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There's the TCEC [0] which is a big thing in some circles. Stockfish does lose every now and then against top engines. [1] Usually it's two different engines playing against one another, though. Like Leela Chess Zero [2] vs. Stockfish.

In that hypothetical of running 2 instances of Stockfish against one another on a modern laptop, with the key difference being minutes of compute time, it'd probably be very close to 100% of draws. Depending on how many games you run. So, if you run a million games, there's probably some outliers. If you run a hundred, maybe not.

When it comes to actually solved positions, the 7-piece tables take around 1TB of RAM to even run. These tablebases are used by Stockfish when you actually want to run it at peak strength. [3]

[0]: https://tcec-chess.com [1]: https://lichess.org/broadcast/tcec-s28-leagues--superfinal/m... [2]: https://lczero.org [3]: https://github.com/syzygy1/tb

by NooneAtAll35 hours ago|

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doesn't TCEC use opening book?

I remember hearing that starting position is so draw-ish that it's not practical anymore

by LogicalRisk5 hours ago|

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TCEC does force different openings yes. Engines play both sides.

by LogicalRisk5 hours ago|

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Here's a game from a month ago where Stockfish loses to Lc0, played during the TCEC Cup. https://lichess.org/S9AwOvWn

Chess is a 2 player game of perfect, finite information, so by Zermelo's theorem either one side always wins with optimal play or it's a draw with optimal play. The argument from the Discord person simply says that Stockfish computationally can't come up with a way to beat itself. Whether this is true (and it really sounds like a question about depth in search) is separate from whether the game itself is solved, and it very much is not.

Solving chess would be a table that simply lists out the optimal strategy at every node in the game tree. Since this is computationally infeasible, we will certainly never solve chess absent some as yet unknown advance in computation.

by RivieraKid5 hours ago|

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What I meant by "solved" is "never loses from the starting position against Stockfish that has infinite time per move".

In the TCEC game, I see "2. f4?!", so I'm guessing Stockfish was forced to played some specific opening, i.e. it was forced to make a mistake.

by gowld5 hours ago|

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That means that Stockfish's parameters are already optimized as far as practically possible for Rapid chess and Slow chess, not that chess itself is solved, or even that Stockfish is fully optimized for Blitz and Bullet.

by sscg135 hours ago|

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Surely it is apparent to you that the first few moves are not independently chosen by the engine, but rather intentionally chosen by the TCEC bookmakers to create a position on the edge between a draw and a decisive result.

For what it's worth, Stockfish wins the rematch also. https://tcec-chess.com/#game=13&round=fl&season=cup16

by LogicalRisk4 hours ago|

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Yes, engines would almost certainly never play 2. f4. That's a different question than whether chess is solved, for which the question of interest would be "given optimal play after 1. e4 e5 2. f4 is the result a win for one side or a draw?"

It's also almost certainly the case, in that I don't know why you would do it, that Stockfish given the black pieces and extensive pondering would be meaningfully better than Stockfish with a time capped move order. Most games are going to be draws so practically it would take awhile to determine this.

I'm of the view that the actual answer for chess is "It's a draw with optimal play."

by MengerSponge6 hours ago|

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That just means that Stockfish doesn't get stronger with more than 1 minute per move on a modern computer. It doesn't say anything about other engines.

by RivieraKid5 hours ago|

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Stockfish with 1000 minutes per move is an approximation of a perfect chess player. So if Stockfish with 1 minute per move will never lose against a perfect player, it is unbeatable by any chess engine.