I totally disagree that most chess engines try to capture material.mclane wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2019 6:07 pm CHESS is about checkmate the opponent king.
Most chess engines, if they can’t see the mate, try to capture material. And if there is no material advantage to get, they make a move that is not giving away the game.
Then the programmer call this chess.
But this is not chess.
CHESS is not a test suite you have to solve with a key move.
CHESS is to make moves in the appropriate order to mate the opposite king.
Therefore you need a plan.
Computerchess Engines do not plan. Therefore they do not play chess but solve test suites.
They reach a very high ELO doing it.
But they don’t play chess.
I often see evaluations of stockfish that I do not understand based on material even at small depth.
I do not claim that stockfish is not stupid at small depth but this is not the type of being stupid because you are too materialistic.
Here is one example(white is winning in the diagram but the point is not who is winning)
[d]3q2r1/1p2kp2/1n1Np2p/p2pPbp1/3Q4/1P4P1/P3PPBP/4R1K1 w - - 3 22
Latest version of stockfish at depth 1 shows
Rc1 with 4.37 pawns for white
if you want to capture material Nxb7 is more logical and even after Nxb7 the evaluation based on material should be only +1.00
At depth 2 things become more strange and main line is
Nxb7 g4 Nxd8 Rxd8 Qxb6 with 13.75 pawns for white
It seems that stockfish prunes moves of the queen and does not see that the queen can escape.
Conclusion is that stockfish at small depth is useless for analysis and I also do not think that this pruning is good for very fast time control that the stockfish team does not test(even at 10+0.1 time control stockfish clearly get more than depth 2).
Basically when I look at a position I would like to understand not only the best move but also the process of thinking of lines by a strong player even if the initial lines are wrong(and strong humans change their mind when they think more) but stockfish does not help.
No strong human think in that way and no strong human will start his thinking by Nxb7 g4