Everything You Need to Know About Chess Engines
Humans might have created chess engines, but we can never calculate like them. Chess engines have truly turned the tables. While we have taught the first machines, now we learn chess from machines and their astonishing computational power. Chess engines are now tools we use to better our chess.
What are Chess Engines?
If you are new to chess or have just played with your friends and family, you may not know the extent to which computers have mastered the game of chess. A chess engine is a computer program that can find the best move, or moves, in any chess position. Not only that, but they can calculate well beyond the capabilities of humans.
First Machine Chess
I won’t dive into the full history of chess versus the computer, but humans have been fascinated with the idea of machines playing chess since the invention of computers, and before! Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen duped many with his invention of the Mechanical Turk in 1770, which he said was a machine that could play chess. It turned out to be a machine with a man hidden inside.
How Far We Have Come With Chess Engines?
Computers don’t need humans to hide inside of them anymore. Computers have now completely surpassed humans in chess ability. Since the 1970s, computers have been able to beat humans. By 1996 a computer engine, Deep Blue, was able to win a game against the world champion, Garry Kasparov. Then, a year later, the computer engine Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a match. Nowadays computers do not play humans in chess matches and are mostly used as analysis and learning tools. Human versus computer matches don’t happen the same way a YMCA basketball team doesn’t play against an NBA team. It’s not fun for anyone.
One Way Humans Were Better Than the Machines
Computer engines used to rely on brute force calculation. One thing that a computer can do that a human cannot do is calculate thousands of moves and positions in seconds. However, those moves are sometimes silly moves to calculate in the first place. Humans use their intuition and learned knowledge to pick for themselves many good candidate moves to calculate. So how have computers been becoming more like humans recently?
AI and Self Learning Engines for Electronic Chess
New chess engines build off of work done by AlphaZero and others, using a neural network so the engine is almost teaching itself to think more like a human by playing against itself thousands of times. Theoretically, these computers trained with a neural network just by playing against themselves build their intuition for chess and rely less on brute force calculation. Modern versions of the popular chess engine Stockfish have implemented some of these techniques.
Computer Chess Championship
World Computer Chess Championship has been held periodically since 1974. You can also watch computers compete against each other on chess.com. It is incredible to see perfection played out over the board fighting for slightly better perfection. Even though we have reached the peak of computing for chess, they are always improving. It’s like watching a mental version of Battlebots.
What Does This Mean For You?
An average chess player these days has access to an incredibly powerful chess engine in their pocket every day! There are open-source programs and engines within analysis boards of modern chess websites that allow you to see what a chess engine thinks of any position. So from your phone, you can find the best move! But, does having access to knowing the best move actually make you a better player?
How to Study With Chess Computers
If you are trying to figure out how to integrate a chess engine into a chess training program for yourself, then make sure you are thinking for yourself. Over-reliance on a chess engine during post-game analysis can hinder your chess development. Instead, I would recommend analyzing the game for yourself while writing down some notes and analysis before turning on the engine. Once you turn the chess computer on, then look and see where there were big swings in the evaluation.
How to Activate Chess Computers
If you have just played an online game, or perhaps you have imputed a recent tournament game into a chess website to review or annotate the game, there are a few settings to be familiar with. On Lichess, there is a toggle for turning on the chess engine as seen below.
If you want the engine off your own game review, make sure this is unchecked.
Chess Engine on Chess.com
After playing a game on chess.com, if you have a paid account it will try and force you to do a “Game Review.” This can be a nice tool, but if you want to think for yourself before using a chess engine, then you can turn off the engine by reviewing before the game review with “lines” checked off.
You can leave the evaluation bar on if you want to see where the game swung without necessarily seeing the actual best move.
Finding Missed Blunders
One great thing about a chess engine analyzing your chess game, especially for beginners, is that the engine will find blunders missed by you and your opponent. When two beginners play, a huge game-ending blunder could be played and missed. Without a coach or a chess engine to point out the error, the players may never learn from that mistake.
Quickly Identify Opening Moves
One great use for a chess engine is to quickly identify possible moves to integrate into your opening theory. Now the best way to study openings is to use the master database of games previously played by masters, but if you are a beginner you may see a mistake get played over and over by your opponents that is not ever played by masters. So at that point using the engine to show you a strong response to add to your repertoire is a good idea. Don’t try to memorize too many moves, just look for an early swing in that evaluation bar, and see if the engine has a recommendation to quickly gain an advantage.
Do Engines Make Chess Boring?
Chess is now far more advanced than it was hundreds of years ago. Does that make chess better or worse? If a riddle has an answer is it less fun to solve? I can’t answer that for you, but since whether or not a computer doesn’t impact how much fun I have while playing chess then I still think chess is exciting! That is as long as my opponent isn't using a chess engine to play against me. But other sports have advanced far past where they were when the games were created and that doesn’t make them worse today. You could say that chess computers have allowed chess to reach a new height.
Learn to Brute Force Calculate and Use Intuition
Most chess engines are great at calculating thousands of lines and finding the best moves. Humans who have played lots of chess can have a strong intuition for which moves to calculate. Picking good candidate moves to even calculate is how humans can counteract their inability to calculate every move. Do your best to pick smart candidate moves while brute force calculating those fewer well-chosen candidate moves.