best chess engines-ultimate game

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ArthurEZiegler

I take from what I read here that a human, say the top chess master, would be unlikely to beat a chess engine without some kind of handicap. So is there a  acknowledged top chess engine? Has anyone done the most analyzed game in history by competing the best engines against each other with super long times (like a week) allowed for each move? Can different engines and human players team up to calculate the best move? My idea is to have the best possible game that can be currently played to see what it would look like. Has this been done for openings and have any classical openings been refuted or new ones created? I do realize the number of possible moves approaches an astronomical number as you look further ahead in a game and at some point even a high speed computer will be overwhelmed. 

Oliver_Prescott

idk, but im eager to find out

ArthurEZiegler

Well, I was hoping to get an answer from someone smarter and more informed than me, but I guess I'll have to try and answer my own question with a bit of research. It seems the top computers right now are AlphaZero and Stockfish. Stockfish uses a brute force computation examining like 60 million moves in a second and evaluates the positions by standards given by human sources, like king safety, pawn positions and such. AlphaZero uses a neural network that trains itself, it learned by playing millions of games against itself. It uses experience to chose to exam the most promising lines rather than every possibility, much like a human. It is about 100 times slower looking at only 60,000 positions a second, but since it prunes the tree of possible moves it just looks for the best. AlphaZero readily beat Stockfish in a match, but it's superiority was questioned since it used a supercomputer and Stockfish had just a regular one. The chess discussion here has comments on a recent match between Stockfish and a AlphaZero derived program called LeelaCO where the hardware was more equal and the match was very close. These games were played with a rapid time limit and so far I have not seen anything about allowing very long games to see what would happen. I have seen some questions about openings and style of play based on what we may observe from these computer games, but nothing about a preferred new opening or variation.

nexim

If you are interested about chess engines and their relative strength compared to each other, I suggest you check out Top Chess Engine Championship. Past couple years it has mostly been a competition between Stockfish and LeelaChessZero, with AllieStein (supervised learning version of Leela) and Komodo making occasional appearances near the top.

ArthurEZiegler

Thanks for the link nexim, very interesting!