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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Chess bots work by looking forward a certain number of moves to calculate the possible outcomes and selecting the move that gives them the best “score” based on pieces captured andvboard positioning. They pick the move that gives them the most future opportunities to capture pieces, avoid being captured, and dominate board space.
It’s enormously demanding to look forward more than a few moves so typically they don’t calculate out very far, but it is still very effective.
To make the bot dumber you just have it select the 3rd best move instead of the best move sometimes. Or the 10th best move.
You change the weighting so it plays less optimally, but will still go for overwhelmingly obvious moves so it doesn’t look purposefully dumb.
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