The Chess Computer A Comprehensive Guide
Humankind has lost the battle. Chess is a game that computers can play to near perfection, and we don’t stand a chance against them. But we should still try our best to understand how chess computers work, how to use chess engines to help ourselves, and how to learn to spot players who are using a chess computer to play unfairly. If we ignore chess computers, we would be doing ourselves a disservice, so keep yourself informed in order to play your best chess.
What are Chess Computers?
If you are new to chess, you may not know the extent to which computers have mastered the game. A chess engine is a computer program that can find the best move, or moves, in any chess position. Think of a chess computer as a one hundred grandmasters in a room, all calculating at the same time and spitting out one answer. Depending on the computer's power, using a chess engine might even be underselling its power.
Why Does it Matter?
Over the last fifty years, there has been a shift not only in how chess is played, but also in how it is taught and understood. Because there are often times a truly “best” move that we can now identify, it has clarified some positions. Especially, in the opening study, which has advanced exponentially in recent decades, thanks to computers. Meaning, the first few moves that masters play in their games of chess are often backed up not just by years of experience, but also by the computing power of a chess computer.
First Machine Chess
Chess players have been fascinated with “solving” chess since its invention. I won’t dive into the full history of chess versus the computer, but humans have been interested in the idea of machines playing chess since the invention of computers, and before. For instance, the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen duped many with his invention of the Mechanical Turk in 1770, which he claimed was a machine that could play chess. It turned out to be a machine with a chess-playing man hidden inside.
How Far We Have Come With Chess Engines?
Computers don’t need humans to hide inside them anymore. Instead, chess computers have fully surpassed humans in chess. Computers have been able to beat average humans since the 1970s, and in 1996, a computer engine called Deep Blue even beat the world champion, Garry Kasparov. At this point, even the top Grandmasters bow down to the mighty chess computers. Instead of trying to beat them, chess masters now learn from chess computers, using them to build even stronger openings and analyze complex positions.
How a Computer Thinks
When calculating a move in chess, humans use their time to think through their options and to pick the best move. Computers also do this, but they use a brute-force approach: they consider hundreds of lines and then evaluate the resulting positions. For a human to calculate this way would take far too long, so we tend to narrow our focus and only calculate the most relevant lines. This helps us calculate more efficiently, but it also means we may miss things we never thought to calculate.
What You Can Learn From How a Computer Plays
So what can we learn from how computers calculate? Don’t have tunnelvision! Force yourself to at least consider all forcing moves, even if at first glance they don’t look like appealing moves. Often, a beginner will stop their calculation when they see a certain move loses a queen, and they will miss the forced checkmating sequence that could have followed. Try your best to scan broadly, looking at many possible moves, before narrowing your focus onto a few prime candidate moves. Chess-playing humans, unlike computers, have intuition!
Playing With Good Intuition
As you improve as a chess player, your intuition will also improve. This is most evident in faster time formats like blitz and bullet. Intuition is the move that you think to play before you have really calculated. It “feels” like a good move. You get this intuition through hours and hours of practice and hundreds of games played. During longer classical games, you shouldn’t rely just on your intuition, but it can help you determine which moves are worth spending your time calculating. This intuition is something that traditional chess engines lack.
Understanding Computer Evaluations
Computers view a chess position through an evaluation. You will often see this on the side of an analysis board on a chess website after a game is played. It is the bar that moves from light to dark, and can go back and forth throughout the game. For beginners, this can be a confusing part of chess analysis. In short, if a position is good for the white side, it will be a positive number, and if it is good for the black side, it will be a negative number. One number can roughly correspond to one point of material, so if white loses their queen, the evaluation might be -9, for instance.
Learn to Think In Terms of Evaluations
Computers are constantly evaluating possible futures and choosing their paths based on those evaluations. It can actually be useful to train yourself to do something similar in your calculations. As you think and calculate, stop and evaluate the position you are calculating. Is it better than one of the alternatives you were looking at? This is one of the best ways for you to get better at picking between moves that your intuition already thinks are good.
AI and Self Learning Engines for Electronic Chess
Recently, newer chess engines have built on the advances made by AlphaZero and similar systems, in which a neural network enables the engine to learn to think more like a human by playing against itself thousands of times. Theoretically, these self-trained neural network-based computers develop their chess intuition and depend less on brute-force calculations. Modern versions of the well-known chess engine Stockfish have adopted some of these approaches. This makes chess engines more powerful than ever and makes them truly unbeatable by mere humans.
Computer Chess Championship
There is a chess format, though, where humans are not involved! The World Computer Chess Championship has been held periodically since 1974. Additionally, computers compete against each other on chess.com regularly. You can watch machines aiming for perfection on the board, constantly seeking minor improvements, and it is fascinating. While we've achieved the highest level of chess computing, these programs continue to evolve.
Chess Training With Chess Computers
If you're figuring out how to incorporate a chess engine into your training, remember to think independently. Relying too much on a chess engine during post-game analysis can slow your progress. Instead, analyze the game yourself first, taking notes and making your own assessments before activating the engine. Only after doing your initial analysis should you turn on the engine, then observe where significant evaluation changes occurred.
Should You Play Against Chess Computers?
Ultimately, the question becomes how we should use chess computers. There are hundreds of ways that top players have integrated them into their study and preparation, but what about your average player? You do have to be careful. There are far too many beginners who become overreliant on chess computers for play and analysis, when instead they should be playing against real people at their skill level, and using their own brain to analyse positions.
Playing Bots Vs Online Chess
It can be very tempting for beginners to play only against chess bots. Playing against other real people can be very stressful for new players. That, though, is a fear that is best conquered early. The best thing about playing online, or in an official chess tournament, is that you are automatically paired against someone near your skill level. Because of that, you don’t need to be scared of playing a real person. Unfortunately, bots, especially low-rated bots, can make moves that are not very realistic. Often, they will play silly moves just to keep their level low, like not recapturing after a capture or hanging a piece for no reason.
Finding Missed Blunders
Using the engine can be useful in chess analysis. One of the best ways to improve at chess is to review your own games and learn from them. Try to do this first without the chess computer’s assistance, but after that, an engine can help you spot moments where you may have made a mistake that you, and likely your opponent, missed completely. There are blunders that higher-rated players would take advantage of, so it is good to spot them and learn from them.
Quickly Identify Opening Moves
Learning openings is a tough part of chess, and learning every variation of every opening is nearly impossible. So, as you are analyzing your game, you can look at the engine move to give you an idea of what was likely the correct theoretical move, or if the engine evaluation swings after a move, then you will know that you made a mistake.
Frequently Asked Questions
Computer chess works the same as real chess, but chess engines are playing, not humans. It is against the rules of regular online chess to use chess computers, though.
The best computer chess engines are always evolving, but Stockfish is often in the conversation, especially since it has also integrated neural networks like other engines.
There are hundreds of ways that you can play chess against a computer, and Stockfish even exists on people’s cellphones.
For as long as computers have existed, people have dreamed of making them play chess. Even before, people were pretending that machines could play chess, like with the Mechanical Turk in 1770.
Playing against bots can be a helpful way to get over your fear of playing chess, but as you get serious about improving, I would play more real opponents who react more like the humans you want to learn how to beat.