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 too many possible moves to be able to truly find the best move every time, so the engines must select a smaller number of moves to look at in detail. Especially as in tournaments they put time limits on moves, so the engine has to pick an (admittedly still huge) random selection of “good” moves to analyse in detail and determine out of those which is actually the best to keep within the time limit.
If the engines had infinite time then they would be able to select the best moves consistently without this random sample approach.
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