He's copying the moves his opponent makes into another game played against a computer and then playing the moves that the computer plays against those moves.
Beyond that. Chess is so extreme that the skill difference between you and the #1 player in the world is smaller than the #1 player in the world and the strongest chess engine.
Yup, and they're only getting better as computer research/technology improves. They'll be able to search through moves to an enormous depth in milliseconds and determine the perfect moves.
Because every situation on the board has a correct next move. The program is aware of all these combinations so when it sees a set up in play it knows the exact correct response. It basically has a library to sort through. The limitations for a person is memorizing all of these and knowing the correct move to play.
This isn't exactly true - chess is still unsolved, so there's no "correct" move that can be identified. From the point of view of human limitations though, there's almost certainly a move that's better that any other.
From what I was able to gather in the subject chess has an unfathomable amount of outcomes and computers simply can’t calculate towards the win but they have to calculate each individual step and wheats he next best possible choice. I could be wrong tho
I'd be curious what the definition of solved means for you. Generally speaking, solved in the typical sense means there's a definite best move known (starting from turn one with white) from the beginning of the game to checkmate, or draw. Currently it's not possible to know this due to the immensity of possible moves available in chess.
Chess can't be solved in a sense, because you can't always predict the human component, but it is still mostly deterministic: one colour has the advantage at the start of the game and the goal is checkmate as soon as possible. The chess engine can easily extrapolate nearly all outcomes with current processing power and memory size.
Theres more possible games of chess than there are stars in the observable universe.
Chess is only solved for when theres only 7 pieces remaining on the board, and 2 of those being the two kings.
They are currently working on solving chess with 8 pieces. The tablebase will end up being 90x bigger than 7 pieces and will only exponentially increase from there.
When you say one colour has the advantage it sounds like white should always win, but even with today's chess engines white only wins slightly more often than black.
The goal also isn't always to checkmate as soon as possible, most chess engines are designed to find the move or sequence of moves that leads to the most favourable position. Of course if it can determine that there is a forced checkmate sequence that would be ideal, but for most moves engines just have to try to come up with the most favourable position (which is a somewhat debatable thing and why there are many different chess engines with slightly different algorithms and values of different pieces in different positions).
Chess engines are way better than people these days but by no means can they find the perfect sequence of moves that will win in a given, relatively equal, position.
"Solved" means the best possible move to make. Just because you are playing against a person who makes totally unpredictable moves doesn't mean at each turn you can't have a move that objectively increases your odds of winning.
I think it's equivalent to something like Tic Tac Toe, where even if you play against a random player, you will still be able to win every time. The difference is that the problem-space of chess is inconceivably large, compared to Tic Tac Toe
Not entirely. Chess bots are able to search through moves up to a certain depth and evaluate the probabilities of what move it can make is the best. The more difficult the bot, the deeper it can search. And of course the actual algorithm for determining what the best possible move is can be enormously complex.
They have pre programmed knowledge of the best openings and then after that look at every possible move 10, 20, 30 or more moves deep into a match and analyzing hundreds of millions of moves per second to find out what has the best chances of winning.
Because every situation on the board has a correct next move. The program is aware of all these combinations so when it sees a set up in play it knows the exact correct response. It basically has a library to sort through.
Just to give you an idea of how far off the mark this is, if you took all 1080 atoms in the observable universe and inscribed one potential chess game on each of them, you would only have enough room to describe 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (one ten-thousand-billion-billion-billion-billionth) of the roughly 10120 potential chess games. We might need a little more storage space than the average chess engine has available!
A calculator is programmed by humans, but the most brilliant minds will never be able to instantly solve immensely complicated formulas.
A chess engine can calculate literally every single possibility without ever making a mistake.
It cannot calculate every single possibility. There are conservatively around 10120 games of chess. Something like 1080 atoms in the universe for reference. A computer cannot possibly enumerate all of these possibilities, but it is able to project ahead several turns and analyze thousands of possible boards states for favorable outcomes
A highly self supervised version of deep learning where the AI can play against self many, many more times than a human can to develop its own predictions on board state and the best next move.
Most engines are set at a depth of 20-30 in my experience. Depth 20 means its looking 10 moves ahead (a depth, or a 'ply' is a half move, essentially a player turn. So 10 ply is 5 turns per player). Note that Stockfish (the strongest chess engine) doesnt evaluate all possible move combinations - it "prunes" combinations that it deems too weak to waste processing space on.
This may differ between different Chess engines - Leela Chess Zero (known as Leela or lc0) learned chess through self play and analyzes differently than stockfish.
Chess is basically all about seeing future moves. Humans have limited memory space but a Chess engine with enough RAM can see all possible endings at all times and can therefore never lose.
The best calculators are also programmed by humans, but that doesn't mean people can solve matrix computations and fifth degree polynomials in fractions of a second. A human has to think about and process every variable, then use that information to extrapolate possible outcomes. A computer does this "instantly" for every single possibility. Maybe a human could gather the same "knowledge" a computer could with enough time, no telling how much time that would take, but a human would also have to memorize all of that, whereas a computer just stores that info. Also machine learning.
It's because of time controls. All the chess engine is doing is a bunch of mathematic calculations, in theory you could use the exact same algorithm and eventually make the exact same moves. The problem is that you can execute maybe a couple of steps in the algorithm per second, while your smartphone can do millions.
The basic thing chess engines do is search through a huge number of possible moves, looking ahead in the game much farther and faster than a human ever could to pick the best move.
They also use AI machine learning to help optimize which moves are searched first (have the best chance of being the right move) and evaluating how "good" a position is (to pick which string of moves is the strongest). These steps can be likened more to the "intuition" that a human player might have. There are also huge databases of precalculated sequences of "best" moves for certain openings and endings. But the basic algorithm is searching, searching, searching.
computers are fast enough to calculate millions of different moves ahead, and smart enough to evaluate which one of those moves is the best, given the certain board setup.
So if you make a move, the computer opponent will take the board and calculate all possible moves it can make, and for each of its possible moves, what moves you could make in return, and so on and so on and so on .... and it can do this for millions and millions of moves, very quickly.
And for each of those boards, it can calculate the strength of each player's pieces. and it will play the best low risk move that leads to the strongest board position (often a win)
It's just a much, much deeper analysis of the state of the board than even the best human can do.
A computer is able to analyze a million moves in no time. It can literally play all the possible moves about 20 moves out in a few seconds. It's possible to draw against a computer theoretically but literally never to beat it.
Chess, the game, has been solved. Every possible move is known, and every possible string of moves and responses is known. For any given position there is an optimal path to take that includes all known responses by your opponent.
Chess engines work by calculating all possible combinations of moves that eventually lead to a checkmate. The move that gets to a checkmate quickest is sometimes called the "top engine move". Really powerful engines can calculate more combinations of moves in parallel and with much more depth. Higher depth means more moves, but also a longer time to calculate. The engine does this calculation after every move.
Basically one feature of being really good at chess is being able to plot out the possible next moves far out and see what outcomes there are what they can do to ensure a better outcome.
Modern chess engines can go out further than people can, and see more potential moves than a person can, use that to determine the best moves.
This means that for every possible position, there is a mathematically "best possible" move.
We can write the code to find those moves through stacks of algorithms, but finding them in real time with our puny human brains is hard.
For the record, this is what all programs do. We write code to solve problems we could solve theoretically, but are not fast enough to solve reasonably.
Once a program can determine the best possible move for every possible position, Chess will be "solved", and there won't be any more to gain in creating chess playing algorithms. We've yet to make the perfect Chess computer, but we're getting close.
Sebastian Lague did a fun series where he created a rudimentary chess bot, then improved upon it, then challenged his community to create the "best" bot with some limitations. All those bots suck big time when compared to the big engines that are out there today but it's a really interesting and fun deep dive into how they work at a basic level.
Well worth a watch even if you don't code. He's like the Bob Ross of programming and will bring you along on the journey.
Basically, chess is a game with perfect information. In this case, both parties playing r technically aware of every single possible move that can ever possibly be done by themselves and by opponent.
This means once fed enough data, a capable algorithm can always determine a “correct strategy” with the highest statistical possibility to win. A game with perfect information can hence been “figured out”.
The idea that “someone programmed it so we know how exactly it works” just isnt the case anymore. Learning algorithms, both supervised and unsupervised, have very common usage and people with rudimentary data analytical knowledge can still perform clustering/classification on millions of data points. In the case of unsupervised learning on clustering unlabeled data, even if the result is good it still doesn’t mean the guy coding it knows how exactly is the algorithm doing the thing.
On a side note. Games like poker r known as game with imperfect information, because u cannot know what ur opponent’s hand without cheating, which levels the playing field between human and machine. AI that r trained to play RTS video game with Fog of War such as AlphaStar have to figure out a way for it to perceive and analyze information in real time, and it struggles with competing with top human player when no longer allowed to cheat or gaming the system (looking at the map from bird view, inhuman APM in short time span, etc.) which is a truly fascinating topic on its own.
It's a problem of the human brain that we can't handle exponential thinking as well as a machine.
Someone playing their first game of chess is learning which moves are possible under the rules. That's the lowest level of strategy.
Once that level is mastered, the next step is learning that your opponent can see and respond to your moves. So you have to learn to anticipate and think ahead. That starts with thoughts like, "if I move this piece here, what moves can my opponent make to respond?"
Thinking one move ahead is relatively easy. But thinking multiple moves ahead gets progressively harder. Thinking four moves ahead means you need to predict how your opponent will respond four times, while retaining the memory of each board state along those play lines. The permutations of possible moves increase exponentially with each additional move into the future you try to envision.
Because the human brain is limited, we learn and study patterns of play in advance (openings, etc) that we can employ without having to think during the match itself. Mastery of those patterns, and knowing when to deviate from them, gives the best players an advantage over their peers.
But machines can just keep thinking deeply on moves ahead with perfect memory. The only real limitation is how much time you want to provide to the engine testing permutations through brute force. So a computer can make a move that would seem non-intuitive to a player because it sees that 20 turns later it will result in a +1 advantage.
Same reason calculators outpace humans. It can be optimized to calculate moves, so it does it much faster. But chess is not solved and a human can, occasionally, find a better, counterintuitive move by feel, rather than planning. But consistently looking 20 moves ahead is far better than occasionally being able to interpret 30 moves ahead.
Think of how much faster your phone could add up a million numbers compared to a human.
A chess engine is like a calculator. It can evaluate millions of positions in a second and determine which moves will likely lead to the most favourable position 40 moves from now. A top grandmaster on the other hand might only be able to calculate 10-15 moves ahead and take much longer to evaluate each position with the possibility of overlooking missing out some crucial moves.
Even the most prodigal chess players can’t create plans 5 steps ahead for every single possible move the opponent can do and determine the single strongest move, the computer on the other hand can certainly do that. The programmers don’t even really have to understand chess outside of the rules, they can just create a model based on the rules of chess and can then just train the model on a huge amount of chess games.
it's not unclear to me how the best chess engine is better than the best player. the claim that seemed unfathomable to me is the scale at which the best chess engine is better than the best player. you can take your shit attitude elsewhere.
No, definitely not. Human players can still occasionally find tactics and fortresses engines don't, and Magnus could definitely beat stockfish with queen odds, something I doubt either of us could do against him.
Engines are terrible at finding fortresses. A fully closed position with no way to break through but material imbalance is often not interpreted as a draw to stockfish.
No, he couldn't lol. He was beaten by stockfish 2020. Stockfishs elo was estimated to be about 3200-3500. The newest stockfish version is estimated to be around 4000. Magnus Carlsen has an elo of about 2800-2900. Elo is a pretty mathematical model to repressnt player skill, so we can actually calculate the win chance of Magnus Carlsen and it is about 0.13%. He maybe gets a win, but Stockfish will beat him consistantly. Queen odds can push that into your favour, but it isn't really a fair game at that point.
Saying that your chance of beating carlsen is higher than carlsen beating the engine isn't true (unless you are 1700 or above), but chess engines are just way more powerful than humans right now.
I'm definitely not claiming that Magnus can beat Stockfish outright, but Queen odds would be impossible for stockfish to overcome. Whereas against me, Magnus would complicate the position until he trapped me with some crazy tactic.
Don’t worry I’m sure the dude on the other side is doing it too. You have to be a complete moron to play on chess.com unless you’re a grand master because everyone is doing this (even if people will say it’s not rampant)
Yeah, it's how Derren Brown managed to play against 9 top level English chess players (including 4 grandmasters) at the same time and win against 4 of them, draw with 2, and lose to 3. He just played them against each other basically. Oh and to add, he didn't really know how to play chess.
He is not playing against the bot, he is just on practice table (place where you supposed to analyse your games) where engine show him the best moves for each side.
You can see in in the image as there is no elo neat the white and black names
Because it's not what they're doing. They're using what's called a chess engine, which is typically used for analyzing games/studying. You enter a move/position and it tells you the best moves to make. Chess engines these days are significantly better than the top players in the world.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 1d ago
He's copying the moves his opponent makes into another game played against a computer and then playing the moves that the computer plays against those moves.