Interesting bug or regression.

Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice:

https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move

FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25

Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] It shows that White is 3.53 pawns ahead—i.e. White is clearly winning.

Run the above position in Stockfish 19, however, and Stockfish 19 at depth 25 says that, while White is ahead, it’s only a 1.2 pawn edge—Black supposedly still has good drawing chances.

At a depth of 35 ply, Stockfish 19 sees that it’s a clear White victory (6.79 pawns ahead), but it takes far deeper search for Stockfish 19 to see the win compared to Stockfish 18.

[1] To run the position, I type the following commands:

  position fen b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25
  d
  go depth 25

I also see the issue on Lichess’s GUI by going to this URL:

https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48

To show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life.

I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays. Anyways some of the best options are not even mentioned like

Nocheto https://nocheto.sallyx.org/ (this my favorite)

ChessMD https://chessmd.org/

PyChess https://pychess.github.io/about/

Would be nice if they included a few "notable" games in the release notes.

Presumably it's easy to highlight ones from benchmarks where the evaluation of Stockfish 19 is most significantly different from version 18?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position.

Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.

I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.

For when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.

Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.

Nice.

I wish these engines could explain why it is recommending certain move, or certain sequence of moves, using natural language - it would be very useful for learning.

For those curious to see actual games played by top-level engines, the most famous French chess-commentator has a youtube plalist where he and french GM Matthieu Cornette analyzes some of these games.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiZ56cRXeIu3-zr-S7_XND3M3...

GM Mathieu Cornette is an excellent chess analyist, might not be the best at banalazing, but he does find some amazing computer games. Engine games are often boring, so it's nice that they pick the good ones.

Game engines, AI, robots and machines in general are establising a "goal horizon" for humans. This is unnecessary and counter productive way of using tools. Tools are supposed to work for us, not set goals or direction for us.

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

People perhaps won't remember the long history of computer chess at least how it played out in the 90s

There was a succession of interesting engines (I think The King used to win a number of computer tournaments, this is the one Chessmaster used, that wonderful audio-visual program, like Encarta but chess related) and then the big three of Fritz (match against Kramnik), Junior (match against Kasparov) and Shredder. And also HIARCS and later, Rybka (and Crafty, as well, touted as the open source chess engine)

Stockfish has been top dog (fish?) for a while now but there was a notable exception when AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) beat it, but these days of course Stockfish is far and away the best engine (I guess. I don't know how far behind Leela is)

And, yes, human vs computer chess has stopped being interesting for a while. There were some centaur chess (human and computer; humans using computers to analyze) competitions in the 2000s and some interesting things but nowadays of course your phone can handedly beat Magnus Carlsen and others without problems, reliably

This may be a dumb question, but how do these engines get better when they're already amazing? Is it simply that they look further down the tree of possibilities?

But does it use AI?

This is good also https://chessdox.com