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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Just to clarify, top players can’t come close to stockfish.
If the best players in the world are ranked 2800, stockfish plays at a 3500+ level. Considering a 200 point difference basically means it’s impossible to win human to human, beating stockfish is actually humanly impossible.
That said, it’s not hard to have a computer pick a weaker choice. It solves the best X moves. And you just have it pick the weaker choices. The engine is SO good by this point, it’s good enough to choose how good it is.
Last thing to consider. It’s not a level of computing power. Any computer can run the stockfish model. It’s already trained. Computational power does help speed it up a bit but honestly, it’s basically a math equation for computers at this point. AI is orders of magnitude better at solving problems than raw computation. You’ll see soon as graphics card developers have said we’re about to see an actual 1000x improvement in graphics. We can render things that took hours in seconds because AI can predict close by pixels instead of calculating them.
Moore’s Law says computational power increases about double every two years. And it’s been slowing down a bit lately, but we’re about to jump massively. Remember the graphics you see today. You won’t recognize it in 5 years. It’s the equivalent of pong to COD. What took 50 years to do, we’re about to do that leap again but in 5.
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