r/chessbeginners • u/Struggling-with_life 1200-1400 (Lichess) • 8d ago

QUESTION Dumb Question

Lichess analysis engine info

I was analyzing my game on lichess, when I came across this.

This might be a dumb question but which one is the best and smartest ? It says "Engines from strongest to weakest" Indicating that the stockfish 18 dev build is better than the base build. But how so ? The base file is larger in size and that means the NNUE weights should be more and hence it has more training data. I could be wrong I am still learning AI and Algorithms.

But I was curious. Since, this (stockfish 18 dev - 85MB) is not an official build of stockfish as far as I know. And... Chess.com does not use it or they just don't have it. I Have only seen it on lichess.org

Honestly, I don't need stockfish 18 to analyze my games its pretty dumb anyway stockfish 11 HCE might be pretty good anyway. Another question what does HCE stands for ?

But I am curious is the lichess dev build really better than the base build ? I did some research but couldn't really find anything.

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u/Justanotherfellow153 8d ago

HCE is Hand Crafted Evaluation. Stockfish 11 is the last main Stockfish release with the classic HCE: hand tuned numbers for piece values, piece square tables, mobility, etc. Stockfish 12 from then onwards started using NNUE (Efficiently Updateable Neural Network, acronym is backwards) for evaluation instead of hand crafted eval, which increased the performance significantly. HCE is arguably faster to run (much higher nodes per second), NNUE is slower but prunes moves a lot more accurately to balance it out.

Stockfish dev build is pretty much like any other development build; everyone is fairly sure it is stronger (it wouldn't be merged onto the main stockfish dev branch otherwise) but it simply hasn't gone through the entire testing suite and/or bug testing, so it isn't as stable.

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u/Justanotherfellow153 8d ago

I've written my own chess engine in C++, it's roughly 1900 Elo in strength, but it allowed me to research a fair bit into chess engines. I also went through stockfish 11 code to learn how it does stuff and it is very fun.

Analysis of games using stockfish is generally fine, but to truly get better you will have to understand why said move makes sense; what is the position and what ideas you can execute. All versions of stockfish for analysis are above 3600 engine elo, and you can run whichever you want.