This has bugged me for a bit. If chess engines are meant to always play the best moves, then how come two chess engines playing against each other doesn’t always have the same winner?
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There are (broadly) two types of chess engines.
One have a set of “questions” or “rules”, a script if you want, and it follows step by step until it finds a good move. The simplest example would be an engine that chooses the first legal move it finds, checking every piece left-right, bottom-top. These engines will always return the same move given the same circumstances.
The other type looks for several moves that look “good”, put them in a bag, and then choose between them depending on which one “feels” better. These engines are the ones that may produce different moves given the same circumstances.
But regardless of the type of engine there is a limit on the information they can recall at any given time so they can look only so many moves ahead, so they are likely to find a “good” move that is not necesarily “the best” move. It is the same case with chess Grand Masters.
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