Does the Stockfish engine use past matches, or does it not need such a "database"? I have a simple question. Does the Stockfish engine use, amongst the steps of its complicated algorithm, a library/database of past matches?
For such an algorithm to work, it would to need store many matches that have had a particular scenario. Each scenario has a player who went on to win. Thus, it is provided some kind of rating point to judge each particular scenario with, allowing it to choose the best move. It's either that or the Stockfish engine works just by working through the possible moves to figure out how to win.
In other words, does the Stockfish engine need to be fed data from past matches or can it work without any such data ?
Technically, Stockfish does make use of past matches, just not when it's playing. The way it uses its past matches is during training, when a new neural network (NNUE in Stockfish's case) is being trained. Once the NNUE is trained, though, it is &quot;standalone&quot; and does not change anymore.
The Stockfish you can download and play has an already-trained NNUE, so it does not use past matches.