Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python

I can't find any recent experiment, but here https://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-des... is a test done in 2014 that shows that smartphones were already clearly superhuman then

In 2019 I estimate we would need less than half of the computing power of that 2014 smartphone to achieve the same playing strength

On the other hand, they happen to be great judges of human- vs engine- style of play. If you ask any of the top players who have spent time reviewing games by chess engines, I think you'll find a consensus around the belief that Alpha Zero and LCZero play far more human-like moves than do engines like Stockfish.

The traditional engine tends to be extremely conservative and materialistic, only playing a sacrifice when it has calculated a line which recovers the material with interest (or forces checkmate). The so-called AIs don't do this. You're far more likely to see them sacrifice material for a long-term positional advantage, like a great human player would.

From my experience looking at Alpha Zero and LCZero wins against Stockfish, one of the more common patterns I see is a sacrifice by the AI which gives such a dominant position that one or more of Stockfish's pieces become uselessly trapped behind their own pawns. It's this sort of position which seems perfectly tailored to exploit Stockfish's materialistic nature.