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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I hear this claim from above: "Some humans can beat stockfish."

Evidence given: "There exist some small number of games on lichess.org played against stockfish where the user won."

My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.

I don't know if any humans can beat stockfish. But I don't consider that to be strong evidence.

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> My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.

Also, Lichess' Stockfish runs in the browser (with all the slowdown that entails), plus is limited to one second of thinking time even on the highest level. It also has no tablebases and AFAIK no opening book. Even if you _can_ consistently beat Lichess Stockfish level 8, there's still a very long way from there to saying you can beat Stockfish at its maximum strength, which is generally what people would assume the best humans would be up against in such a duel.

People generally don't play unencumbered engines anymore because the result isn't interesting.

Well, there is nothing I can do to prove to you that I did, as I can not travel into the past taking you with me. I know, I did win two or three games and drew approximately 25 out of approximately 500 training games. But I can not prove it. You have to believe or not.

I believe you. I just suspect stockfish was misconfigured, it wasn’t playing at its highest skill level or something similar was going on. That seems more likely. (I’d love to know for sure though).

An extraordinary claim without any proof. Surely you believe the moon to be made of cheese, since we can‘t travel there to verify it‘s not?

Yeah his claim is quite absurd really. If it was a weaker stockfish (bad hardware, older version etc.) then maybe. Modern stockfish pretty much crushes any and everyone. A draw alone would be extremely impressive, and maybe doable with enough luck from a top player. But even that is very far fetched nowadays. Let alone actually winning.

Elsewhere in the thread he revealed that he achieved these results around the year 2015, which means we was playing against Stockfish 6 or earlier, estimated to have about 400 less ELO than today's Stockfish 18. Stockfish 6 didn't even have NNUE, so the real issue seems to be that he thinks his results from 2015 hold any relevance to the chess engines of today.

Quick search shows elo of stockfish 6=3278 (1 cpu).

To assume that a human can beat that is just delusional.

No not at all! You can find plenty of videos on YouTube of humans taking down 2015-era stockfish. Usually it involves exploiting specific weaknesses in the engine, for example bringing the game to a stalled position where the game nearly reaches the 50 move rule, and then the engine makes a disadvantaged move to avoid a draw.

Especially pre-NNUE, chess engines were often not fully well-rounded, and therefore a human with specific knowledge of the chess engine's weaknesses could take it down with enough attempts.

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