Would it be possible to use something like Maia, instead of Stockfish? Then you could more plausibly get ‘higher human-strength moves’, where you are not left trying to followup impossibly sharp tactical play you can’t pull off without a chess engine, or other issues with doing direct naive behavior cloning from superhuman chess engines.
I looked into this, and I think it wouldn’t work for what I’m trying to do.
On my item bank (filtered for bad moves that humans thought were plausible), Maia basically agrees with Stockfish around half of the time, but also makes a move as bad or worse than the human around a quarter of the time. There are a small number of cases where Maia picks a good move and thinks Stockfish’s move is completely implausible (1.5%), but either the moves are so close that we’d basically never serve it, or the bad move is obvious even if Stockfish’s move is weird.
Since I want to guarantee that the moves we show people are actually good, I approach this from the other direction and use how hard it is to see Stockfish’s move as a difficulty filter. At low ratings, we show you moves where there’s a large win swing that’s visible with a shallow search, and as you get better we slowly show moves with a smaller win swing or that require a deeper search to see.
Here’s the ratings bands and gaps:
rating band
median win rate gap
0–400
0.441
1200–1600
0.315
2000–2400
0.185
2400–2800
0.065
2800–3200
0.081
So, it’s possible for us to show moves that are very hard to distinguish, but only if you’re insanely good at this task. This item from before would require you to be in our 2400+ band.
Would it be possible to use something like Maia, instead of Stockfish? Then you could more plausibly get ‘higher human-strength moves’, where you are not left trying to followup impossibly sharp tactical play you can’t pull off without a chess engine, or other issues with doing direct naive behavior cloning from superhuman chess engines.
I looked into this, and I think it wouldn’t work for what I’m trying to do.
On my item bank (filtered for bad moves that humans thought were plausible), Maia basically agrees with Stockfish around half of the time, but also makes a move as bad or worse than the human around a quarter of the time. There are a small number of cases where Maia picks a good move and thinks Stockfish’s move is completely implausible (1.5%), but either the moves are so close that we’d basically never serve it, or the bad move is obvious even if Stockfish’s move is weird.
For examples of the last category, Maia plays queen to g7 here, and rook to e8 here.
Since I want to guarantee that the moves we show people are actually good, I approach this from the other direction and use how hard it is to see Stockfish’s move as a difficulty filter. At low ratings, we show you moves where there’s a large win swing that’s visible with a shallow search, and as you get better we slowly show moves with a smaller win swing or that require a deeper search to see.
Here’s the ratings bands and gaps:
rating band
median win rate gap
0–400
0.441
1200–1600
0.315
2000–2400
0.185
2400–2800
0.065
2800–3200
0.081
So, it’s possible for us to show moves that are very hard to distinguish, but only if you’re insanely good at this task. This item from before would require you to be in our 2400+ band.