Stockfish dificulty ratings

I've been playing around with the new Stockfish DD engine & its pretty good especially at the price!

I use it sometimes for training when no human opponents are available or my internet connection is too slow (which is most of the time)

So far the results are pretty good. At levels where the chess.com computer has a nervous breakdown & refuses to castle & attacks with its King (a tactic that really infuriates me) Stockfish plays a far more human style game without the stupid computer typical moves.

My question is, what approximate rating (ELO etc) do the various difficlty levels in Stockfish equate to?

Example : Would level 5 (out of 20 max) be equivelant to 1,000 ELO or what?

I am not playing Blitz or any tight time limit, shortest games are 30 minute

Any help appreciated, thanks in advance!

I think so

My guess is that Level 5 would be significantly above 1000 elo, but where exactly, I don't know.

The most accurate way of determining this would be for some officially rated player to play many games against the engine at that level under tournament conditions. That would take lots of time and effort, so I don't see that happening.

The next best way is to set up an engine-engine tournament between Stockfish (Level 5) and another engine of approximately similar strength which is listed on the engine rating lists. They would have to play a good number of games. You'd set up the tournament on your PC and just let it run. Maybe someone out there has done this, but then again, maybe not. Even if it's been done, the results often aren't publicized.

If I can find 1 engine with ELO ratings as a benchmark I'll do that, the problem is they all seem to give an ELO rating for maximum strength but not the lower levels & its the lower levels I am interested in. I'll do some searching & see if anything is out there but they all seem fixated on which one has the highest maximum rating & can beat all the others.

Thanks for the comment.

If I were doing this, I'd try to pick a reference engine from this list. The only problem is that a lot of weak engines are buggy, so I think the goal is to find a weak engine with no major bugs.

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/rating_list_all.html

Chessmaster rates its characters. If you could get a hold of a copy of a chessmaster game and experiment with the levels until you get mostly draws, I'd say that should give you a really good indicator. As a second opinion, record the PGN of your games against the stockfish at its various levels and then go to, http://chesszen.com/ 

This site allows you to analyze one free game a week and will tell you not only the average elo per move outside of the opening and end game table base, but will give an overall elo estimate of your play and the engine's play.

While Chessmaster is a fun program, I'd like to caution people from putting too much reliance on the ratings of the Chessmaster personalities. Although the Chessmaster manual claims that the ratings are accurate, some of the personalities are off as much as two or three hundred points from reality.

I've got a starting point, I must be suffering from some sort of Brain Fade!!

The Chess.com Java computer has approximate ratings for Easy, medium, Hard etc. I'll run Stockfish against that for a start & get a baseline then I'll move on to Chessmaster or any others I find suitable.

I'm just looking for a guide at the moment rather than a full blown Empirical study.

I'll post any results & maybe a couple of games as it progresses.

Thanks for the suggestions, if anyone has any more keep 'em coming, I'll try everything eventually

Any results yet against Chess.com java engine?