YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Stockfish 19

34 points atiedebee 2 days ago 7 comments

piker 30 minutes ago | parent

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

tumdum_ 26 minutes ago | parent

I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...

mattr03 24 minutes ago | parent

yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have

gwd 20 minutes ago | parent

My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.

Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.

I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.

The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.

haunter 19 minutes ago | parent

The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays.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