A 1996 Pentium Pro Running Modern Stockfish Would Have Crushed Kasparov
Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
Nicholas Carlini ported Stockfish to a 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 64MB of RAM and estimates it plays at roughly 3300 Elo at classical time controls—far above Kasparov's 2800. By backporting three decades of search and evaluation improvements, he shows most of modern chess engines' strength comes from better algorithms, not faster hardware. In a 100-game match, the modern engine on the vintage Pentium beat 1996 Crafty on a modern Ryzen 78–17–5.
As it turns out, we could easily have beaten Kasparov without building Deep Blue, using only commodity hardware, and it (almost certainly) wouldn't have even been close.
- tombert
Very tangential, but I think a lot about how modern video compression has gotten so unbelievably good that if we went back in time with AV1 or HEVC or something, I'm wondering if we could have had passable video streaming at 240p with something like an ISDN connection.
It would be a tight fit, but I still think within feasibility. We've gotten so good at shrinking video that it kind of feels like wizardry to me. Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.
- FartyMcFarter
Awesome article. Nit:
> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.
I don't buy this. I've seen GMs playing online while verbalizing their thought process (on twitch / youtube videos where they livestream their play), and they consider way more branches than I do, while also going deeper than I ever would on some branches. My top rating in lichess blitz is about 1900, not bad but way lower than a GM.
- rockmeamedee
Yes but most of it is NNUE, a custom neural network trained on mountains of data to copy modern Stockfish.
So a computer from back then _can_ run at Elo +3k, but the programmers at the time wouldn't have been able to implement it even if you went back with a time machine and the blueprint for the technique. They wouldn't have the teacher model to distill from.
- Sharlin
> because who would want to buy a Pentium Pro when the better-in-almost-every-way Pentium MMX
Maybe this was satirizing people running after every shiny new thing, but the MMX certainly wasn’t. The Pro was the first P6, a totally new, out-of-order microarchitecture that the Pentium 2 would be based on. The MMX was a standard P5 Pentium with a larger L1 and the MMX vector instruction set which, while the first of its kind in an x86, was ultimately not used much in applications, partly because it was integer-only (also because it awkwardly co-opted the existing FPU registers rather than having its own register file). In any case, the Pros were expensive and meant for business use, while the MMXs were consumer processors.
- dmurray
Great project but I have a nit on the board displays: every board is displayed as <human username> vs Pentium Pro, even when the Pentium is playing White. The normal chess convention is <White name> vs <Black name>.
I spent some time trying to figure out how some of the humans seemed to have trapped the machine out of the opening, because it looked like the human was winning.
- mb_thd
> Throughout this article, when I say "I wrote", what I really mean is "I asked an LLM to write".
I wish disclaimers like that would be at the start and not halfway trough the text.
- weinzierl
I find the general topic of purely algorithmic progress super interesting.
I just ran Andrej Karpathy's Tiny Stories model on a tiny ESP32.
In principle we could probably have done this in the 80's and it would have been so amazing.
- glimshe
Very interesting. I don't play chess but like to observe others playing and talking about it on YouTube.
I thought about something the other day... Modern chess sites run proprietary algorithms to detect cheating by modern engines. But would it be possible for an old engine, let's say from the 70s or 80s, running on modern hardware to deceive these algorithms?
They wouldn't win every tournament but still have a respectable performance.