@gwern and @lc are right. Stockfish is terrible at odds and this post could really use some follow-up.
As @simplegeometry points out in the comments, we now have much stronger odds-playing engines that regularly win against much stronger players than OP.
As the name suggests, Leela Queen Odds is trained specifically to play without a queen, which is of course an absolutely bonkers disadvantage against 2k+ elo players. One interesting wrinkle is the time constraint. AIs are better at fast chess (obviously), and apparently no one who’s tried is yet able to beat it consistently at 3+0 (3 minutes with no timing increment)
At rapid time controls, it seems like we could maybe go even against Magnus with knight odds? If not Magnus, perhaps other high-rated GMs.
There was a match with the most recently updated LeelaKnightOdds and GM Alex Lenderman but I don’t recall the score exactly. EDIT: which was 19-3-2 win draw loss.
I am very skeptical of this on priors, for the record. I think this statement could be true for superblitz time controls and whatnot, but I would be shocked if knight odds would be enough to beat Magnus in a 10+0 or 15+0 game. That being said, I have no inside knowledge, and I would update a lot of my beliefs significantly if your statement as currently written actually ends up being true.
Hissha from the Lc0 server reports 19 wins, 3 draws, and 2 losses against Lenderman (currently ~2500 FIDE) at 15+10 from a knight odds match 2 months ago—with the caveat that Lenderman started playing too fast after 10 games. I haven’t run the numbers but suspect this would be enough to go even against a 2750, if not Magnus?
I was surprised too. I think it’s an exciting development :)
Hmm, that sounds about right based on the usual human-vs-human transfer from Elo difference to performance… but I am still not sure if that holds up when you have odds games, which feel qualitatively different to me than regular games. Based on my current chess intuition, I would expect the ability to win odds games to scale better than ELO near the top level, but I could be wrong about this.
@gwern and @lc are right. Stockfish is terrible at odds and this post could really use some follow-up.
As @simplegeometry points out in the comments, we now have much stronger odds-playing engines that regularly win against much stronger players than OP.
https://lichess.org/@/LeelaQueenOdds
https://marcogio9.github.io/LeelaQueenOdds-Leaderboard/
That’s really cool! Do you have any sense of what kind of material advantage these odd-playing engines could use against the best humans?
As the name suggests, Leela Queen Odds is trained specifically to play without a queen, which is of course an absolutely bonkers disadvantage against 2k+ elo players. One interesting wrinkle is the time constraint. AIs are better at fast chess (obviously), and apparently no one who’s tried is yet able to beat it consistently at 3+0 (3 minutes with no timing increment)
At rapid time controls, it seems like we could maybe go even against Magnus with knight odds? If not Magnus, perhaps other high-rated GMs.
There was a match with the most recently updated LeelaKnightOdds and GM Alex Lenderman
but I don’t recall the score exactly.EDIT: which was 19-3-2 win draw loss.I am very skeptical of this on priors, for the record. I think this statement could be true for superblitz time controls and whatnot, but I would be shocked if knight odds would be enough to beat Magnus in a 10+0 or 15+0 game. That being said, I have no inside knowledge, and I would update a lot of my beliefs significantly if your statement as currently written actually ends up being true.
Hissha from the Lc0 server reports 19 wins, 3 draws, and 2 losses against Lenderman (currently ~2500 FIDE) at 15+10 from a knight odds match 2 months ago—with the caveat that Lenderman started playing too fast after 10 games. I haven’t run the numbers but suspect this would be enough to go even against a 2750, if not Magnus?
I was surprised too. I think it’s an exciting development :)
Hmm, that sounds about right based on the usual human-vs-human transfer from Elo difference to performance… but I am still not sure if that holds up when you have odds games, which feel qualitatively different to me than regular games. Based on my current chess intuition, I would expect the ability to win odds games to scale better than ELO near the top level, but I could be wrong about this.
Knight odds is pretty challenging even for grandmasters.