[hackingthenews]

My impression from reading about chess engines online is that drawing is far simpler if that is your explicit goal. Several comments online on different websites claims that they are able to end games in draws against stockfish.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There's a parameter called "contempt" that you can increase to make the engine avoid draws.

The idea is that if the engine has "contempt" for the opponent, it assigns a negative value to a draw, instead of assigning it a value of zero. The engine will then only attempt to draw if it thinks that it is actually in a worse position, but it will not go for a draw in an objectively drawn game. The engine will even play suboptimal moves in order to avoid drawing.

When playing against evenly matched opponents, contempt makes the engine perform worse. But against weaker opponents (such as human super-grandmasters), contempt can make the engine score significantly better.

[faeriechangling]

Contempt died with NNUE being added to stockfish, it can’t be implemented.

[SamBam]

I'd humbly suggest that those anonymous comments put up or shut up.

[joshuamorton]

There are various videos you can see of strong players forcing draws against stockfish (or engine cheaters online etc.). The general way to do it is to trade everything but rooks and then force a very closed position. Then you shuffle for 50 moves or until contempt makes the computer sacrifice material.

[faeriechangling]

I mean I can force a draw against stockfish by just using stockfish myself to beat stockfish.

Look to put this into perspective back in 2008 Hikaru Nakamura a world top 10 player won a game once against the then top engine and it was a significant story in the chess world that day. It's been 14 years since then. If people can easily draw stockfish I'd like to see them do it live giving stockfish the same clock.

One problem with trying to draw stockfish by trading off its pieces is that stockfish is so dominant it tends to win more games the more complicated positions get, so it's actually hardcoded to be bias towards making positions as complicated as possible, so it will resist you closing the position and trading off pieces to an extent. It's also non-deterministic. You might be able to force it to a draw in some games but it's hard to do this reliably.

I'm also by the way not saying Magnus cannot draw stockfish 1/100 games, I'm saying it wouldn't be easy.

[joshuamorton]

Note that you've shifted the claim a bit:

"Magnus Carlsen would have a real hard time drawing stockfish on a phone 1/100 games." is what you initially said.

If you're running a fully decked out stockfish with classical time controls, yeah the human will lose every game, but if you aren't, then humans can win in 15 second time controls [0], where computers have a distinct advantage of not needing dexterity to move the pieces, and against online cheaters[1], and with some prep (which like, you get against humans too!) they can win with weird prepped lines (Jonathan Schrantz does this fairly regularly, and he's not even titled).

And the systems those players beat are, uhhh, stronger than a phone. Edit: to substantiate this I just checked, stockfish in the TCEC, which is the big beefy 3700 elo one has hardware to evaluate 200 million positions per second on average. my phone sustained 350k/second, although that was in browser and droidfish is probably 10x faster. But you're still looking at 100x slower than the baseline. That's a significant performance drop. The phone is still comfortably above 3k elo, but not 3500. With prep and meta knowledge in a 100 game match? You only need to trick the machine once.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ObxTiA4wG8

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMTcawGzbOk

[faeriechangling]

Okay I’ve never seen that 15 second game strategy before, that’s pretty amazing to literally be able to react faster than stockfishjs. I’ve seen that guy do puzzle rushes before he is an insane talent.

I guess I am overestimating the difficulty because I haven’t seen recent anti-computer strategies. I also know they NNUE changed a lot because contempt is no longer a thing.