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Comment by fsiefken | Hacker News Reader

What would be the added value of an average and aspiring chess player like me to play against Stockfish 14 instead of one of he previous versions? I feel I'll never challenge the maximum capacity of such an engine.

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> What would be the added value of an average and aspiring chess player like me to play against Stockfish 14 instead of one of he previous versions? I feel I'll never challenge the maximum capacity of such an engine.

I do not see chess engines as good sparring partners, but rather as tools for effective chess exploration.

The nice thing about these newer engines is that they are starting to be useful tools to explore more sacrificial and unbalanced positions which are really fun to get over the board against humans.

Finding these ideas with the help of a computer gives a competitive edge against other humans, as well as helping discover interesting corners in this vast game.

Play against? Probably very little. But certainly it'll give you sharper analyses of your other games, and slightly better lines to memorise as part of your preparation. This probably isn't where most people should be spending their time learning though, obv.

Probably most of the improvements in 14 are for arriving at a more accurate answer quickly for play against other machines

When you play stockfish at a human level, it is purposely choosing an answer it knows is worse ^.^

My impression from playing against lower levels of the default stockfish on Lichess is that it's really bad at playing badly, so not much fun to play against. It seems like it plays at full power, interspersed with random bad moves.

Absolutely. You might want to take a look at Maia Chess, an engine which is supposed to mimic low/mid-level human play, rather than just playing perfectly and with a 1/10 chance of a terrible move, like Stockfish at low levels does.

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