Forgotten History: The Modern War of Chess AI!

  This is part 2 of the series, talking about the Story of Chess AI. The previous blog posts talked about the pre-2000 Era, where IBM’s Deep Blue dominated Humanity. However, in 2008, Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiisk created something. And that thing is called Stockfish!

So let’s dive right into it!

THE CREATION OF STOCKFISH

In 2004, a college student named Tord Romstad created an open-source chess bot called Glaurung. The bot never exploded into the competitive scene, however, it laid the framework for the eventual creation of Stockfish.

4 years later, two more college students came to the team and created what would be known now as Stockfish. Stockfish was especially powerful because it was far more aggressive than any other chess engine, considering the most forcing options first.

When it was first created, it wasn’t the most powerful chess engine by any means, being ranked 3rd or 4th when it was first created. However, due to its forcing options, this aggressive chess engine very quickly became the most potent chess engine objectively. But for how long?

Google’s War Against Stockfish

The previous chess bots had learned to play and master chess by using loads of human data. But Google’s approach was very different. Google had created a neural network, where their robot, Alphazero played millions of games against itself. 

This allowed it to improve at exponential speed. This brand new neural network was so powerful that it could defeat the legendary Stockfish, which had been champion for over 6 years in a row, with just 9 hours of training. The legendary games between Stockfish and Alphazero infamously ended with Alphazero winning 99% of the games.

Alphazero was interesting as it hugely favoured activity over material, sacrificing multiple pawns, sometimes multiple pieces to gain a colossal activity advantage. Sadly, AlphaZero’s development was stopped by Google, and once again, Stockfish became the reigning champion.

LEELA CHESS ZERO

Google’s Bot, AlphaZero became such an excellent success that Gian-Carlo Pascutto used AlphaZero’s reinforced learning to create Leela Chess Zero (LCZero). LCZero was first announced in January 2018, and within a few months, it had already reached the Grandmaster level.

LCZero, unfortunately, did not have as big of a legacy as AlphaZero, however, in 2019, it won the Top Chess Engine Championship, scoring significantly higher than Stockfish. LcZero was known to have exceptional strength in the Fischer Random category.

THE PRESENT + THE FUTURE

Recently, Chess.com released their own chess engine, named Torch, which is currently the second most powerful Chess Engine. It is unknown currently whether Stockfish will be dethroned or not, but, we can say that Stockfish has lamented its legacy, as one of the Greatest Chess Bots in History.