16 ms·
Stockfish 14
- cmeacham98 5y ago> Stockfish has thus gained about 80 Elo per year. Pointless but fun question: how does this compare to human players?
- andrewchambers 5y agoHumans can gain hundreds or thousands of points per year at the start, but then tend to plateau afaik, it's actually easy to check this out on peoples public lichess accounts. Here is the world champion: https://lichess.org/@/DrNykterstein https://lichess.org/@/DrNykterstein If you browse some other people, especially young and new players you can see the improvement over time.
- warent 5y agoNitpick, certainly not thousands. When you're first starting out even if your elo is like 400, you'll be lucky to break 1000 after a year unless you study very diligently. The gap from 1000-2000 then takes multiple years (probably like 4-5 of diligent study) Climbing chess elo is very hard and slow!
- anikan_vader 5y agoI think reaching 1400 elo after a year of decent study after learning the rules is not too unreasonable. To reach 1400 in a year you would need to be either talented or hard-working. Climbing the elo ladder does get much harder though, as you mentioned. To reach 2000 in two years you would need to be both hard-working and talented. To reach 2850 in a lifetime you have to be hard-working, talented, and a particular Norwegian GM.
- dangero 5y agoIn which format? I highly doubt that someone could do that in bullet unless they played full time. Bullet players are already on average a higher percentile of chess players so the elo is skewed
- anikan_vader 5y agoIt's generally thought that beginners improve most quickly by playing slower chess (e.g. 15+10 or even 30+20). If you're a 1000 and you only play bullet, you may end up cementing some of your bad habits. Whereas with slower time controls, one has time to calculate some deeper lines and really try to understand the position. And if one spends a year getting to 1400 in rapid, one will find that one's gains from slower time controls will quickly bare fruit in the lower time controls (once you learn time management). Generally speaking, players playing bullet are more interested in having fun and less interested in gaining elo (which of course is totally fine).
- saiojd 5y agoAs with all things, it depends on how intense you are. I've seen a guy go from 900 to 2k in 6 months, but he played over 1k hours during that time (yeah). It really depends on how much you are willing to play! Edit: Just to be clear, I'm talking about online rating
- yewenjie 5y agoI don't know about Elo but I reached 2100 from 900 Glick2 (the rating system Lichess uses) on Rapid in little over a year.
- andrewchambers 5y agoI started from beginner to about 1800 on lichess in about a year of casual play and watching some grandmasters on youtube. I am 30 years old, i think younger kids can do better and we know many prodigies do. I guess this is different to official rankings and/or elo though, so that was my mistake.
- zucker42 5y agoTop players plateau in strength because human memory and processing power is limited, so they are limited in how much additional knowledge can improve their actual playing strength. For Stockfish, OTOH, algorithmic improvements (especially NNs) have steadily increased its strength.
- cellis 5y agoTranslation: Alpha Zero, we're ready for a rematch!
- ivalm 5y agoAlph zero/mu at similar computation resources was weaker for a while iirc.
- joshuamorton 5y agoRight, my recollection is that stockfish + nnue has been stronger than leela since stockfish 13, and leela is stronger than A0.
- cellis 5y agoIsn't the difference though, that Leela is a pure RL implementation whereas NNUE/SF still uses some tablebase stuff?
- TchoBeer 5y agoNo, NNUE doesn't necessarily need tablebases and Leela uses tablebases too. The difference is that their network architecture are different and their search algos are different.
- ivalm 5y agoLeela uses mcts, sf does not. SF also trains on human positions, while I think Leela is self play only.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoSF14's net was actually trained on lc0 data. Human data is way too weak for SF to learn from.
- kohlerm 5y ago
- ivalm 5y agoThat’s amazing. NNUE has been a boon for stockfish as it enabled it to find complicated ideas even on low depths, which are often more interesting than simple tactical perfection. Really excited to see stockfish 14.
- kzrdude 5y agoWhat's the qualitative difference? Must be more interesting than a few elo points..
- ivalm 5y agoSo stockfish has long been superhuman strength, but there are kind of two separate reasons for it 1. Tactics - in middle game there are a lot of possible variations and humans are bad at looking at all the possibilities so they blunder some tactic (eg some move order combination of under 10 moves that leads to a mating attack or significant material advantage). This alone is close to enough to be superhuman. 2. Long term advantage building — a move order that has no clear tactical advantage but puts the player into a better position many moves into the future. This is something that old fashion chess engines used to need very high depth but with nnue stockfish started selecting these kind of move orders even at low depths. Variations of type 2 are more interesting to people because this is something we can try to learn from and infer general rules (eg instigating with flank pawns without immediate conversion of the attack became more common after alphazero used this in many games to get long term advantage). At the same time most people analyze their games in browser running on their laptop/mobile device (since most games happen on chess.com or lichess.org) so really they only get low depth stockfish variations. Without strong ability in (2) it can be hard to interpret SF generated variations since it is still superhuman (eg it will beat a human from a given position) but it sometimes makes moves that are probably suboptimal (because there are no immediate tactics available). But you can’t really tell if a variation is because sf doesn’t know what to do or because there is some hidden tactic/etc. The normal “solution” is if you suspect the position is pivotal to just calculate to very high depth. But that takes time and not something an average player will do.
- jeffbee 5y agoI see that, like ed(1), stockfish is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. $ ./stockfish_14_x64_bmi2 Stockfish 14 by the Stockfish developers (see AUTHORS file) help Unknown command: help ? Unknown command: ? eat flaming death Unknown command: eat flaming death
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI suppose you can interact with stockfish by hand, but it is designed to plug into a chess board app like xboard or others: https://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/ https://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/
- jeffbee 5y agoThanks :-] I was trying to figure out why stockfish debian package suggests xboard, but they don't work together. It is because stockfish suggests xboard and polyglot, but polyglot is required to use stockfish with xboard.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 5y agoChess engines' stdio is for IPC with graphical front-ends, not interactive REPL use. Stockfish isn't really packaged as a standalone software program. Here's an immediately usable browser version (supports WebAssembly with SIMD instructions): https://lichess.org/analysis https://lichess.org/analysis If you want to experiment with ./stockfish anyway, the protocol documentation is here: https://www.shredderchess.com/chess-features/uci-universal-chess-interface.html https://www.shredderchess.com/chess-features/uci-universal-c... edit: also someone mirrored it here (in a more convenient format) https://gist.github.com/DOBRO/2592c6dad754ba67e6dcaec8c90165bf https://gist.github.com/DOBRO/2592c6dad754ba67e6dcaec8c90165...
- agalunar 5y agoStockfish also has a few non-standard commands, e.g. `eval`, which shows the NNUE derived piece values (among other things), which is pretty cool: $ ./stockfish position startpos eval
- jaimex2 5y agoRematch Alpha Zero. Have power consumption restraints. Go!
- TwoBit 5y agoDid Alpha Zero play games against Stockfish on regular PC hardware or big specialized hardware.
- fcurts 5y agoIt was running on specialized hardware in the cloud. But Stockfish and Lc0 have long since surpassed Alpha Zero.
- wkavey 5y agoI think this is a good idea, but in no way should it be the only restrained game. Others could be time restraints (total time per game and/or total time per move), depth restraints (if they both work off of BFS/similar), and probably many other restraints that those more familiar with the engines can come up with. Definitely throw in a no casteiing game as well.
- aidenn0 5y agoMost chess games are already time constrained (though a ref can call it if someone in a non-winning position is trying to run out the opponents clock) [edit] I was imperfectly remembering the rules. If it is theoretically impossible (even with blunders on the player who is out of time's part) for the player with time left to win, then it is a draw. In addition, a player with less than 2 minutes on the clock may request a draw; see Article 10.2 which includes this subsection: > a. If the arbiter agrees the opponent is making no effort to win the game by normal means, or that it is not possible to win by normal means, then he shall declare the game drawn. Otherwise he shall postpone his decision or reject the claim.
- recursive 5y agoI'm not super into chess, but I was under the impression that running out the clock was a totally legitimate tactic. I'm surprised to hear that a referee has discretion to end the game based on it.
- tus89 5y agoIs it just me or is battle-of-the-AI chess more exciting than humans?
- abnry 5y agoAt the highest level, chess becomes an endurance sport. Magnus is so great because he can squeeze water from a stone. That is definitely admirable, but somewhat deflating compared to idea of the one brilliant move or insane positional play. Give a man bionic legs and it is no longer about how fast he can run but rather what new places he can go.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- poutrathor 5y agoor... how far ? how long the batteries stay on ?
- vecter 5y agoI agree, only because the ideas and brilliance/depth that they demonstrate is so breathtaking to behold. I love the chess.com Game of the Day playlist on YouTube, which occasionally has amazing computer chess games with early sacrifices for long-term positional compensation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-vNq61KfLs&list=PL-qLOQ-OEls5EvEHSirKYqmCH_m7IAVWa&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-vNq61KfLs&list=PL-qLOQ-OEl....
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoPeople usually feel more attached to sports and other competitions if there are personalities behind the results.
- SamBam 5y agoMinor thought, but one of the things I love about high level AI chess, like Stockfish vs AlphaZero, is seeing how their ratings of positions change over the course of the game. I had realized a while ago that, as a human, the computer will give your position a score, and then you make a move, and your score can pretty much only stay the same (if you make a "perfect" move) or go down. Much of the time, it goes down. Two humans playing each other, it's just a question: who's score goes down less each time they make a move? It became a little sad. It seemed like either you can make the right move, or you make a sub-optimal move, and the winner is simply the one who makes the fewer sub-optimal moves. But when AlphaZero plays, and you watch Stockfish's score, the reason it wins is that it makes moves Stockfish thinks is poor, so it rates AlphaZero's moves poorly, and then all of a sudden it has an oh shit! moment when it realises that AlphaZero is actually ahead, and its score jumps. It's really a look inside the computer's head while it's being beaten by a better player.
- Mustangdudu69 5y agohttps://coincircle.com/l/I3VxB2MqAi https://coincircle.com/l/I3VxB2MqAi
- jeremyjh 5y agoAnd chess.com still uses version 8...
- elias94 5y agoTrue, but who uses chess.com anymore?
- dabfiend19 5y agowhat do you use?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoLichess is much better in most ways.
- mellosouls 5y agoChess.com is much better in most ways.
- gbear605 5y agoI’m not the parent commenter, but I use Lichess. It’s free, supported by donations (so their incentives align with mine more than a business’), open source (which I like ideologically), and in my opinion just has a nicer user interface.
- runarberg 5y agoI started playing chess online less then a month ago. I started with chess.com, because I knew about it beforehand for some reason. After about a week there I couldn’t take their constant nagging about getting premium account: “Get a free 7 day trail”, “Get a premium account to unlock more analysis”, “you’ve reached your maximum puzzles for the day, get a premium subscription to unlock more”, etc. I did some research (mostly on the online-go.com forums) and joined lichess.org and haven’t looked back since. Superior in every way. Perhaps I should thank chess.com for being so annoying, if it weren’t for their constant nagging I would probably have stayed on the platform and never discovered lichess.org.
- mlang23 5y agoFor those of you with a little CPU time to spare, the fishtest project should be mentioned here. Stockfish has a "CI" which self-plays all PRs before accepting them. The client is easy to install. Go get it! https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest
- maeln 5y agoYou can also run Fishnet (which use stockfish) to provide analysis for Lichess.org :) https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet
- wohfab 5y agoI am not too familiar with the pro chess world nor the AI chess world. But did anybody try yet to make the AI always try to achieve a draw?
- trianx 5y agoJust train it to make it win. Then, anytime it is a bit in front, perform suboptimal moves, until things are even (those engines typically have a score on whether they are in front or not).
- Aachen 5y agoNot sure that would work in an end game though. If you are behind and make a good move, you accidentally win. If you are technically ahead and make a bad move, you probably lose. If you can get reliably to an end game with only a king and a one or maybe two pieces left on each side, then maybe it can just be hand-scripted and bolted onto what you're proposing, but I'm not sure your proposal would consistently get it there.
- cout 5y agoDo you mean like Commander Data played Kolrami in Strategema?
- bspammer 5y agoSomewhat related, a variant of chess where the objective is to lose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess
- tetha 5y agoI think the most anticlimatic, but most effective way to make such an AI would be to run an engine like stockfish at maximum strength to turn a game into an endgame, and then use the endgame tables to convert the game to a forced draw.
- vfc1 5y agoI feel like I've been playing against it a lot in chess.com, with the tremendous amount of cheating that is going on online, every 1 out of 6 or 7 games is an engine user (I know because I report them, and they get banned). It's great to have a better engine, but I feel that would benefit the most the online chess community is not a better engine, but an open source cheat detection system, if that's even possible. I wouldn't know how to build one, but I think that is a lot more important for chess right now, still it's great to have a better engine so congratulations and thank you to the Stockfish team.
- madflame991 5y agoHow do you figure out they're using an engine? Are there obvious human moves and AI moves?
- lionkor 5y agoI guess you could compare the outputs for different engines with that of a "suspicious" player - if their moves match exactly, flag them, if it happens too many times, ban them. Something like that.
- cout 5y agoSomeone who plays a lot against a computer will often pick up the computer's style. But sometimes a computer will make odd moves no human would ever make. I've been playing against an ios stockfish app to relearn how to play, and when it gets behind it starts throwing material away to delay the inevitable; a human would more likely keep the material and hope the opponent doesn't see the path to victory. One way to detect use of an engine is to look for moves like this, though if it could be done algorithmicly then that same algorithm could be used to make the engine play more like a human.
- Gauge_Irrahphe 5y agoWhy not just pair them with an engine? If they win they are cheating.
- 5y ago
- fsiefken 5y agoWhat would be the added value of an average and aspiring chess player like me to play against Stockfish 14 instead of one of he previous versions? I feel I'll never challenge the maximum capacity of such an engine.
- fridif 5y agoProbably most of the improvements in 14 are for arriving at a more accurate answer quickly for play against other machines When you play stockfish at a human level, it is purposely choosing an answer it knows is worse ^.^
- Jarmsy 5y agoMy impression from playing against lower levels of the default stockfish on Lichess is that it's really bad at playing badly, so not much fun to play against. It seems like it plays at full power, interspersed with random bad moves.
- andrepd 5y agoAbsolutely. You might want to take a look at Maia Chess, an engine which is supposed to mimic low/mid-level human play, rather than just playing perfectly and with a 1/10 chance of a terrible move, like Stockfish at low levels does.
- phonebucket 5y ago> What would be the added value of an average and aspiring chess player like me to play against Stockfish 14 instead of one of he previous versions? I feel I'll never challenge the maximum capacity of such an engine. I do not see chess engines as good sparring partners, but rather as tools for effective chess exploration. The nice thing about these newer engines is that they are starting to be useful tools to explore more sacrificial and unbalanced positions which are really fun to get over the board against humans. Finding these ideas with the help of a computer gives a competitive edge against other humans, as well as helping discover interesting corners in this vast game.
- 5y ago