Re:AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again
by vova_hn2 on Thursday April 02, 2026 @06:28AM
(#47612452)
> I knew that it was just a minmax with alpha beta pruning and a really good eval function. Now its not.
It is still "just" a minimax with alpha beta pruning, except the eval function is now a neural network. NNUE, to be more specific.
I highly advise anyone who is curious about chess engines, but hasn't heard about NNUE to read about it. I find this technology absolutely fascinating.
The key idea is that a neural network is structured in a way that makes it very cheap to calculate scores for similar positions. This means that during a tree search, each time you advance or backtrack you can update the score efficiently instead of recalculating it from scratch.
It is still "just" a minimax with alpha beta pruning, except the eval function is now a neural network. NNUE, to be more specific.
I highly advise anyone who is curious about chess engines, but hasn't heard about NNUE to read about it. I find this technology absolutely fascinating.
The key idea is that a neural network is structured in a way that makes it very cheap to calculate scores for similar positions. This means that during a tree search, each time you advance or backtrack you can update the score efficiently instead of recalculating it from scratch.
Good starting points to read more:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiently_updatable_neural_n...
- https://www.chessprogramming.org/NNUE