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ArcHoundyesterday at 9:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

It's not that easy. Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least).

Even if you don't blunder anything, you'll still find yourself in a worse position without any clue as of what went wrong and why.

Whereas when playing humans, they can usually explain their approach and when they noticed errors in your play.


Replies

debatem1yesterday at 10:10 PM

I mean, I'm not a great player but I've learned a lot from working through games with stockfish using a git repo and a small script that lets me rewind to different moves and try different approaches. It may not explain its moves but if you're thinking through what's happened you can usually debug your game anyway.

Quekid5yesterday at 9:22 PM

> Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least).

It's the same for Magnus Carlsen. Even with Queen odds, Stockfish is literally unbeatable for the best players in the world. It's just too strong at evaluating all kinds of random tangent moves (and ensuing positional advantage) which no human player can possibly pay attention due to the time required.

Stockfish vs any human is like Carlsen vs other players by about 3-5 orders of magnitude[0]. It's that stark.

[0] A wild pun appears.

EDIT: To avoid having to respond to each responder, fair comments about Queen odds. Maybe I was thinking Rook odds? Also, I kinda lumped Stockfish in with all the other engines, but I realize there are other engines with different properties ofc.

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