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Comment by thomasmg | Hacker News Reader

For me (having written my own tiny 400 line chess engine, that now I'm not able to beat - sure I'm not a good player, but still), the reason to have Stockfish is not really to play against it, and then inevitably lose, but to use it to show which moves are best. I assume that's how most (hobby and professional) chess players use Stockfish nowadays.

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I can't beat the famous 1k JavaScript version either. I was better when I was younger.

https://nanochess.org/archive/toledo_javascript_chess_3.html

this feels around 1000 elo

crazy to see 110mb.com links in 2026 (on the github repo project), it's been a while

Yeah, I blundered a knight and still managed to win.

What does it matter if you can see which moves are best if you can't understand it?

99.5% of the time you can understand it (percentage varies with rating).

You just try it yourself and go down the different lines. "Okay, Stockfish suggests this, but I wanted to do that, let's try my idea, oh, I didn't think of that response to my move". Etc., play along some lines, think about them. Sometimes it's obvious, other times it just sets up something far in the future you must be a grandmaster to see the subtlety of.

The Square One Chess channel on youtube turns this kind of exploration/commentary into quite digestible content, though the thumbnails are, like everything else these days, a little clickbaity.

It's been fun viewing for me and my chess-interested 9-year-old.

ChessNetwork on YouTube also does a great job with this: analysis of interesting games, using Stockfish as a tool along the way.

For some reason this question reminds me of all of the drama about Navier-Stokes from the last few days. Tangential to the ethical questions are tons of examples where in history when word gets out about a solution to a problem, not even the solution itself just rumors that there is a solution, suddenly competing solutions appear.

So maybe it matters like that? Just knowing that an oracle like stockfish is saying "this is the best move" may trigger pathways in your brain that promote understanding?

Because then you explore the line and try to learn what is so good about the move

Stockfish has created entirely new lines in chess which people incorporate into their play. For instance an early pawn push to h4 is now common among chess pros. It's value was not recognized before Stockfish.

h4 push was AlphaZero/Leela thing wasn't it?

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