Chess AI Engines

Discussions center on chess engines like Stockfish and AlphaZero, their superhuman capabilities, comparisons to human players and LLMs like ChatGPT, and debates on whether they represent true AI or just brute force computation.

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Keywords

CPU LLM AlphaZero sciencemag.org apple.com AnarchyChess GPU wikipedia.or AI FWIW chess engine engines moves game heuristics play ai played human

Sample Comments

remus Dec 1, 2022 View on HN

Could get very meta if you had a chess engine that knows how to play human chess!

ttsda Nov 25, 2020 View on HN

Chess AI can play like humans, and win consistently (stockfish), and it can also play in completely novel ways, and win even more (alphazero)

oneeyedpigeon Feb 4, 2025 View on HN

Chess solvers are more AI than 90% of the things currently being touted as AI!

PaulHoule Nov 14, 2024 View on HN

Maybe that one which plays chess well is calling out to a real chess engine.

nottorp Dec 1, 2022 View on HN

Is it human chess if you have to think like an engine to know what not to do?

Akababa Nov 27, 2019 View on HN

That's a really oversimplified view. The truth is beyond a certain point no amount of "theorizing" is enough to overcome the sheer computational power of programs. AlphaZero just took advantage of recent advances in neural networks and GPU hardware to achieve a better tradeoff between hard rules and heuristics than Stockfish. Both of them are probably Pareto efficient in some sense, and barring some insane undiscovered loophole in the rules of chess it's unlikely that any hum

superfx Jan 24, 2019 View on HN

Science paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1140NYT article summarizing some of the issues addressed: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/science/chess-artificial-...

janalsncm Nov 15, 2024 View on HN

Huh. Honestly, your answer makes more sense, LLMs shouldn’t be good at chess, and this anomaly looks more like a bug. Maybe the author should share his code so it can be replicated.

Davidzheng Mar 3, 2024 View on HN

Chess AI is pretty much chess god

religio Oct 21, 2025 View on HN

yes, it's a proof of human intelligence at chess. nothing more.