Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one? In many areas such as prediction and classification, ensemble methods tend to outperform individual methods. This made me wonder if it would make sense to pick a few of the top chess engines and work with them together to make a stronger one.
Let us assume the total amount of hardware is fixed to what people use for typical benchmarks, and that the time is fixed as well. In addition, we would not be changing the engines themselves to work together, but just making a wrapper around them that they are practically unaware of.
Hence my refined question:
How hard would it be to beat the number 1 engine in the world, by an ensemble of engines with fair resources?
The answer is &quot;No&quot;.
If you have a defined fixed set of resources - CPUs, memory, cache, etc. - and you allow one engine to have full use of them then that engine is going to be able to analyse to a greater depth than if you take the same set of resources and split them in some way between several different engines. Inevitably the single engine analysing to a greater depth is going to perform better than several engines analysing to a much lesser depth.