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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what you want?'

To play against...no. It will crush you like a cockroachh. it will crush a grandmaster like a cockroach....running on a smartphone.

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You can set the skill level. As a complete chess novice, I can do okay at very low difficulty. A level or two above the minimum and it completely wrecks me though.

For anyone interested in playing with it yourself, you can use python-chess (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-chess) to set up / play against the engine (or make engines play against each other) without having to directly use the UCI commands.

edit: It looks like there are quite a few other front-ends that will work with Stockfish. Fritz and PyChess look popular. I just used python-chess for a project a while ago.

With a lower skill level it plays weird, almost useless to learn from compared to playing other humans.

Browsing the source code, I was not able to find an openings database. Is it so strong in openings theory that it is able to compute it on the fly?

Yes

UCI chess engines typically defer opening book to the GUI consuming it. So if you were using Stockfish with Arena or Tarrasch, that would handle the opening book. Stockfish will start calculating when it is out of the book. This is all configurable, of course.

I had no idea openings were so fixed from the computers point of view. Does this mean that in order to become a better player it is a must to learn all the openings as a book?

Even in professional chess, openings are almost "by the book". There are quite a few main lines of openings and play is almost always along one of them, or variants thereof.

Up to an ELO rating at 2000 (and even beyond that) there is no need to memorize openings. It is much more important to learn the basic opening and development ideas. Even if you play against non-masters who have memorized some openings you can easily crunch them by the basic ideas. It takes master level to go from memorize to actually understand how a given opening works.

Really if your're good enough...

Magnus Carlsen spends very very little time on memorizing openings.

There's a variant of Stockfish called "Brainfish" that has a way of incorporating information about the opening. More info here https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Brainfish and here http://spcc.beepworld.de/ (ratings)

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