Playing chess against a computer has several advantages, but there are also some disadvantages. The first is that your opponent is not human and will not make the same mistakes that you do. Consequently, you may find it difficult to defeat the program. Second, the programs can be expensive.
Machine learning techniques
If you’ve been following chess, you’ve likely heard of the amazing AlphaZero chess engine. This machine learning algorithm can play chess, go, and shogi better than humans in just a few hours. While the engine didn’t start out knowing much about these games, it played millions of games against itself and learned from its mistakes. It has now become the number-one player in the world.
Chess programs can learn to find the best possible moves by using heuristics. These methods involve creating trees of moves and evaluating them to identify the best possible moves. These trees typically contain thousands to millions of nodes. Modern computers can process hundreds of thousands of nodes per second, which allows them to narrow down their trees and focus on the most relevant moves.
Faster hardware
A new approach to playing chess against computers has come in the form of faster hardware. Chess programs can play with greater strength thanks to hyperthreaded architectures and additional memory. Most modern programs can use multiple cores for parallel search, while others allocate dedicated processors to evaluation and move generation. The research on this subject was first published in 1950 when Claude Shannon published a paper on search. He predicted two main search strategies that computers would use to solve a chess game.
Today’s CPUs are powerful enough to match the performance of specialized chess hardware. Intel’s i7-3930K is one such processor. Although the FX-8350 has lower performance than the i7 3930k, it is only $190, which makes it a good budget choice. However, the FX series architecture does not allow for more than one CPU per rig, which is not ideal for chess servers.
Additional memory
Additional memory for chess positions is often associated with expertise. Experts can recall chess positions because they have acquired a large amount of conceptual knowledge. This helps them perform better memory tasks. The template theory and computational models of the template theory indicate that expertise increases a player’s ability to recall chess positions.
In addition to pattern recognition, memory for chess positions also requires a high level of knowledge. This knowledge is automatically acquired through experience and other factors, but it is also a product of high-level chess activity.
Limitations of chess engines
Computers have revolutionized the sport of chess, but some players feel limited by the limitations of these programs. In a blog post, GM Alex Colovic said that chess engines have powers of calculation far beyond the capabilities of the human mind. Nevertheless, human players can still benefit from the outputs of these programs and can study them to improve their games.
One major limitation of these programs is that they are slow. In addition, these systems tend to be quite predictable, and their evaluations can be very boring. They may also play the same moves in a given situation over. The Bobby engine, for example, tries to avoid playing predictable openings by trying to avoid equivalent moves. It also limits the depth of the game to three moves.