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Here’s a chess stackexchange of positions that stump engines

https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/29716/positions-th...

It basically comes down to “ideas that are rare enough that they were never programmed into a chess engine”.

Blockades or positions where no progress is possible are a common theme. Engines will often keep tree searching where a human sees an obvious repeating pattern.

Here’s also an example where 2 engines are playing, and deep mind finds a move that I think would be obvious to most grandmasters, yet stockfish misses it https://youtu.be/lFXJWPhDsSY?si=zaLQR6sWdEJBMbIO

That being said, I’m not sure that this necessarily correlates with brilliancy. There are a few of these that I would probably get in classical time and I’m not a particularly brilliant player.


Stockfish totally dropped hand crafted evaluations in 2023.
It’s still the case that the evaluation model hasn’t seen enough examples of a blockade to be able to understand it as far as I can tell. Some very simple ones it can (in fact I’ve seen stockfish/alpha-zero execute quite clever blockades before). But there’s still a gap where humans understand them better.

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