There is an old joke about chess – “When do we get an update?”. Well, despite the rules did not change in 1997, it was still a pivoting moment for all chess players. Gary Kasparov, a player who dominated the chess arena for about two decades, loses to a computer. As he said later on the Lex Fridman podcast: “It was physically painful to lose. It was not my first defeat against a computer, it was my first defeat, period!”. Deep Blue, a supercomputer developed by IBM, managed to outsmart the depth and creativity of humankind.
Nowadays, chess engines are nothing special. There are plenty of solid open-source solutions for all kinds of problems. You can train by playing a computer you can develop your own chess bots, and you can use free databases to monitor the recent trends in chess.
Basically, chess engines are programs that calculate the best possible move at a certain position and predict the flow of a game up to tens of moves ahead. In order to give a bit of intuition here, we can compare the Elo ratings of top chess engines with top chess players. The Elo rating is a score used to mark the player’s level. So, the Elo of the current world’s best player Magnus Carlsen is 2864. While the rating of the most powerful chess engine is estimated to be 3000. It should be mentioned, that even a difference of 50 points is significant on that level.
There are plenty of different engines that do the same job but have different features. For example, the Stockfish engine is utilized by chess.com for the analysis of your game. It gives you a list of your moves with an explanation of what could be done better and grades you play. It also gives you two important metrics – depth and precision. They are quite interconnected, and there is a positive correlation between them. Depth is the number of moves that the computer can calculate. Precision is a number that grades your overall performance. It can also show your best moves, moves that are recommended by chess books or your blunders. Komodo is another engine that is used by chess.com for bots. Whenever you play it, you play against a machine that is called Komodo.
The use of machines has dramatically changed the way we learn, teach and play chess. It is another world where the games are perfect. This is also a reason why grandmasters do not always recommend using them – we can lose the creativity that used to be a decisive factor in a chess battle.
Sources:
- https://www.chess.com/terms/chess-engine
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RVa0THWUWw&ab_channel=LexFridman
- https://stockfishchess.org/