3 ms·
Stockfish doesn’t have an opening book. Chess engines are good enough now where they play sound openings without any need for direct human input.
by stouset 9y ago
Stockfish doesn’t have an opening book. Chess engines are good enough now where they play sound openings without any need for direct human input.
- thomasahle 9y agoIt plays alright without a book, but far from its best. Deepmind say they chose StockFish 8 because it was the TCEC Champion. In the TCEC all engines are given an opening book + endgame tables. Further, since everybody gives chess engines these tools, engine writers usually don't optimize these aspects very much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship
- stouset 9y agoStockfish specifically dropped support for opening books since at least 2014, possibly earlier. The code base literally does not have the capability to use one any more. Regardless, in every game that I saw, Stockfish played perfectly sound openings that nobody would criticize it for. Tablebases are a different story, but in every one of the games they released, where Stockfish lost, it was far behind by its own estimation well before tablebases would have had meaningful utility. Neither opening books nor tablebases would have helped because Stockfish was handily losing the middlegames, not openings nor endgames.