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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.
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> 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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Well, that's actually not true at all. Stockfish is not a very good odds player and at queen odds is easily beatable even by bad players like me. It will just trade down into more trivial and easier to win positions that it perceives as "less bad", since everything is super-losing anyway when you start down a queen.

Leela odds networks, on the other hand, are an entirely different beast. I cannot beat Leela queen odds, much less rook or minor piece odds, and even GMs struggle against Leela knight odds.

Without odds though, yeah, Stockfish is just incomprehensibly strong by human standards. All top chess engines are, but Stockfish moreso.

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No worries, I know stockfish is unbeatable by humans.

But sometimes, these GMs can flag it, which counts as a win (especially when it's proxied by a cheater). Sometimes they can also explain the idea that cost them the game, so they've learned something maybe.

Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding.

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> Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding

Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition") and can only make explicit calculation of a small fraction of possibilities, after which decisions are guided by guesswork. The computers are unbeatable in practice because they can calculate concretely in seconds what might take an expert human long intensive study to notice, and they don't make the same kinds of oversights humans can make.

But if you stop and explore a particular position for an extended time, and if you have an intermediate level of chess skill, you too can probably often (usually?) figure out why it's doing something. Sometimes understanding the computer's reasons takes searching multiple branches of a tree several unlikely looking moves deep, but the collection of threats the computer was preemptively thwarting, traps it was setting, etc. are comprehensible to humans with enough effort, especially in games between the computer and a human.

The frustrating thing about playing against the computer is that it notices and thwarts every plan you might come up with, before you make up the plan yourself, and it doesn't make (human-apparent) mistakes, so the game ends up feeling hopeless. Nothing you try works on it, and if your idea is even slightly inaccurate it will be exploited.

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