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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The same way a person holds back. A person might know the best move in a particular situation. But that doesn’t mean they need to *make* that move.
So you just have a computer do that: not do the best move. There are different ways to do that, like randomly selecting a move or trying to rank the moves and having the computer pick from somewhere on that rank (e.i. intermediate might pick from the middle of the list, beginner picks from the bottom). Or follow a simple(ish) algorithm that people know to not be a very good one and just switch up the algorithm based on the difficulty level.
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