WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO REMEMBER
To use a chess engine properly, you'll need to remember just a couple of
important things we've learned in this chapter.
When an engine shows you its search depth, that is, how many moves
ahead it's looked, it expresses this value in half-moves or plies.
When a chess engine shows you a numerical evaluation at the end of a
suggested variation, those moves reflect best play for both sides in the
chess engine's judgment (computers never say “Maybe he won't see
it...”), and the numerical evaluation the engine assigns applies to for the
board position at the end of the variation it shows.
Finally, the farther ahead a computer searches (we often say “the deeper
the engine looks into the position”), the better and more accurate the
evaluation will tend to be. That's why the old 1970's and 1980's chess
computers often played such awful chess; their processors weren't
strong enough to look deeply ahead, and their primitive algorithms
sometimes misevaluated positions. Present day chess engines are not
only faster, but smarter, too – the art of programming a chess computer
has advanced a great deal over the years.
Now let's get to work making you a better chess player!
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