In today’s day and age, computers are obviously way better at chess than humans, and even the best players in the world have a hard time holding a candle to engines like Stockfish, etc. However, what I don’t understand is how is it possible to have them in different levels of strength. For example, on Chess.com, there are dozens of bots that you can play against depending on your own level. But for the weakest ones, how does this work? One would think that an engine either knows how to play chess efficiently, or it doesn’t. How can you “dumb down” a computer to the level of an intermediate player or even a beginner? Thanks!
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We can break bad chess bots down into three categories.
1. Ones that are a regular chess bot that knows how to crush any human, but simply doesn’t. Every bot on chess.com falls into this category. They know the best moves, know how to accurately evaluate. This means they can, instead of selecting the best move, search for moves that lower their evaluation and play one of those. These bots don’t feel authentic and you won’t learn anything playing against them.
2. Bots that are trying to play well, but are poorly coded. Not every chessbot is made by a team of people who know what they’re doing. Every once in a while someone who is learning how to program will try their hand at making a bot from scratch. Or as a fun challenge will code a bot with some kind of restriction. SEE [The Kilobyte’s Gambit](https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/) These kinds of bots often do play like people, but like beginners. They have limited calculation strength and holes in their fundamentals.
3. The last type are bots designed not to find the best move, but instead to find the move a player from a certain rating is most likely to play. This is probably the most difficult, and rarest, to make. Maia on Lichess is the only example I can think of.
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