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Fairy-Stockfish

Fabian Fichter

Fairy-Stockfish Hand-Crafted Evaluation

Chess engineStrategy
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How can we learn to evaluate like IM Emory Tate?

As always, opinions are my own, not those of Lichess.org.

Legend IM Emory Tate visited my chess club and regaled with us his best games. How can I learn to evaluate like Tate (or like Karpov), so I may defeat @LeelaQueenOdds?

https://lichess.org/study/Lii1yPZJ/NziaZaPI#21

Stockfish 16 removed hand-crafted evaluation. Thankfully, Fairy-Stockfish still has it!
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This data needs a radar chart visualization (although I don't know how to produce a good one). We need to be able to visualize data in order to properly understand it; humans are terrible with raw numbers like -0.63 or 44.5. I suspect a 2-D, 3-D, or n-D visualization could radically change all future chess and shogi commentary (photo credit: AbemaTV).
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Thinking about Super Evaluation... we can and we do augment engine data with clock data as well as "psychological situation" data (however you want to define that) when spectating games, and even when making decisions in our own games. The latest Perpetual Chess Podcast episode likewise grapples with this topic:
https://youtu.be/47kt28i8zVA

I have only questions and no answers, but please do use and support Fairy-Stockfish, and data science in general!


Image credit: @ubdip
EDIT 2024-11-23: Commenters noted that the current Stockfish stable release also includes an "eval" command with a breakdown by material, space, initiative, etc. despite those numbers being generated from neural network data (and therefore perhaps being challenging to understand as compared to HCE).