How do I make my chess engine play more humanly??

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CoryEckert1

Ugh you can clearly tell when I set my chess engine (Stockfish) to a level, it makes perfect moves everytime. So I set the strength down to like 16, and that's still a lot. I guess my question is, how do I make a chess engine (even other than Stockfish) play more humanly?? How do I make it not as aggressive, but make it play more tactical?

Harmbtn

You can't because humans have emotions. People will play timid defensive moves that are bad because they are scared of a percieved threat or overambitious attacking moves when they get excited. A chess engine has none of this human intuition because it's just a calculating machine, it searches huge amounts of variations and determines the best technical outcome.

Chess engines that have their strenght lowered to mimic human players are just designed to sometimes play random bad moves. When a human player makes a mistake it's because they misunderstood something strategically or missed something tactically in the position. However, against a computer these bad moves don't come from errors in reasoning because a computer doesn't reason to begin with. This makes their mistakes completely artificial and you can often tell when the engine makes a funny unhuman move. 

When you beat an engine it's because it chose to play the losing moves, where's the fun in that? :P

Harmbtn
1NaturalDisaster wrote:

Why are you using an engine??! You are cheating and outright telling people about it?

I think he's just talking about an engine he plays against for training :)

(or I completely missed something)

joshuagambrell

Start working in the field of artificial intelligence.

NJCat

It isn't strong by any means but you could always just play against Chess Titans.

CoryEckert1
Yeah 1NaturalDisaster I mean for training, because It's part of my routine to play Stockfish before a tournament. That coupled with Orange Juice, and my Modern Chess Openings book
MrKornKid

What would lvl 10 on Chess Titans be elo wise?

NJCat
MrKornKid wrote:

What would lvl 10 on Chess Titans be elo wise?

Estimates are between 1600-1800. I usually play against level 9 because the computer moves a lot faster.

xman720

Go into the code of your engine and copy/paste:

[Engine Name] New sub

Sub Add personality

Personality = Agressive,tactical,defensive,positional

Add Agressive

Add Tactical

Add Defensive

Add Positional

Import skynet

End Sub

Mattsetzungsabsicht

http://support.stockfishchess.org/kb/advanced-topics/engine-parameters

contempt is maybe the option you are searching for.