A few words about the strength of the play - how to make your chess bot stronger
There are many factors and parameters, which affect how strong your chess bot will be.
First of all,
it depends on how good hardware you have
(escpecially CPU and RAM). Stockfish on intel Pentium 4 will be much weaker than on intel core i7.
Secondly, many depend on the chess engine. Latest versions of Stockfish, Komodo Dragon and LCZero are considered the strongest engines in the world at this moment. Here is rating list.
Opening books and endgame tables are also important (especially in faster time controls).
Endgame book (aka EGTB - endgame tablebases) can be for 5,6 or even for 7 pieces. We can recommend to start with Syzygy 5-men.
Also, strength depends on chess engine configuration. Many chess engines have such parameters as Threads (how many CPU cores use to calculate moves), Contempt (it's something like the aggressiveness of playstyle), Hash size and many others. Please refer to documentations of the specific chess engine.
Always set
Threads parameter
to a max value in engine's settings (it is set to 1 by default). For example, if you have 4-core CPU, set Threads = 4, etc.
Use 64-bit versions of engines, instead of 32-bit versions, if possible (you need 64-bit Windows for that).
And there is one more important moment - time management. Chess engine can play by time or by fixed depth.
Always use "play by time", when you need to achieve the strongest play
. The only exception - very short time controls, like ultrabullet (15 sec per game). At such short time controls it is better to use fixed depth (faster).
In long time controls, it is strongly recommended to use "Play By Time" calculation method with the "
Permanent brain
" feature (pondering). This option allows the engine to calculate the next move during the opponent's turn, which allows increasing the overall strength of play by 15-30%. ChessBotX versions 1.2 and higher support this feature.
Turn off animations at website settings if possible. Also, try to decrease the size of the chessboard if possible (you can even try to lower your screen resolution for that). These recommendations will help the bot to react faster. See more info here.
