In chess terms, this is equivalent to having a slight advantage (which is what Stockfish is displaying with the Chess Informant symbol to the left of “-0.90” in the analysis panel). It’s looked 17 plies and determined that with best play for both sides (the moves shown by the variation in the analysis panel), after Black plays …Nb4 he will be 90/100ths of a pawn ahead. So what is Stockfish telling us with its evaluation of the position above? When you’re reading a numeric evaluation, positive numbers mean an advantage for White, while negative numbers indicate an advantage for Black. That might not sound like much of a difference, but those little numbers can add up pretty quickly if one side keeps making small mistakes. That’s why you’ll very often see evaluations that are less than a pawn (as in the illustration above). It also looks at a large number of other factors, like mobility, King safety, control of space, how well the pieces guard each other, and on and on. Of course, a chess engine takes more than just material into account. It follows then that a value of 3.00 is equal to a minor piece, 5.00 is equal to a Rook, and 9.00 is equal to a Queen. I mentioned earlier that a value of 1.00 is equal to a pawn. This is also sometimes called the score (as it is in the illustration above). The longer you let an engine analyze a position, the more it sees and the more accurate the analysis should be. That’s an important point, and you just know we’ll be coming back to it. It took 212 kN/s to reach a ply search depth of 17. Most programs will also show the amount of time the engine has been analyzing. In Stockfish this is measured in kN/s. In other words, it was looking eight and a half moves ahead. When I took the screen shot, Stockfish was then analyzing the 17 th ply. Most chess engine will display:ĭepth refers to how far ahead (in plies, or half moves) the engine looked ahead. Several pieces of information are common to all chess program. Obviously, different programs will display chess engine analysis in different ways. Let’s fire up Stockfish and see what it thinks! When we look at this position (with Black to move) we see the tempting Rook on f1 which is attacked by Black’s Bishop. I’ll be running Stockfish in the Chess Analysis app on android store. The best way to illustrate how to read the info in a Stockfish analysis window is by using a practical example. Pretty dang near every chess program ever made has some form of “analysis window” in which it will show the user what moves it’s pondering at any given moment. What’s even cooler is that the computer will show us what it’s thinking. The Stockfish engine looks ahead as far as it can, evaluating millions of possible future positions, “backtracks” the numbers, and ultimately plays the one candidate move which leads to that best position. In one of my previous posts “ How do Chess Engines Work” I addressed how computers play chess by using a formula called an algorithm to assign a numerical evaluation to a particular position. Reading Stockfish Chess Engine (Analysis Free) The main thing to remember when reading a chess engine is 1.00 equals a pawn, and positive numbers mean that White’s ahead. It can’t learn to use our language but, believe it or not, it’s actually pretty easy for us to learn its language. But to get that information, we’ll have to meet our computer chess coach halfway. Over the course of many such analyzed games we can also spot tendencies in how we play, categories of mistakes that we make over and over again, which will show us what problems we need to correct in order to improve. The responses are “canned”, that is, pre-programmed and often not very informative.Ī chess computer can give us a whole lot of input as to what we did wrong in a game and how we could have played better. Some chess programs claim to offer game analysis in such natural language and they do, but it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. Many computers can understand voice commands (as long as they’re programmed to do so), but they have the devil of a time using natural language to talk back to us. It sure would be cool if you could feed one of your games to a chess computer, let it analyze for a while, and have it spit out a multi-page plain language commentary about your chess strengths and weaknesses, including several paragraphs about your pawn structures, and a breakdown of your endgame play.īut it won’t happen.
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