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Official release version of Stockfish 16 Bench: 2593605 --- Stockfish 16 A new major release of Stockfish is now available at https://stockfishchess.org/download/ *Quality of chess play* Stockfish continues to demonstrate its ability to discover superior moves with remarkable speed. In self-play against Stockfish 15, this new release gains up to 50 Elo[1] and wins up to 12 times more game pairs[2] than it loses. In major chess engine tournaments, Stockfish reliably tops the rankings[3] winning the TCEC season 24 Superfinal, Swiss, Fischer Random, and Double Random Chess tournaments and the CCC 19 Bullet, 20 Blitz, and 20 Rapid competitions. Leela Chess Zero[4] was the challenger in most finals, putting top-engine chess now firmly in the hands of teams embracing free and open-source software. *Progress made* This updated version of Stockfish introduces several enhancements, including an upgraded neural net architecture (SFNNv6)[5], improved implementation, and refined parameterization. The ongoing utilization of Leela’s data combined with a novel inference approach exploiting sparsity[6], and network compression[7] ensure a speedy evaluation and modest binary sizes while allowing for more weights and higher accuracy. The search has undergone more optimization, leading to improved performance, particularly in longer analyses[8]. Additionally, the Fishtest framework has been improved and is now able to run the tests needed to validate new ideas with 10000s of CPU cores. *Usability improvements* Stockfish now comes with documentation, found in the wiki folder when downloading it or on GitHub[9]. Additionally, Stockfish now includes a clear and consistent forced tablebase win score, displaying a value of 200 minus the number of plies required to reach a tablebase win[10]. Furthermore, the UCI_Elo option, to reduce its strength, has been calibrated[11]. It is worth noting that the evaluation system remains consistent with Stockfish 15.1[12], maintaining the choice that 100cp means a 50% chance of winning the game against an equal opponent[13]. Finally, binaries of our latest development version are now provided continuously as pre-releases on GitHub making it easier for enthusiasts to download the latest and strongest version of the program[14], we thank Roman Korba for having provided a similar service for a long time. *Thank you* The success of the Stockfish project relies on the vibrant community of passionate enthusiasts (we appreciate each and every one of you!) who generously contribute their knowledge, time, and resources. Together, this dedicated community works towards the common goal of developing a powerful, freely accessible, and open-source chess engine. We invite all chess enthusiasts to join the Fishtest testing framework and contribute to the project[15]. The Stockfish team [1] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/649409f0dc7002ce609c99cc [2] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/649409d7dc7002ce609c99c6 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Competition_results [4] https://lczero.org/ [5] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/c1fff71 [6] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/38e6166 [7] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/a46087e [8] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/472e726 [9] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/wiki/ [10] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/def2966 [11] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/a08b8d4 [12] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/52e84e4 [13] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/wiki/Stockfish-FAQ#interpretation-of-the-stockfish-evaluation [14] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/releases?q=prerelease%3Atrue [15] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/ |
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Stockfish
A free and strong UCI chess engine.
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Overview
Stockfish is a free and strong UCI chess engine derived from Glaurung 2.1 that analyzes chess positions and computes the optimal moves.
Stockfish does not include a graphical user interface (GUI) that is required to display a chessboard and to make it easy to input moves. These GUIs are developed independently from Stockfish and are available online. Read the documentation for your GUI of choice for information about how to use Stockfish with it.
See also the Stockfish documentation for further usage help.
Files
This distribution of Stockfish consists of the following files:
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README.md, the file you are currently reading.
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Copying.txt, a text file containing the GNU General Public License version 3.
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AUTHORS, a text file with the list of authors for the project.
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src, a subdirectory containing the full source code, including a Makefile that can be used to compile Stockfish on Unix-like systems.
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a file with the .nnue extension, storing the neural network for the NNUE evaluation. Binary distributions will have this file embedded.
The UCI protocol
The Universal Chess Interface (UCI) is a standard text-based protocol used to communicate with a chess engine and is the recommended way to do so for typical graphical user interfaces (GUI) or chess tools. Stockfish implements the majority of its options.
Developers can see the default values for the UCI options available in Stockfish
by typing ./stockfish uci in a terminal, but most users should typically use a
chess GUI to interact with Stockfish.
For more information on UCI or debug commands, see our documentation.
Compiling Stockfish
Stockfish has support for 32 or 64-bit CPUs, certain hardware instructions, big-endian machines such as Power PC, and other platforms.
On Unix-like systems, it should be easy to compile Stockfish directly from the
source code with the included Makefile in the folder src. In general, it is
recommended to run make help to see a list of make targets with corresponding
descriptions.
cd src
make -j build ARCH=x86-64-modern
Detailed compilation instructions for all platforms can be found in our documentation.
Contributing
Donating hardware
Improving Stockfish requires a massive amount of testing. You can donate your hardware resources by installing the Fishtest Worker and viewing the current tests on Fishtest.
Improving the code
In the chessprogramming wiki, many techniques used in Stockfish are explained with a lot of background information. The section on Stockfish describes many features and techniques used by Stockfish. However, it is generic rather than focused on Stockfish's precise implementation.
The engine testing is done on Fishtest. If you want to help improve Stockfish, please read this guideline first, where the basics of Stockfish development are explained.
Discussions about Stockfish take place these days mainly in the Stockfish Discord server. This is also the best place to ask questions about the codebase and how to improve it.
Terms of use
Stockfish is free and distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). Essentially, this means you are free to do almost exactly what you want with the program, including distributing it among your friends, making it available for download from your website, selling it (either by itself or as part of some bigger software package), or using it as the starting point for a software project of your own.
The only real limitation is that whenever you distribute Stockfish in some way, you MUST always include the license and the full source code (or a pointer to where the source code can be found) to generate the exact binary you are distributing. If you make any changes to the source code, these changes must also be made available under GPL v3.