endgame,

Modern chess engines take a lot of effort to hide this problem. For example, an engine might know from a table that it can win a king+rook vs king+pawn endgame, and then throws away its second rook to reach such a position. Humans using the engine don't like this however, and so the authors build in heuristics to make it play more "humanly". Things like using scores for positions, rather than "chance of winning" is also largely for the sake of the users.