Official release version of Stockfish 15
Bench: 8129754
---
A new major release of Stockfish is now available at https://stockfishchess.org
Stockfish 15 continues to push the boundaries of chess, providing unrivalled
analysis and playing strength. In our testing, Stockfish 15 is ahead of
Stockfish 14 by 36 Elo points and wins nine times more game pairs than it
loses[1].
Improvements to the engine have made it possible for Stockfish to end up
victorious in tournaments at all sorts of time controls ranging from bullet to
classical and even at Fischer random chess[2]. At CCC, Stockfish won all of
the latest tournaments: CCC 16 Bullet, Blitz and Rapid, CCC 960 championship,
and the CCC 17 Rapid. At TCEC, Stockfish won the Season 21, Cup 9, FRC 4 and
in the current Season 22 superfinal, at the time of writing, has won 16 game
pairs and not yet lost a single one.
This progress is the result of a dedicated team of developers that comes up
with new ideas and improvements. For Stockfish 15, we tested nearly 13000
different changes and retained the best 200. These include the fourth
generation of our NNUE network architecture, as well as various search
improvements. To perform these tests, contributors provide CPU time for
testing, and in the last year, they have collectively played roughly a
billion chess games. In the last few years, our distributed testing
framework, Fishtest, has been operated superbly and has been developed and
improved extensively. This work by Pasquale Pigazzini, Tom Vijlbrief, Michel
Van den Bergh, and various other developers[3] is an essential part of the
success of the Stockfish project.
Indeed, the Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
to offer a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely
available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the Fishtest
testing framework and programmers to contribute to the project[4].
The Stockfish team
[1] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/625d156dff677a888877d1be
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Competition_results
[3] https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/blob/master/AUTHORS
[4] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/
retire msvc support and corresponding CI. No active development happens on msvc,
and build is much slower or wrong.
gcc (mingw) is our toolchain of choice also on windows, and the latter is tested.
No functional change
In case the evaluation at root is large, discourage the use of lazyEval.
This fixes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/3772
or at least improves it significantly. In this case, poor play with large
odds can be observed, in extreme cases leading to a loss despite large
advantage:
r1bq1b1r/ppp3p1/3p1nkp/n3p3/2B1P2N/2NPB3/PPP2PPP/R3K2R b KQ - 5 9
With this patch the poor move is only considered up to depth 13, in master
up to depth 28.
The patch did not pass at LTC with Elo gainer bounds, but with slightly
positive Elo nevertheless (95% LOS).
STC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) <0.00,2.50>
Total: 40368 W: 10318 L: 10041 D: 20009
Ptnml(0-2): 103, 4493, 10725, 4750, 113
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/61800ad259e71df00dcc420d
LTC:
LLR: -2.94 (-2.94,2.94) <0.50,3.00>
Total: 212288 W: 52997 L: 52692 D: 106599
Ptnml(0-2): 112, 22038, 61549, 22323, 122
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/618050d959e71df00dcc426d
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3780
Bench: 7127040
Official release version of Stockfish 14.1
Bench: 6334068
---
Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 14.1.
As usual, downloads will be freely available at stockfishchess.org/download [1].
With Stockfish 14.1 our users get access to the strongest chess engine
available today. In the period leading up to this release, Stockfish
convincingly won several chess engine tournaments, including the TCEC 21
superfinal, the TCEC Cup 9, and the Computer Chess Championship for
Fischer Random Chess (Chess960). In the latter tournament, Stockfish
was undefeated in 599 out of 600 games played.
Compared to Stockfish 14, this release introduces a more advanced NNUE
architecture and various search improvements. In self play testing, using
a book of balanced openings, Stockfish 14.1 wins three times more game
pairs than it loses [2]. At this high level, draws are very common, so the
Elo difference to Stockfish 14 is about 17 Elo. The NNUE evaluation method,
introduced to top level chess with Stockfish 12 about one year ago [3],
has now been adopted by several other strong CPU based chess engines.
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
(thanks everybody!) that contribute their expertise, time, and resources
to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust,
widely available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the
fishtest testing framework and programmers to contribute to the project [4].
Stay safe and enjoy chess!
The Stockfish team
[1] https://stockfishchess.org/download/
[2] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/6175c320af70c2be1788fa2b
[3] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/discussions/3628
[4] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/
Official release version of Stockfish 14
Bench: 4770936
---
Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 14.
As usual, downloads will be freely available at https://stockfishchess.org
The engine is now significantly stronger than just a few months ago,
and wins four times more game pairs than it loses against the previous
release version [0]. Stockfish 14 is now at least 400 Elo ahead of
Stockfish 7, a top engine in 2016 [1]. During the last five years,
Stockfish has thus gained about 80 Elo per year.
Stockfish 14 evaluates positions more accurately than Stockfish 13 as
a result of two major steps forward in defining and training the
efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) that provides the evaluation
for positions.
First, the collaboration with the Leela Chess Zero team - announced
previously [2] - has come to fruition. The LCZero team has provided a
collection of billions of positions evaluated by Leela that we have
combined with billions of positions evaluated by Stockfish to train the
NNUE net that powers Stockfish 14. The fact that we could use and combine
these datasets freely was essential for the progress made and demonstrates
the power of open source and open data [3].
Second, the architecture of the NNUE network was significantly updated:
the new network is not only larger, but more importantly, it deals better
with large material imbalances and can specialize for multiple phases of
the game [4]. A new project, kick-started by Gary Linscott and
Tomasz Sobczyk, led to a GPU accelerated net trainer written in
pytorch.[5] This tool allows for training high-quality nets in a couple
of hours.
Finally, this release features some search refinements, minor bug
fixes and additional improvements. For example, Stockfish is now about
90 Elo stronger for chess960 (Fischer random chess) at short time control.
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
(thanks everybody!) that contribute their expertise, time, and resources
to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely
available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the fishtest
testing framework and programmers to contribute to the project on
github [6].
Stay safe and enjoy chess!
The Stockfish team
[0] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/60dae5363beab81350aca077
[1] https://nextchessmove.com/dev-builds
[2] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/stockfish-13/
[3] https://lczero.org/blog/2021/06/the-importance-of-open-data/
[4] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/e8d64af1
[5] https://github.com/glinscott/nnue-pytorch/
[6] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/
Official release version of Stockfish 13
Bench: 3766422
-----
It is our pleasure to release Stockfish 13 to chess fans worldwide.
As usual, downloads are freely available at
https://stockfishchess.org
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
who contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free
and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and
very strong. We would like to thank them all!
The good news first: from now on, our users can expect more frequent
high-quality releases of Stockfish! Sadly, this decision has been
triggered by the start of sales of the Fat Fritz 2 engine by ChessBase,
which is a copy of a very recent development version of Stockfish
with minor modifications. We refer to our statement on Fat Fritz 2[1]
and a community blog[2] for further information.
This version of Stockfish is significantly stronger than any of its
predecessors. Stockfish 13 outperforms Stockfish 12 by at least
35 Elo[3]. When playing against a one-year-old Stockfish, it wins 60
times more game pairs than it loses[4]. This release features an NNUE
network retrained on billions of positions, much faster network
evaluation code, and significantly improved search heuristics, as
well as additional evaluation tweaks. In the course of its development,
this version has won the superfinals of the TCEC Season 19 and
TCEC Season 20.
Going forward, the Leela Chess Zero and Stockfish teams will join
forces to demonstrate our commitment to open source chess engines and
training tools, and open data. We are convinced that our free and
open-source chess engines serve the chess community very well.
Stay safe and enjoy chess!
The Stockfish team
[1] https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/643239805544792064/statement-on-fat-fritz-2
[2] https://lichess.org/blog/YCvy7xMAACIA8007/fat-fritz-2-is-a-rip-off
[3] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/602bcccf7f517a561bc49b11
[4] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/600fbb9c735dd7f0f0352d59
Using no searching time in case of a single legal move is not beneficial from
a strength point of view, and this special case can be easily removed:
STC:
LLR: 2.93 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.25,0.25}
Total: 22472 W: 2458 L: 2357 D: 17657
Ptnml(0-2): 106, 1733, 7453, 1842, 102
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5f926cbc81eda81bd78cb6df
LTC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-0.75,0.25}
Total: 37880 W: 1736 L: 1682 D: 34462
Ptnml(0-2): 22, 1392, 16057, 1448, 21
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5f92a26081eda81bd78cb6fe
The advantage of using the normal time management for a single legal move is that scores
reported for that move are reasonable, not searching leads to artifacts during games
(see e.g. https://tcec-chess.com/#div=sf&game=96&season=19)
The disadvantage of using normal time management of a single legal move is that thinking
times can be unnaturally long, making it 'painful to watch' in online tournaments.
This patch uses normal time management, but caps the used time to 500ms.
This should lead to reasonable scores, and be hardly perceptible.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3195
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3183
variant of a patch suggested by SFisGOD
No functional change.
Official release version of Stockfish 12
Bench: 3624569
-----------------------
It is our pleasure to release Stockfish 12 to users world-wide
Downloads will be freely available at
https://stockfishchess.org/download/
This version 12 of Stockfish plays significantly stronger than
any of its predecessors. In a match against Stockfish 11,
Stockfish 12 will typically win at least ten times more game pairs
than it loses.
This jump in strength, visible in regular progression tests during
development[1], results from the introduction of an efficiently
updatable neural network (NNUE) for the evaluation in Stockfish[2],
and associated tuning of the engine as a whole. The concept of the
NNUE evaluation was first introduced in shogi, and ported to
Stockfish afterward. Stockfish remains a CPU-only engine, since the
NNUE networks can be very efficiently evaluated on CPUs. The
recommended parameters of the NNUE network are embedded in
distributed binaries, and Stockfish will use NNUE by default.
Both the NNUE and the classical evaluations are available, and
can be used to assign values to positions that are later used in
alpha-beta (PVS) search to find the best move. The classical
evaluation computes this value as a function of various chess
concepts, handcrafted by experts, tested and tuned using fishtest.
The NNUE evaluation computes this value with a neural network based
on basic inputs. The network is optimized and trained on the
evaluations of millions of positions.
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
that contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free
and open source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and
very strong. We invite chess fans to join the fishtest testing
framework and programmers to contribute on github[3].
Stay safe and enjoy chess!
The Stockfish team
[1] https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/wiki/Regression-Tests
[2] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/84f3e867903f62480c33243dd0ecbffd342796fc
[3] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/
to prevent user errors or generating untested code,
check explicitly that the ARCH variable is equivalent to a supported architecture
as listed in `make help`.
To nevertheless compile for an untested target the user can override the internal
variable, passing the undocumented `SUPPORTED_ARCH=true` to make.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3062
No functional change.
some GUIs do not show the error message when the engine terminates in the no-net case, as it is send to cerr.
Instead send it as an info string, which the GUI will more likely display.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3031
No functional change.
Increases the use of NNUE evaluation in positions without captures/pawn moves,
by increasing the NNUEThreshold threshold with rule50_count.
This patch will force Stockfish to use NNUE eval more and more in materially
unbalanced positions, when it seems that the classical eval is struggling to
win and only manages to shuffle. This will ask the (slower) NNUE eval to
double-check the potential fortress branches of the search tree, but only
when necessary.
passed STC:
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5f36f1bf11a9b1a1dbf192d8
LLR: 2.93 (-2.94,2.94) {-0.50,1.50}
Total: 51824 W: 5836 L: 5653 D: 40335
Ptnml(0-2): 264, 4356, 16512, 4493, 287
passed LTC:
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5f37836111a9b1a1dbf1936d
LLR: 2.93 (-2.94,2.94) {0.25,1.75}
Total: 29768 W: 1747 L: 1590 D: 26431
Ptnml(0-2): 33, 1347, 11977, 1484, 43
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3011
Bench: 4173967
this workaround is possibly rather a windows & gcc specific problem. See e.g.
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54412#c25
on Linux with gcc 8 this patch brings roughly a 8% speedup.
However, probably needs some testing in the wild.
includes a workaround for an old msys make (3.81) installation (fixes#2984)
No functional change
A number of engines, GUIs and tournaments start to report WDL estimates
along or instead of scores. This patch enables reporting of those stats
in a more or less standard way (http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?t=72140)
The model this reporting uses is based on data derived from a few million fishtest LTC games,
given a score and a game ply, a win rate is provided that matches rather closely,
especially in the intermediate range [0.05, 0.95] that data. Some data is shown at
https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/wiki/UsefulData#win-loss-draw-statistics-of-ltc-games-on-fishtest
Making the conversion game ply dependent is important for a good fit, and is in line
with experience that a +1 score in the early midgame is more likely a win than in the late endgame.
Even when enabled, the printing of the info causes no significant overhead.
Passed STC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.50,0.50}
Total: 197112 W: 37226 L: 37347 D: 122539
Ptnml(0-2): 2591, 21025, 51464, 20866, 2610
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5ef79ef4f993893290cc146b
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2778
No functional change
the option was, since at least 2014, not correctly implemented,
ignoring all dynamic adjustments to optimum time in search.
Instead of fixing it, remove it, no need to expose an option that
will influence time management negatively.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2765
No functional change.
Fixes#2533, fixes#2543, fixes#2423.
the code that prevents false mate announcements depending on the TT
state (GHI), incorrectly used VALUE_MATE_IN_MAX_PLY. The latter
constant, however, also includes, counterintuitively, the TB win range.
This patch fixes that, by restoring the behavior for TB win scores,
while retaining the false mate correctness, and improving the mate
finding ability. In particular
no alse mates are announced with the poisened hash testcase
```
position fen 8/8/8/3k4/8/8/6K1/7R w - - 0 1
go depth 40
position fen 8/8/8/3k4/8/8/6K1/7R w - - 76 1
go depth 20
ucinewgame
```
mates are found with the testcases reported in #2543
```
position fen 4k3/3pp3/8/8/8/8/2PPP3/4K3 w - - 0 1
setoption name Hash value 1024
go depth 55
ucinewgame
```
and
```
position fen 4k3/4p3/8/8/8/8/3PP3/4K3 w - - 0 1
setoption name Hash value 1024
go depth 45
ucinewgame
```
furthermore, on the mate finding benchmark (ChestUCI_23102018.epd),
performance improves over master, roughly reaching performance with the
false mate protection reverted
```
Analyzing 6566 mate positions for best and found mates:
----------------best ---------------found
nodes master revert fixed master revert fixed
16000000 4233 4236 4235 5200 5201 5199
32000000 4583 4585 4585 5417 5424 5418
64000000 4852 4853 4855 5575 5584 5579
128000000 5071 5068 5066 5710 5720 5716
256000000 5280 5282 5279 5819 5827 5826
512000000 5471 5468 5468 5919 5935 5932
```
On a testcase with TB enabled, progress is made consistently, contrary
to master
```
setoption name SyzygyPath value ../../../syzygy/3-4-5/
setoption name Hash value 2048
position fen 1R6/3k4/8/K2p4/4n3/2P5/8/8 w - - 0 1
go depth 58
ucinewgame
```
The PR (prior to a rewrite for clarity)
passed STC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.50,0.50}
Total: 65405 W: 12454 L: 12384 D: 40567
Ptnml(0-2): 920, 7256, 16285, 7286, 944
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e441a3be70d848499f63d15
passed LTC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.50,0.50}
Total: 27096 W: 3477 L: 3413 D: 20206
Ptnml(0-2): 128, 2215, 8776, 2292, 122
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e44e277e70d848499f63d63
The incorrectly named VALUE_MATE_IN_MAX_PLY and VALUE_MATED_IN_MAX_PLY
were renamed into VALUE_TB_WIN_IN_MAX_PLY and VALUE_TB_LOSS_IN_MAX_PLY,
and correclty defined VALUE_MATE_IN_MAX_PLY and VALUE_MATED_IN_MAX_PLY
were introduced.
One further (corner case) mistake using these constants was fixed (go
mate X), which could lead to a premature return if X > MAX_PLY / 2,
but TB were present.
Thanks to @svivanov72 for one of the reports and help fixing the issue.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2552
Bench: 4932981
This updates estimates from 1.5 year ago, and adds missing terms. All estimates
from tests run on fishtest at 10+0.1 (STC), 20000 games, error bars +- 3 Elo,
see the original message in the pull request for the full list of tests.
Noteworthy changes are step 7 (futility pruning) going from ~30 to ~50 Elo
and step 13 (pruning at shallow depth) going from ~170 to ~200 Elo.
Full list of tests: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2401
@Rocky640 made the suggestion to look at time control dependence of these terms.
I picked two large terms (early futility pruning and singular extension), so with
small relative error. It turns out it is actually quite interesting (see figure 1).
Contrary to my expectation, the Elo gain for early futility pruning is pretty time
control sensitive, while singular extension gain is not.
Figure 1: TC dependence of two search terms
Going back to the old measurement of futility pruning (30 Elo vs today 50 Elo),
the code is actually identical but the margins have changed. It seems like a nice
example of how connected terms in search really are, i.e. the value of early futility
pruning increased significantly due to changes elsewhere in search.
No functional change.
the removed line is not needed, since with the conditions on SE, eval
equals ttValue (except inCheck), which must be larger than beta if the second condition
is true.
The removed line is also incorrect as eval might be VALUE_NONE at this
location if inCheck. This removal addresses part of https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2406#issuecomment-552642608
No functional change.
