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
allows for repeating a depth N search K times.
Repeated searches improve the quality of eval, but don't bring in higher depth info.
Might allow for removing some of the noise in low depth scoring.
in case a score can be parsed from the comment field in the pgn, add it to the output.
This form works for the fishtest pgns, and is quite common (cutechess-cli among others).
older versions of gcc (<8.1) need this, even if they accept -std=c++17
with this patch, the code can be run on fishtest again,
at least by the majority of workers (fishtest doesn't require c++17 to be available)
See e.g.
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5fcfbf801ac1691201888235
Bench: 3820648
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.
RootInTB was an incorrectly shared global, probably leading to wrong scoreing
Minor:
setting TB global state from input by all threads (all threads write same values)
setting Limits global state by all threads (idem)
thread counting for finalization
CI can be enabled once races are fixed in the learner, manually goes like:
```
make clean && make -j2 ARCH=x86-64-modern sanitize=thread optimize=no debug=yes build
../tests/instrumented_learn.sh --sanitizer-thread
```
Needs some review.
additionally allow all options to be converted to string.
Without this, restoring of the options (multi_think.cpp:117) can't work.
fixes https://github.com/nodchip/Stockfish/issues/128
Now gensfen/learn pass with debug=yes in CI
1) Only access UCI option if defined
2) disable -Werror for now.
3) disable a few target that don't have _mm_malloc.
4) Add profile-learn target, with small speedup.
5) just test on Linux + gcc (skip macOS, unclear openblas, skip linux+clang, unclear omp/std::filesystem).
makes it a little easier to change the BLAS library used,
doesn't hardcode the mingw headers. Works on Linux with openblas installed.
Should be no change on Windows.
fixes valgrind errors as seen with:
```
setoption name Use NNUE value true
isready
gensfen depth 6 loop 10 use_draw_in_training_data_generation 1 eval_limit 32000 output_file_name training_data/training_data.bin use_raw_nnue_eval 0
quit
```
the latter script now runs without valgrind errors on linux
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.
this patch extends bench to print static evaluations.
./stockfish bench 16 1 1 filename eval
will now print the evaluations for all fens in the file.
This complements the various 'go' flavors for bench and might be useful for debugging and/or tuning.
No functional change.
This patch measures how frequently search is exploring new configurations.
This is done be computing a running average of ttHit. The ttHitAverage rate
is somewhat low (e.g. 30% for startpos) in the normal case, while it can be
very high if no progress is made (e.g. 90% for the fortress I used for testing).
This information can be used to influence search. In this patch, by adjusting
reductions if the rate > 50%. A first version (using a low ttHitAverageResolution
and this 50% threshold) passed testing:
STC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 26425 W: 5837 L: 5650 D: 14938
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcede8b0ebc5902563258fa
LTC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 32313 W: 5392 L: 5128 D: 21793
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcefb1f0ebc590256325c0e
However, as discussed in pull request 2414, using a larger ttHitAverageResolution
gives a better approximation of the underlying distributions. This needs a slight
adjustment for the threshold as the new distributions are shifted a bit compared
to the older ones, and this threshold seemingly is sensitive (we used 0.53125 here).
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2414
This final version also passed testing, and is used for the patch:
STC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 16025 W: 3555 L: 3399 D: 9071
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dd070b90ebc5902579e20c2
LTC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 37576 W: 6277 L: 5998 D: 25301
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dd0f58e6f544e798086f224
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2414
Bench: 4989584
The removed lines approximately duplicate equivalent logic in the movePicker.
Adjust the futility_move_count to componsate for some difference
(the movePicker prunes one iteration of the move loop later).
Passed STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 8114 W: 1810 L: 1663 D: 4641
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dc6afe60ebc5902562bd318
Passed LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 89956 W: 14473 L: 14460 D: 61023
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dc6bdcf0ebc5902562bd3c0
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2407
Bench: 4256440
---------------------
How to continue from there?
It would be interesting to see if we can extract some Elo gain
from the new futility_move_count formula, for instance by somehow
incorporating the final -1 in the 5 constant, or adding a linear
term to the quadratics...
```
futility_move_count = (5 + depth * depth) * (1 + improving) / 2 - 1
```
Current master 648c7ec25d will generate an
incorrect mate score for:
```
setoption name Hash value 8
setoption name Threads value 1
position fen 8/1p2KP2/1p4q1/1Pp5/2P5/N1Pp1k2/3P4/1N6 b - - 76 40
go depth 49
```
even though the position is a draw. Generally, SF tries to display only
proven mate scores, so this is a bug.
This was posted http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=72166
by Uri Blass, with the correct analysis that this must be related to the
50 moves draw rule being ignored somewhere.
Indeed, this is possible as positions and there eval are stored in the TT,
without reference to the 50mr counter. Depending on the search path followed
a position can thus be mate or draw in the TT (GHI or Graph history interaction).
Therefore, to prove mate lines, the TT content has to be used with care. Rather
than ignoring TT content in general or for mate scores (which impact search or
mate finding), it is possible to be more selective. In particular, @WOnder93
suggested to only ignore the TT if the 50mr draw ply is closer than the mate
ply. This patch implements this idea, by clamping the eval in the TT to
+-VALUE_MATED_IN_MAX_PLY. This retains the TTmove, but causes a research of
these lines (with the current 50mr counter) as needed.
This patch hardly ever affects search (as indicated by the unchanged
bench), but fixes the testcase. As the conditions are very specific,
also mate finding will almost never be less efficient (testing welcome).
It was also shown to pass STC and LTC non-regression testing, in a form
using if/then/else instead of ternary operators:
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 93605 W: 15346 L: 15340 D: 62919
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5db45bb00ebc5908127538d4
LTC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 33873 W: 7359 L: 7261 D: 19253
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5db4c8940ebc5902d6b146fc
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/2370
Bench: 4362323
This PR refactors update_quiet_stats, update_capture_stats and search to more clearly reflect what is actually done.
Effectively, all stat updates that need to be done after search is finished and a bestmove is found,
are collected in a new function ```final_stats_update()```. This shortens our main search routine, and simplifies ```update_quiet_stats```.
The latter function is now more easily reusable with fewer arguments, as the handling of ```quietsSearched``` is only needed in ```final_stats_update```.
```update_capture_stats```, which was only called once is now integrated in ```final_stats_update```, which allows for removing a branch and reusing some ```stat_bonus``` calls. The need for refactoring was also suggested by the fact that the comments of ```update_quiet_stats``` and ```update_capture_stats``` were incorrect (e.g. ```update_capture_stats``` was called, correctly, also when the bestmove was a quiet and not a capture).
passed non-regression STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 75196 W: 16364 L: 16347 D: 42485
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5db004ec0ebc5902c06db9e1
The diff is most easily readable as ```git diff master --patience```
No functional change