Carlini publishes analysis on chess engine algorithmic improvements
1 Nov 3 2:56 AM · 5d ago · 1 article · 4 posts · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
Nicholas Carlini released an article examining whether modern chess engine algorithms running on 1996 Pentium hardware could have defeated Kasparov in the 1996 Deep Blue match, framing the question as an investigation into how much progress in game-playing AI comes from better algorithms versus increased computational power.
Nicholas Carlini Author of technical analysis
Garry Kasparov Chess player in 1996 Deep Blue match
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first by HN Best, 5d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 52 · verbatim
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Given that all the technical details boil down to "I don't know, an LLM wrote it for me", the article can be loslessly be summarized to a single word: "yes".
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While I do not doubt that that machine would have had good chances against Kasparov, the author throws around various Elo ratings for computers with more authority and certainty than is warranted. The simple fact is we do not have a reliable estimate of how strong Stockfish on a modern desktop is let alone a port of SF to a Pentium Pro machine in…
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"[W]as Deep Blue necessary to beat Kasparov? Or could we have gotten away with an off-the-shelf 1996 desktop running a smarter chess engine? As it turns out, we could easily have beaten Kasparov without building Deep Blue, using only commodity hardware, and it (almost certainly) wouldn't have even been close. I know this because, as I write this…
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On the one hand, I'm glad the author is upfront about it. But on the other, it sucks the joy out of it for me. Of course, they aren't writing *for me*, so what I feel doesn't matter – that's fine. I can best describe it like hearing about a dream someone had last night, versus hearing about how their day was.
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The main point the post is trying to make is accurate, modern chess engines are stronger mostly due to improved eval, search, etc and not hardware; but the idea that Kasparov would lose to one on 90s hardware is not as clearly true as one might think. Modern engine eval functions and search algos make very different depth tradeoffs and when given…
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This is clearly untrue. The author knows what they're talking about, and knows how to write a chess engine.
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This doesn't seem to be the same person as The Great Carlini from the Coffee Chess youtube channel, but that's ok, the hacking he did on these chess engines was interesting and he seems to know what he's doing.I'd have liked to see a backport of something more like Leela, i.e. more human-like evaluation with less search. Leela's neural net is…
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And sometimes, amusingly, the opposite. There are at least a few examples of "surprisingly advanced" algorithms that were invented in the 1960s and then forgotten because nobody had the entire _megabytes_ of RAM that would have been needed to put them into production. Then they stayed forgotten until the 2000s or so when someone said "well what if…
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Nice post, thanks.On a kinda similar note i always wander that about indie video games. We have this massive hits like balatro, vampire survivors, that easily could be made in the era of SNES or N64. But somehow we have to wait 30 years to get them.It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack…
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This is awesome, and it has me wondering what the most minimal system that could defeat a GM would be.
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Excellent post. One thing that would be really interesting to see is the "ponder hit rate" (how often two engines pick the same move across a large set of test positions) between your custom Crafty engine and the lineage of engine development over the decade after 1996 (Fruit, HIARCS, Rybka, Stockfish, etc).Fabien Letouzey released the Fruit…
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Well, not completely; it does provide e.g. the split that moving to a weak Pentium-crunched neural-network evaluation does nothing, and the later direct gain from a better-taught NN is larger than from speedups when you start using it for pruning. So, the impact and the interdependencies of the algorithmic improvements are given.
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I think the author jumps around a bit in the piece muddying the facts. A 200 MHz Intel Pentium Pro he's talking about had a single core and a supported single thread, so while this may be true of a modern x64 computer:>Chess engines like Stockfish, running on silicon instead of our human brains, dominate us at the first of these and analyze…
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Interesting! It's easy to get the perception that "new algorithms are better but too complex for older devices which is why they weren't used", but it turns out that sometimes new algorithms are just always better haha
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> because who would want to buy a Pentium Pro when the better-in-almost-every-way Pentium MMXMaybe this was satirizing people running after every shiny new thing, but the MMX certainly wasn’t. The Pro was the first P6, a totally new, out-of-order microarchitecture that the Pentium 2 would be based on. The MMX was a standard P5 Pentium with a…
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This is amazing. I would pay money to see Hikaru or Magnus go against a Pentium.
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As another data point I'm somewhat stronger, and it comfortably beat me trying to play 'normal' chess against it, at least over a couple of games - though I should have had a draw in one game. I think you had the right idea with trying to horizon it. 11. .. h6?? is amusing.Kind of interesting too because trying to get into a tactical mess is the…
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As I recall, backgammon was a game that proved very hard for a rule-based engine to beat a good human (not even the *best* humans, just a strong player), but neural networks were able to do better. Backgammon is interesting because of the doubling cube. The game involves moving tokens around a board, but you don't play a single game, you play a…
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I wonder where you'd hit the performance limits vs the algorithmic improvements. On our family pentium 120 playing an mp3 in Winamp took 10-15% of the CPU, so I'm not sure how much headroom there'd be.But anecdotally I'll share that one of my brother's college roomies was a consultant for RealVideo and was behind their initial codecs. He came back…
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It seems very strange that the author had their LLM "port" Stockfish to a 32 bit CPU when Stockfish already supports 32 bit. Heck, it'll run on a VAX! It seems like LLMs have made people so lazy they're skipping really obvious things and making extra work for themselves (for their LLMs). Also, details in this are off a bit. The Pentium Pro was…
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> Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.In software, quite possibly not[0].But I'm sure we could have built hardware decoders that were up to decoding AV1 or HEVC back in the 90s no problem, had those codecs existed at the time.[0] Somewhat later than the timeframe we're talking…
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Cool stuff, and I like the demo. It definitely defeated me, though I'm admittedly 1-2 kELO under Kasparov: 1. g4 d5 2. h4 Bxg4 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. f3 Qd6 5. Nh3 Bd7 6. e4 dxe4 7. Nxe4 Nxe4 8. fxe4 Qg3+ 9. Ke2 Bg4#
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Awesome article. Nit:> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.I don't buy this. I've seen GMs playing online while verbalizing their thought process (on twitch / youtube videos…
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Only seeing this now but I verbatim (just translated) linked this to a channel yesterday with "I hate chess and I hate AI and yet I really liked this post".
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