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Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

I am decent amateur (2300 ELO) and I crush the strongest computers in blitz (which are way stronger than the strongest humans) with bishop odds and it's not even interesting.

Either your rating is wrong, your are not actually playing the strongest computers, you're arguing from a too small sample size, or your definition of "crush" means "I win half of the games but those that I do win I do so convincingly".

4 stones is more like a pawn

This is completely and utterly wrong. The winning odds of having a 4 stone headstart are an order of magnitude higher than those of being up a pawn.

There is huge difference between a bishop and two pawns.

Yes. About 150 ELO - equivalent. More than being another pawn up.

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Do you have anything to back those claims ? I mean I am at least decently strong chess player and I played tons of games vs Houdini 3 and 4 on modern i7 quad and as you can see at least one other person did as well.

>>Yes. About 150 ELO - equivalent. More than being another pawn up.

You can't quantify it like that. Strong chess player is going to win with bishop odds vs any entity on the other side: 2500GM, elite GM or Houdini on 32 cores. It's just a win starting from certain level and "150ELO" doesn't convey it. On the other hand there are a lot of entities which would beat me (and even some stronger players) with 2 or 3 pawn odds.

It's from private research, but there seems to be some public on the same subject and my numbers (roughly) agree with it: https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Pawn+Advantage,+Win+...

ELO, Material Difference and Winning percentage are directly correlated.

You can't quantify it like that

Of course you can. A material advantage increases the average winning probability, and does so in a way that corresponds reasonably close to the ELO formulas. No more and no less.

Strong chess player is going to win with bishop odds vs any entity on the other side: 2500GM, elite GM or Houdini on 32 cores. It's just a win starting from certain level and "150ELO" doesn't convey it.

You have no argument to support this, and there's evidence to the contrary. (See the above study). "Strong chess player" is totally meaningless, ELO is a relative scale. A 2500 player loses just as hard against a 2850 one as a 1600 does to an 1950. That's the definition of ELO.

I'm sorry but you're just not going to beat Magnus Carlsen in a long match even if he gives you bishop odds. That's exactly what him being 2880 ELO means. You would beat Karpov (!) though.

gcp, I am yet another 2350 Fide player who would take Bishop odds against Magnus any day of the week despite the 500 point difference.

The main point is that Bishop odds are different from 3 pawn odds. It tilts the game too much in the favor of the odds taker taking away most of the advantages(positional considerations, openings, etc) that a 2850 player enjoys over a 2350 player.

What happens playing against a strong computer given a bishop odds, is that computer will slowly succumb to the negative eval.

Instead a better strategy for a computer would be to try something very speculative like in old Tarrasch games with odds against amateurs.

That is computer should be on the lookout for eval -20.00 with perfect play by opponent(me) but possibility of 0.00 or even +10 when I make a wrong move. That is computer would have to try hard to create high volatility situations and hope that the 2350 player would misplay them.

I suppose that Magnus would try something similar(especially given his penchant for grinding).

Where are you getting this material advantage / ELO handicap ratio?

At any rate I'm also a decent amateur (2350 ELO) and it's absolutely unsurprising that a (2200+) player easily beats very strong computers with bishop odds.

I pointed some public research putting 1 pawn = 100 ELO advantage above. I used a different technique that didn't try to search for quiet positions, but calculated the ELO value of positional and material factors directly, and included human games as well. The mathematics to do so are (appropriately enough!) in a research paper from the Crazy Stone author.

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