Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.
I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.
Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.
I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.
Stockfish has been dominant for a long time. And a later version of Stockfish would outperform an earlier version given the same time control.
Basically this optimization means that stockfish will sometimes take a bad read from a cache (so it will take an evaluation of the position from cache which was calculated for a different position). It's fairly random when this will trigger a bad play, but if you brute force vs any deterministic setup you will find it eventually.
But even withtout it - you can just implement a kind of a brute-force heap of positions using stockfish's own eval and you can find wins from almost any position even on fairly high playout count.
I got as far as 32M from different even starting positions, but I spent compute to find as many games as possible rather than as deep as possible.
Example game: https://lichess.org/XVUjezMr#134
the collection of the games I found (vibecoded gui) https://kuboble.com/chess_ideas/
> against Stockfish 18, this new release brings an Elo gain of up to 44 points, and wins more than three times as many game pairs as it loses.
As originally suggested, when running modern Stockfish at 60 seconds per move the games overwhelmingly tend to draw. Even when the older engines make slightly worse moves.
Not that an engine evaluation will always be helpful (the line in question making a position strong or weak might be effectively unplayable/impossible to find by a human), but it’s useful for studying nevertheless.