When two chess engines play against each other, do we ever see them play the exact same game in succession? (If not, why not?)

You probably wouldn’t.

Based on my understanding, this is because engines use stochastic modelling rather than deterministic modelling.

In deterministic modelling, you configure the inputs (I.e. position on chess board, last move) and you’d end up with a single output. Much like the ‘sausage diagrams’ you might have seen historically.

Stochastic modelling however models a number of different options in the future, (often through Monte Carlo) and produces a distribution of results, from which you’d often take the average result (not sure how that works with engines - I’d guess by the +/- of the position). However the key is because it’s running multiple simulations of moves it won’t end up with the same end result each time. The individual results will be slightly different resulting in a slightly different outcome. Theoretically if you ran enough simulations (10,000 is often the number used for Monte Carlo), you’d end up with a very similar result.

I’ve probably butchered the explanation of that, and as I say, just someone with a loose understanding of deterministic vs stochastic modelling rather than someone who knows the ins and outs of engines.

/r/chess Thread