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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A lot of replies here are giving interesting facts about chess engines that don’t answer the question.
The ones that actually answer the question are a way down, talking about how randomness is built into algorithms, or computational details such as parallel processing and race conditions.
The answers at the top: fun fact, chess is really hard and even a computer doesn’t always know the best move! Yes, but OP isn’t asking why they don’t find the best move, they are asking why they don’t make the same move every time in the same situation. An algorithm can be imperfect but still deterministic, after all.
This is venturing into chaos theory… where increased complexity and amount of factors can skew probability of outcome
You cannot control for every factor, even if you are talking about computers. I would guess when the engines play there are times, when different moves yield the same benefit or have the same amount of loss and than the engine randomly chooses a move. Unfortunately there is no such thing as random in computing, computing a true random is impossible, computer randoms are predictible to a certain degree.
Randomness is kind of contriary to computers, because computers are built on being predictible… and random is not predictible
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Here is a great video about random
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg)
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