What is chess engine evaluation?

Computer engines evaluate positions and offer an aggregate figure to show who is ahead. The number means how much better one side is in terms of material. E.g. a -0.8 evaluation means that Black has a serious advantage that is equal to about 0.8 of a pawn.

How are chess engines so good?

Its like a bringing a chess book to a tournament. They do not cheat, they just have better “memory” and stronger processing power. You have your brain to store opening moves, they have a hard drive. You have your brain to visualize the board and analyze the moves, they have RAM and CPU to do that.

How good is a chess engine?

Chess engines are much stronger than humans, with the best of them reaching an estimated Elo rating of more than 3000. Engines are also getting stronger each year due to improvements in hardware and software.

Why do I want to make a chess engine?

The evaluation of a chess board is one of the things that’s kept me interested in chess engines. Evaluation rules are easy to add and take away. I refactored the code from Go to Python to be able to prototype different rules faster.

What does a negative mean in a chess engine?

Chess engines (computer programs) use a standard notation to indicate who is better off (White or Black) in a given position. A negative (“-“) means things look better for Black. However, the evaluation is not just about material currently on the board.

Is there a way to read chess engine evaluations?

Other than wanting to participate in some sort of Terminator-like apocalypse, chess engines also want to play the best moves. However, despite these machines’ brilliance, they are not intelligent (yet?!), so there must be a way for us to know what exactly the machine is thinking. Enter the concept of evaluations.

Why is a 1 evaluation meaningless in chess?

In very complex middlegames, a -1 evaluation could be meaningless because there is some sort of forced sequence that leads to an objectively drawn position (that the computer misevaluates as being -1, or it hasn’t even reached that position due to the horizon effect).