Can Engines properly assess openings?

What do you mean?

Nxf7 was not suggested but still draw .Do you mean other moves that SF suggest leads to worse than Nxf7? Show me the FEN or position let me analyse with my 4 cores i5 cpu for 3 mins with  6 men TB access. ( approx 1 billion position ).

I wont be surprised if SF missed 1% of opening ( I will forward that 1% for stockfish development fishcooking discussion)

Are you saying other moves that SF suggest leads to a loss or  worse position?

I meant the entire discussion took place after Nxf7 (which does draw but everyone knows is not good.) The OP was claiming White was winning because SF said so. I showed that Black, in fact, could sac a piece a force a draw by perpetual check. SF agrees with that, but only if you show it one of the moves leading up to the draw. For some reason that thread seems to have been deleted (I'm not sure the OP still has an account,) but the same line came up in another thread and someone else came along there and suggested a different move later on in that line for Black which leads to an advantage. So yeah, the moves SF suggest do lead to a loss or worse or position in that line. (But you have to plan the inferior Nxf7 to get into that line and I don't think SF is going to suggest it, so it's not the best example.) There are still positions like this, material imbalances in crazy, romantic openings that engines tend to mis-evaluate until they calculate past the important horizon. I will see if I can find that thread again but it seems you already have endgames here to test. Not what you were asking about, but another place where we know engines can be weak.

There's a line in the Traxler where a lot of people on this forum could play better than Stockfish. We were debating it here a few years back. Stockfish says White is winning until it sees black has a draw by repetition, then its evaluation goes to 0. Stockfish will take that draw but people who read that forum would castle Queenside as black. Eventually Stockfish sees black is better but it takes it a very long time. There's a line in the KG that at least five or six years back Fritz was similar, idk about now. Of course engines will never play into either of these lines if you don't make it do it because their opening books have been programmed by human players who have studied and know they are bad.

Lol, Numqualm, yes, that is what I meant. Though we ended up wasting work both writing it out at the same time, thank you.

Why not?? You can see evaluation values before and after the moves. If evaluations get worse, it is unsound, getting better means sound.

Or else, do you want an engine to explain the moves verbally? In fact it is possible, if chess is a big business that everyone is interested, programmers can do verbal output / explaination of engine moves.

They have their own evaluation that guide them to decide the better moves and they always choose the better move after the allocated search time.

I think dmrboss believes that engines are superior to humans in openings because they are smarter. But hundreds of theoreticians using an engine analysis to assist them can play an opening better. Chess Engines like Leela can contribute to theory a lot, but they are not the basis of all theory. Engines that believe hypermodern openings are unsound believe that entirely because they like a space advantage. A "perfect engine" could possibly determine the soundness of openings with humans fact-checking. We should keep a close eye on AlphaZero in the case of which it evaluates openings. I doubt that this means that openings AlphaZero prefers to avoid are unsound.

As an author of a chess engine (called Rodent, slightly above 3000 Elo on a CCRL scale) I must tell you that evaluations of strong engines are not objective - because they are not meant to.  The goal of returning objective evaluation is different from the goal of returning evaluation that improves engine's play. One simple example: Stockfish has ridiculously high bonus for threatening to check enemy king. Please open Stockfish in a console mode (ie. open the engine exe file directly, so that a black window appears). In that window, please type the following line:

position startpos moves d2d4 g8f6 c2c4 g7g6 b1c3 d7d5 c4d5 f6d5 e2e4 d5c3 b2c3 c7c5

then press enter, then type "eval". With Stockfish 10 You will get score of over 1.5 pawn for white, meaning that Grunfeld defence is close to busted, which it obviously isn't. What the hell is going on?

I'll tell you. Stockfish gives insane bonus for the possibility of giving two checks to black king (Bb5 and Qa4). Why does it need such an absurd bonus? The answer is in the search. If Stockfish searches, say, 30 plies, then the chance of such eval being backpropagated right to the root of the search and returned as final positional evaluation are abysmally small, something like 1 to 100.000.000. What if they do get backpropagated to the root? It means that the engine cannot avoid these threats, or has to make big concessions in order to defuse them. Had these threats been avoidable (and in the Grunfeld line they will disappear once black castles short), search would avoid them and you would not see this high value as a final score. Final score returned by modern engines is a result of a struggle between two opposing forces: evaluation function trying to generate absurdly high score, and search trying to return the lowest common denominator, score that both black and white claim to be the best. Evaluation creates high values, search gravitates towards low scores, acceptable for both sides, unless these high scores are really unavoidable.

To summarize: engine evaluations aren't objective. They are numbers created by a function whose aim is to guide the search, not to inform user about true merits of the position. What's more, Stockfist with an evaluation that tries to be objective would be weaker by 200 to 400 Elo points.

As an author of a chess engine (called Rodent, slightly above 3000 Elo on a CCRL scale) I must tell you that evaluations of strong engines are not objective - because they are not meant to.  The goal of returning objective evaluation is different from the goal of returning evaluation that improves engine's play. One simple example: Stockfish has ridiculously high bonus for threatening to check enemy king. Please open Stockfish in a console mode (ie. open the engine exe file directly, so that a black window appears). In that window, please type the following line:

position startpos moves d2d4 g8f6 c2c4 g7g6 b1c3 d7d5 c4d5 f6d5 e2e4 d5c3 b2c3 c7c5

then press enter, then type "eval". With Stockfish 10 You will get score of over 1.5 pawn for white, meaning that Grunfeld defence is close to busted, which it obviously isn't. What the hell is going on?

I'll tell you. Stockfish gives insane bonus for the possibility of giving two checks to black king (Bb5 and Qa4). Why does it need such an absurd bonus? The answer is in the search. If Stockfish searches, say, 30 plies, then the chance of such eval being backpropagated right to the root of the search and returned as final positional evaluation are abysmally small, something like 1 to 100.000.000. What if they do get backpropagated to the root? It means that the engine cannot avoid these threats, or has to make big concessions in order to defuse them. Had these threats been avoidable (and in the Grunfeld line they will disappear once black castles short), search would avoid them and you would not see this high value as a final score. Final score returned by modern engines is a result of a struggle between two opposing forces: evaluation function trying to generate absurdly high score, and search trying to return the lowest common denominator, score that both black and white claim to be the best. Evaluation creates high values, search gravitates towards low scores, acceptable for both sides, unless these high scores are really unavoidable.

To summarize: engine evaluations aren't objective. They are numbers created by a function whose aim is to guide the search, not to inform user about true merits of the position. What's more, Stockfist with an evaluation that tries to be objective would be weaker by 200 to 400 Elo points.

My S10 gives 0.3 in that position, which is a very reasonable evaluation, and it doesn't think Bb5+ is better than Bc4.

His example is the search at depth 1....anyways the point is any engine is biased. Yes, that includes Leela.

That wont stop the many from saying over and over again the best first 'independent' moves are d4,c4,Nf3,and g3....and have no clue that its a transposition to the same position that has some small bonuses.   

This has also been noted in the context of the role of technology in lives, from a generational standpoint.

Engines and people alike have biases in chess evaluation. Only the Flying Spaghetti Monster can tell us the answer

As an author of a chess engine (called Rodent, slightly above 3000 Elo on a CCRL scale) I must tell you that evaluations of strong engines are not objective - because they are not meant to.  The goal of returning objective evaluation is different from the goal of returning evaluation that improves engine's play. One simple example: Stockfish has ridiculously high bonus for threatening to check enemy king. Please open Stockfish in a console mode (ie. open the engine exe file directly, so that a black window appears). In that window, please type the following line:

position startpos moves d2d4 g8f6 c2c4 g7g6 b1c3 d7d5 c4d5 f6d5 e2e4 d5c3 b2c3 c7c5

then press enter, then type "eval". With Stockfish 10 You will get score of over 1.5 pawn for white, meaning that Grunfeld defence is close to busted, which it obviously isn't. What the hell is going on?

I'll tell you. Stockfish gives insane bonus for the possibility of giving two checks to black king (Bb5 and Qa4). Why does it need such an absurd bonus? The answer is in the search. If Stockfish searches, say, 30 plies, then the chance of such eval being backpropagated right to the root of the search and returned as final positional evaluation are abysmally small, something like 1 to 100.000.000. What if they do get backpropagated to the root? It means that the engine cannot avoid these threats, or has to make big concessions in order to defuse them. Had these threats been avoidable (and in the Grunfeld line they will disappear once black castles short), search would avoid them and you would not see this high value as a final score. Final score returned by modern engines is a result of a struggle between two opposing forces: evaluation function trying to generate absurdly high score, and search trying to return the lowest common denominator, score that both black and white claim to be the best. Evaluation creates high values, search gravitates towards low scores, acceptable for both sides, unless these high scores are really unavoidable.

To summarize: engine evaluations aren't objective. They are numbers created by a function whose aim is to guide the search, not to inform user about true merits of the position. What's more, Stockfist with an evaluation that tries to be objective would be weaker by 200 to 400 Elo points.