Nicholas Carlini pits Stockfish 17 on 200MHz Pentium vs 1996 Crafty: 78-17-5

The experiment traces back to Deep Blue's 1997 victory over Garry Kasparov, a machine built with 30 processors running at about 120MHz and 480 chess-specific chips. Carlini asked whether such a massive system was necessary to beat Kasparov, and whether a 1996-era consumer PC running modern chess AI could have done the job instead. To test this, he used a 1995-era Pentium Pro PC with 64MB of memory and ran the 1996 program Crafty 11.13 against a heavily modified version of the modern engine Stockfish 17. Crafty 11.13 on the Pentium Pro scored 1999±90 Elo at 1 second per move and 2383±77 at 10 seconds. The same program on a Ryzen 7 PC reached 2614±97 at 1 second per move, showing how much raw hardware speed alone contributed. Carlini then added 30 years of software improvements to Crafty, including search pruning and the NNUE neural network evaluation, lifting it to 2718±34 at 1 second and 2974±74 at 10 seconds on the same old Pentium Pro. When he ported Stockfish 17 to the Pentium Pro, it reached 3180±80 Elo at 30 seconds per move, and he estimated about 3300 under longer tournament conditions. Carlini also broke down the 1335-point Elo gain from 1996 to today, attributing 720 points to program improvements alone. He noted that comparing computer Elo with human tournament Elo is imperfect, and that the 3300 figure is an estimate rather than a measured long-game rating. Still, he concluded the gap is large enough that the improved Stockfish on the old Pentium Pro would very likely beat Kasparov.