The computer likely analyzes all possible moves a move or two deep. It then narrows down the choices to those with the best point value, and looks deeper from there. Since sacrificing material gave lower point values at least a move or two deep, the computer then analyzes the best point values from the first set of possible moves. The result is the white pieces just move around inside their territory, instead of busting through to get the much weaker black pieces.
I made a position that tricked the computer:
Sort:
I think White should play:
1. Qxc5 dxc5 2. d6, then Qd5, then prepare the other two queens to invade and do some checking or just capture the c5 and e5 pawns to make the hole bigger. The loss of a queen, lack of any initial checks, and delay before win back is reached is why the computer will probably just walk pieces back and forth inside its own camp.
Cool
Worded differently:
Humans look at a position and wish they could get a piece to a certain square. They then try to plot a route to get there.
Computers look at every possible move from the current position. There are usually 20-50 possibilities per move per side, which is about 1000 positions per full move, and 1,000,000 positions per 2 white and 2 black moves. See how fast it grows? Computers take a minute to do 200,000,000 moves, so 3 moves deep is asking a bit much. My move one or two, computers start to narrow down the choices based on which ones look best thus far, searching a much smaller subset from there. They like to consider 6 possibilities, per move, so they can go 20 moves deep. But they miss many. This position shows the limitations of computers as currently written.
Grandmasters analyzing Alphazero were very impressed that it was so willing to sacrifice material or not capture material when a better position was possible. This could just be because it had 2000 processing cores and thus could see far enough to see the breakthroughs even with brute force computation.
No it isn’t
Ohhh yes it is!
The position is illegal (unless white started the game with eleven pawns).
Give your computer White. Humans can easily win. I suspect the computer will just tic around.