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How it is possible that a so high profile article says a so doubtful statement? "Traditional chess engines – including the world computer chess champion Stock

How it is possible that a so high profile article says a so doubtful statement? "Traditional chess engines – including the world computer chess champion Stockfish and IBM’s ground-breaking Deep Blue – rely on thousands of rules and heuristics handcrafted by strong human players that try to account for every eventuality in a game."

have_faith 8y ago
It's not that far from the truth though is it? https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/pawns.cpp https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...
nmca 8y ago
So this is... Sort of true? Alpha/Beta pruning relies on heuristics and exploits their power with search. The heuristics that make stockfish so strong are numerous, handcrafted and try to account for many notions of material. In the current computer chess championships, there are Monte Carlo engines that use the search search strategy as AlphaZero with hand crafted heuristics, and they're doing ok. But they're not as strong as AZ, which learnt, by itself, what a good chess position looks like, starting from random play
judofyr 8y ago
Looking at the recent patches[1] for Stockfish it seems like a rather true statement? Most of the patches are related to how it evaluates a position; not how it prunes/searches the tree of possible moves. Here's one random test which showed improvement: https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...51e1b4b https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...5... Bitboard b1 = double_pawn_attacks_bb<Them>(nonPawnEnemies) & b & attackedBy[Us][PAWN]; score += make_score(90, 72) * popcount(b1); And look at all of the magic numbers and logic in evaluate.cpp: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/evaluate.cpp https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/... [1]: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests
- antirez 8y ago
  Position evaluation is very unlike to the article statement, where it looks like actual game dynamics are taken into account one after the other in order to make the engine stronger. Instead still traditional engines mostly rely on brute force. So a reader not aware of those things will have a wrong picture in her/his mind.

have_faith 8y ago

It's not that far from the truth though is it? https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/pawns.cpp https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...

nmca 8y ago

So this is... Sort of true? Alpha/Beta pruning relies on heuristics and exploits their power with search. The heuristics that make stockfish so strong are numerous, handcrafted and try to account for many notions of material. In the current computer chess championships, there are Monte Carlo engines that use the search search strategy as AlphaZero with hand crafted heuristics, and they're doing ok. But they're not as strong as AZ, which learnt, by itself, what a good chess position looks like, starting from random play

judofyr 8y ago

Looking at the recent patches[1] for Stockfish it seems like a rather true statement? Most of the patches are related to how it evaluates a position; not how it prunes/searches the tree of possible moves. Here's one random test which showed improvement: https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...51e1b4b https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...5... Bitboard b1 = double_pawn_attacks_bb<Them>(nonPawnEnemies) & b & attackedBy[Us][PAWN]; score += make_score(90, 72) * popcount(b1); And look at all of the magic numbers and logic in evaluate.cpp: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/evaluate.cpp https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/... [1]: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests

antirez 8y ago
Position evaluation is very unlike to the article statement, where it looks like actual game dynamics are taken into account one after the other in order to make the engine stronger. Instead still traditional engines mostly rely on brute force. So a reader not aware of those things will have a wrong picture in her/his mind.