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Meanwhile, white to move and mate in two.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
In Berlin yesteday for the kitchy but lucrative “Armageddon” blitz, Wesley So defeated Richard Rapport and must now face Nodirbek Abdusattorov. The winner plays Duda for €80,000!
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Meanwhile, I watched a podcast yesterday Fabi, Christian and Yassir and learned about Chessify.
This is really interesting. Instead of getting ever stronger computers to handle chess databases and analysis, you can use a cloud based super-computer. You “rent” time on it. It can do things that our home computers couldn’t dream of… not that our home computers… at least I hope not. I’m not sure what my computer is doing when I’m away.
Anyway, Chessify gives access to the best engines and tablebase. There is a free level that analyzes at 1,000 kN/s speed. Paid, up to 1 BN/s. Not sure exactly what that is or how it might translate into actual language. One billion N per second where N is… “nodes”. Okay… HERE…
A node, … is a chess position with its evaluation and history, i.e. castling rights, repetition of moves, move turn, etc. Once you make a move, the engine starts calculating various continuations in search of the best move. This process can be described as a decision tree with its root being the current position. Every legal move creates a new position, known as a child node, and each of those child nodes, in turn, grows into more branches with every legal move.
FWIW… after White’s first move the number of possible positions is 20 (16 pawn moves, 4 knight moves). After 2 moves: 400 distinct chess positions. After 3 moves: 5,362 distinct chess positions or 8,902 total positions after three moves (White’s second move). You see where this is going. After 7 moves: 3,284,294,545.
The total number of chess positions is called the Shannon number, which is 10120,.
That’s a lot of nodes. Anyway,
Stockfish working on 4 CPUs of an average local computer considers around 5,000k nodes per second, which is insufficient for in-depth analysis. A local high-end computer, on the other hand, can support up to 20,000 kN/s; and a special pay-top-dollar local server, which may be owned by some super GMs only, will provide around 50,000kN/s. Higher speeds are possible to reach only with cloud servers: from 100,000 to 1 million kN/s and even higher if needed.
When I turn on Stockfish to analyze something, immediately the cooling fan revs up. I really need a new computer.
Fun facts.
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A variation on the classic attack on f7:
1. N-g5 B-d8 or Q-d8 or N-e5
2. N-h7#
1. Kg5 . . .
If 1A. . . . Rh8, then 2. Qf7#.
If 1A. . . . Qe8, then 2. Kh7#.
I had access to a 128-core, 1TB RAM cloud setup for a time, and opened up the Lichess analysis board. This setup was optimized for a different task, and I’d guess the Lichess browser isn’t optimized to use all of those resources, so may not reveal the true powers of Chessify. I was getting up to ~25/30k nodes/sec. That was ~8x more than my desktop gets, and ~8x the number of cores, so I’m thinking cores -> nodes is relatively linear.
One significant advantage was it could calculate 5+ lines to a certain depth (say depth 25) as quickly as a normal desktop could calculate a single line to the same depth. I suspect this is of enormous advantage when doing opening prep.
In the same way a normal desktop hits a wall at a certain depth, the cloud computer hit a wall too, but the depth was much greater (say depth 35/40, instead of 20/25). I imagine the opening prep advantage is you can lock in the next 4-5 moves in a given position from the current evaluation, rather than needing to make the first 2-3 moves, re-evaluate, and then determine the next 2-3 moves (and potentially re-evaluate the first 2-3 moves).
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UncleBlobb, thank you so much! You saved me from having to search for that information.