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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You can limit the depth of calculation (for example, cap it at 2 moves deep) or limit it’s breadth of calculation (for example, only calculate 1 or 2 variations per move deep). You may also have it find inaccurate moves and play them with a certain probability.
AI is being used in engines these days, so I’m not sure how they’re able to control for that when it comes to difficulty level. I do know there are AI bots trained to specifically play at certain ratings, say a 1600, by analyzing games at that rating level and then learning to predict the next move accurately.
Outside of that, it all depends on the engine in question. The best engines in the world are optimized in their calculation and trained on extensive libraries of games, as well as implementing machine learning with complex neural nets. By comparison, a homebrew chess engine built for fun is unlikely to achieve anywhere near the same results and may struggle to achieve better than a master performance.
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