Indeed, even in "classical chess engines" like Stockfish which previously required handcrafted heuristics at leaf nodes, in recent years the NNUE [1] [2] has gr

Indeed, even in "classical chess engines" like Stockfish which previously required handcrafted heuristics at leaf nodes, in recent years the NNUE [1] [2] has greatly outperformed it. Note that this is a completely different approach from the one that AlphaZero takes, and modern Stockfish is significantly stronger than AlphaZero. [1] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2020/introducing-nnue-evaluation/ https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2020/introducing-nnue-evalua... [2] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Stockfish_NNUE https://www.chessprogramming.org/Stockfish_NNUE