Hacker News Reader

Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

View on HN

For me (having written my own tiny 400 line chess engine, that now I'm not able to beat - sure I'm not a good player, but still), the reason to have Stockfish is not really to play against it, and then inevitably lose, but to use it to show which moves are best. I assume that's how most (hobby and professional) chess players use Stockfish nowadays.

I can't beat the famous 1k JavaScript version either. I was better when I was younger.

https://nanochess.org/archive/toledo_javascript_chess_3.html

this feels around 1000 elo

crazy to see 110mb.com links in 2026 (on the github repo project), it's been a while

Yeah, I blundered a knight and still managed to win.

What does it matter if you can see which moves are best if you can't understand it?

99.5% of the time you can understand it (percentage varies with rating).

You just try it yourself and go down the different lines. "Okay, Stockfish suggests this, but I wanted to do that, let's try my idea, oh, I didn't think of that response to my move". Etc., play along some lines, think about them. Sometimes it's obvious, other times it just sets up something far in the future you must be a grandmaster to see the subtlety of.

The Square One Chess channel on youtube turns this kind of exploration/commentary into quite digestible content, though the thumbnails are, like everything else these days, a little clickbaity.

It's been fun viewing for me and my chess-interested 9-year-old.

ChessNetwork on YouTube also does a great job with this: analysis of interesting games, using Stockfish as a tool along the way.

For some reason this question reminds me of all of the drama about Navier-Stokes from the last few days. Tangential to the ethical questions are tons of examples where in history when word gets out about a solution to a problem, not even the solution itself just rumors that there is a solution, suddenly competing solutions appear.

So maybe it matters like that? Just knowing that an oracle like stockfish is saying "this is the best move" may trigger pathways in your brain that promote understanding?

Because then you explore the line and try to learn what is so good about the move

Stockfish has created entirely new lines in chess which people incorporate into their play. For instance an early pawn push to h4 is now common among chess pros. It's value was not recognized before Stockfish.

h4 push was AlphaZero/Leela thing wasn't it?

TIL: En Croissant https://encroissant.org/

love the name :P

It’s oddly fun to put maximum Stockfish in play against some horrible position and to be murdered by it.

Feels like a variant of "really bad chess". Would make for a fun game.

Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).

also in chess a better line is not required to be shorter

This seems like an interesting alternative line of research. Design the a chess engine where the goal is to beat the best human in the minimum number of turns, while still offering ~no chance of human victory.

The Leela odds bots are working on a similar problem: beat humans starting down material. It's roughly grand master level starting down a rook, and for fast time control even starting down a queen

Unfortunately Chess (unlike Go) doesn't have a good handicap system. When playing without a piece (or two) it is not chess anymore OR it doesn't really matter.. During how many games does Queen's rook come into play during early middle game?

Go, on the other hand has a nice handicap system (which doesn't change the nature of the game too much). One can have a fighting chance against a much stronger player with enough handicap (Upto 9 stones). In Chess terms, an IM can have a _decent_ game against a GM. Probably lose. But the GM has to work for it.

the rook is fairly useless early game (which is why rook and knight odds are surprisingly close), but the queen actually does a lot in the early midgame (just mostly not by moving). The queen is usually keeping a bunch of squares indirectly defended, the trick is that the queen starts in a pretty good position and is much more mobile, so its importance doesn't come from where it is, but where it could be in 2 movies

Losing faster to Stockfish 19 it'd mean youre an insanely good player, hundreds of times better than even Magnus.

Magnus cannot even beat his phone. We're long past the point of humans being able to compete with the `fish, any version, any platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com