Strength of Lichess computer

@Cedur216 : It used to be rated 1350, that's why it was so hard for beginners.
Now they are doing some modifications and the rating number will probably change.

yeah cool.

Also games against Stockfish shouldn't be considered for your longest/current win streak, since basically someone could play stockfish 1 over and over and get a neverending winning streak.

I am glad I found this because I thought someone broke computer stockfish levels and I need to file a bug. I am actually not happy that the team chose to do this without implementing some sort of notification that level strengths have changed.

I for one appreciated that Stockfish 1 was a challenge for me - I am pretty much at beginner level and it was totally fair. There is no point of winning against a dumb opponent that does completely nonsense moves. I don't see how anyone would learn from it.

Now even level 2 is so dumb it would do nonsense moves instead of taking a queen which was handed to it on a silver platter.

Now that I complained I am going to go figure out at what level I can actually get a reasonable opponent.

@denis1928: I have built a mental idea of why this could be happening.

* Stockfish calculates all the possible moves with "infinite" depth (infinite from our point of view of beginners).
* The moves are sorted, and one of them is chosen according to some "weight function" which depends on the difficult level.
* In lower levels there is a higher probability of chosing the 2nd-best move, the 3rd-best move or even another move down in the sorted list.

When we are in the middle of a piece-trade, the best reply for the computer is normally to "re-take"; even the 2nd best move is very often a material loss for the computer. And that is exactly how the lower levels behave, not only on this site lichess.org but also on other chess sites: we take the queen and cross fingers, maybe the computer does not retake and we are 1 queen up :)

I wonder if there are more realistic ways of weakening a good engine like Stockfish.
Perhaps calculating the replies with lower depth, maybe depth=2, 3 or 5 instead of depth=22?

@diedrsch I don't know why it's happening or how the team changed the algorithm but I just beat level 3 in less than 15 min and I did barely any thinking until the game was almost done. Computer's moves where just irrational and all over the place.

Maybe you right and the key to a good computer opponent is not about making dumb moves to lower the game level but rather making good moves but with less depth at each level. I think that's how humans basically start out - their ability to think ahead and strategize improves as their level grows.

My 10 year old for example focuses mostly on the next move and either defending or attacking pieces with occasional pattern recognition because grandpa is teaching her.

Bottom line I feel like we traded a system that was sometimes unpredictably strong at lower levels to one that is too dumb with occasional spikes in good moves. It is still an inconsistent experience but levels 1-3 based on what I have seen are mostly very weak.

Lichess level 1 vs Shredder-elo 850, Lichess K+Queen giving up against Shredder K+Knight...
lichess.org/Bs2GuXxx/black

Here is the game:

Looking at how levels 3 en 4 play and after some testgames against other computerprograms, I would say:
Level 3 is 1200 elo and level 4 is 1400 elo.