alt Hacker NewsYes but most of it is NNUE, a custom neural network trained on mountains of data to copy modern Stockfish.
So a computer from back then _can_ run at Elo +3k, but the programmers at the time wouldn't have been able to implement it even if you went back with a time machine and the blueprint for the technique. They wouldn't have the teacher model to distill from.
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Stash has never adopted NNUE and breaks 3k with ease
It's also great reference engine with all of the pinned tags of its evolution.
https://github.com/mhouppin/stash-bot
https://chessprogramming.org/Automated_Tuning has excellent history. Still substantial compute on tuning, but viable.
NNUE was added to Stockfish in 2020. Although this was a big improvement, it was already extremely strong before that. With plain hold hand-coded logic as a board evaluation function.
You could have used one or more Deep Blue computers as the teacher model, or just a cluster of regular PCs doing very deep searches.
Doesn't the author address this point? They speculate that it could be attained through self play back then using a ton of 1996 compute and time, but it's theoretically possible.
“In principle, I could have used the same engine itself as the teacher, but just to save on wall clock time I used Stockfish. This reduced the wall-clock time from ~4000 1996-core-years (something entirely doable in 1996---but sadly not something I can do with my single lonely desktop) to just a few days on a modern desktop running a modern engine.”
I see no reason to doubt the author here.