[xoroshiro]

Probably the wrong engine to test this with then. Although it's interesting nonetheless. It's pretty well known that chess engines have this trade-off between searching and evaluating. Among the consistent top 3 I suppose Stockfish is the easiest to test, being open source and all. It's pretty well regarded that Komodo has the best evaluation function though. Even if it doesn't keep up with the nodes/sec of Houdini and Stockfish, it's consistently up there with the top 3. The other chess engines doen't even come close. (Fire is probably number 4 but is on a league of it's own. Not quite good enough to challenge the top 3, but eats everything else.)

I know it's complicated, between the hardware differences, search method used, etc. But when claiming that NNs beat hand crafted evaluation functions, keep in mind that Stockfish is probably are not the best choice to compare, since it has made different tradeoff choices to get more depth (which goes back to search method and hardware choices).

[gcp]

Your comments about Stockfish, Komodo etc are entirely subjective. "It's pretty well regarded". No it's not.

You can't disconnect the search part from the discussion, as the search selectivity is ALSO learned by the neural network.