9 ms·
Stockfish 19
- piker 7d agoQuestion: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?
- tumdum_ 7d agoI think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#Tournament_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...
- mattr03 7d agoyes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have
- Sopel 6d ago[dead]
- lynx97 6d agoThey basically replaced the static position evaluation function with a NN approach and kept the rest of the tree search mostly intact. I ran fishtest on an old cluster for a while. Was nice to watch the stockfish team methodically improving things. Basically, every commit has to show it can beat the main branch before it gets merged.
- gwd 6d agoMy understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment. Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero. I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero. The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.
- sinuhe69 6d agoI guess someone can twit Hassabis and ask him :D He certainly has access.
- NooneAtAll3 6d agowho is Hassabis?
- xenocratus 6d agoDemis Hassabis [1], co-founder of DeepMind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
- kzrdude 6d agoIsn't one problem that it's hard to determine what equivalent compute is, for CPU search vs a neural net based engine like AZ or Leela?
- gwd 6d agoOne way would be to calculate a cost per game, factoring in both electricity and an amortized cost of the hardware, maybe having a penalty too for extra time run (e.g., if focusing only on hardware depreciation and electricity, 1 minute of TPU would translate to 2 weeks of CPU, that 2 weeks of waiting still costs you something). Obviously this isn't stable, as relative prices of GPUs and memory shift over time, and it's somewhat sensitive to setup; but done right it's probably more "what a user actually wants to know", in terms of what it would take to get equivalent performance.
- zarzavat 6d agoIt's more fundamental than that. AlphaZero is a shallower search with a heavier evaluation function. Stockfish is a deeper search with a lighter evaluation function. In chess, depth usually wins because of how narrow the search tree is compared e.g. to Go.
- sapiogram 6d agoTechnically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.
- noir_lord 6d ago> like AlphaZero? Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming out very slightly ahead. That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
- kqp 6d agoLike a red headed stepchild.
- NitpickLawyer 6d agoOn average, yes. Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like. But on a game to game basis Lc0 can still win some games, depending on the starting position. It's rare that Lc0 can win both black and white starting from the same position, tho. There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.
- eklitzke 6d agoIt's widely believed so because Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper.
- Sopel 6d agoAlphaZero does not exist, as far as modern computer chess is concerned
- VulgarExigency 6d agoLeela proved that the ideas worked, regardless of the conditions that the AlphaZero vs Stockfish matches were run in. What's funny is that if computer chess had paid more attention to computer shogi, Stockfish could have already been using NNUE by that time, and not lost to AlphaZero. But perhaps that would have stifled Leela's development, and would have led to worse training data for Stockfish in that parallel universe's present day, making it weaker overall.
- haunter 6d agoThe GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays. Anyways some of the best options are not even mentioned like Nocheto https://nocheto.sallyx.org/ https://nocheto.sallyx.org/ (this my favorite) ChessMD https://chessmd.org/ https://chessmd.org/ PyChess https://pychess.github.io/about/ https://pychess.github.io/about/
- 0x00cl 6d agoI have tried En Croissant and its personally its a nice GUI and easy to use. It allows you to download stockfish and others right from their GUI.
- noir_lord 6d agoAmused me the first time I ran En Croissant, it lets you download existing chess databases and one of those (Caissabase) was my project from years ago :). I don't play Chess much any more but others have taken up the Chess DB mantle (with slightly different criteria). I do find it ironic that a project I did in a couple of days for myself and chucked online in case it was useful is still kicking around though. If you like En Croissant there is a nice fork called Pawn Appetit that does all the same things and adds some other QoL bits and bobs.
- fileeditview 6d agoI really like ChessX ( https://chessx.sourceforge.io/ https://chessx.sourceforge.io/ ). Pychess was always unstable and slow for me. Anyways. Now I can use an even better Stockfish to benchmark my own engine..
- petilon 6d agoIf you like uncomplicated GUIs: http://mayura.com/chess/ http://mayura.com/chess/
- qlmos 6d ago[dead]
- 6d ago
- stabbles 6d agoWould be nice if they included a few "notable" games in the release notes. Presumably it's easy to highlight ones from benchmarks where the evaluation of Stockfish 19 is most significantly different from version 18?
- Sopel 6d agoThey could but it's pretty much meaningless. You're bound to find outliers in favor of either engine, and the landscape is pretty chaotic
- ZiiS 6d agoFor when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.
- tweakimp 6d agoWhenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.
- hyperbolablabla 6d agoWouldn't be that hard in my case
- herbstein 6d agoDepending on your feelings on being spoiled on the general techniques, and an approach to implement them, Sebastian Lague made a great two-part series on building a chess engine. It's specific enough that you have an idea of the techniques involved, without dwelling enough with the details to make implementing your own futile. https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk
- fileeditview 6d agoI did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time. The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch. From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)
- nevi-me 6d agoTo show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)
- FartyMcFarter 6d agoProbably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).
- Sopel 6d agoalso in chess a better line is not required to be shorter
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 6d agoThis seems like an interesting alternative line of research. Design the a chess engine where the goal is to beat the best human in the minimum number of turns, while still offering ~no chance of human victory.
- adgjlsfhk1 6d agoThe Leela odds bots are working on a similar problem: beat humans starting down material. It's roughly grand master level starting down a rook, and for fast time control even starting down a queen
- reddit_clone 6d agoUnfortunately Chess (unlike Go) doesn't have a good handicap system. When playing without a piece (or two) it is not chess anymore OR it doesn't really matter.. During how many games does Queen's rook come into play during early middle game? Go, on the other hand has a nice handicap system (which doesn't change the nature of the game too much). One can have a fighting chance against a much stronger player with enough handicap (Upto 9 stones). In Chess terms, an IM can have a _decent_ game against a GM. Probably lose. But the GM has to work for it.
- alex1138 6d agoPeople perhaps won't remember the long history of computer chess at least how it played out in the 90s There was a succession of interesting engines (I think The King used to win a number of computer tournaments, this is the one Chessmaster used, that wonderful audio-visual program, like Encarta but chess related) and then the big three of Fritz (match against Kramnik), Junior (match against Kasparov) and Shredder. And also HIARCS and later, Rybka (and Crafty, as well, touted as the open source chess engine) Stockfish has been top dog (fish?) for a while now but there was a notable exception when AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) beat it, but these days of course Stockfish is far and away the best engine (I guess. I don't know how far behind Leela is) And, yes, human vs computer chess has stopped being interesting for a while. There were some centaur chess (human and computer; humans using computers to analyze) competitions in the 2000s and some interesting things but nowadays of course your phone can handedly beat Magnus Carlsen and others without problems, reliably
- kadoban 6d ago> AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) Pretty much. DeepMind never released their code or models, just the main ideas of their techniques and training. Leela, which came out of the go-ai world, implemented the paper(s) and became the de-facto version everyone used for a while until other projects improved over it on both go (mainly katago) and chess (mainly stockfish).
- tsoj 6d agoThe next closest is probably Torch currently
- canucker2016 6d agofrom the TCEC Season 29 Premier Division tournament, Stockfish was first, Reckless v0.9.0 was second, LCZero 0.33 was third, PlentyChess (won tiebreaker) tied with Torch for fourth. see https://tcec-chess.com/#div=p&game=1&season=29 https://tcec-chess.com/#div=p&game=1&season=29 click on the Standings tab to see the results.
- strenholme 6d ago
- msavara 6d agoThis is good also https://chessdox.com https://chessdox.com
- Aachen 6d agoIs this an ad? How's this relevant, does it run the new Stockfish or a competing engine or something?
- timbaboon 6d agoBut does it use AI?
- gus_massa 6d agoAs a joke project, it would be nice to add a LLM module that adds a commentary bullshiting an explanation of why it is destroying the human player.
- noir_lord 6d agoIt's been tried, they feed the evaluation into the LLM and get it to commentate. The results are absolute garbage (as you would expect) since the LLM's really don't understand chess or how to play it, someone posted a benchmark of the current SOTA ones playing Chess and the best was estimated at 1480.
- gregdeon 6d agoThis is a very rough approximation of what the strong bots on chess.com do.
- tsoj 6d agoIt's not really what you're looking for, but I made this lichess BOT that makes stupid (but relevant) comments on your moves from time to time: https://lichess.org/@/Annie_Archy/all https://lichess.org/@/Annie_Archy/all
- 6d ago
- jan_m_savage 6d agoI am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.
- tvelichkov 6d agoReminds me of: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Paul Murphy.
- jan_m_savage 6d agoI got to a 1900 bullet rating in two years, playing an average of 10 to 30 games a day--while not learning any theory! (I wanted to discover theories on my own). And that's when I realized nah, it's not worth it. That's a great quote, thanks for sharing.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- samus 6d agoMurphy was in general so dismissive of his own talent. Granted, he lived in the era before people played chess for a living.
- zem 6d ago*Morphy
- FartyMcFarter 6d agoI think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way: - it teaches resiliency in bad situations. - it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it. The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too. To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.
- thinkingtoilet 6d agoThis may be a dumb question, but how do these engines get better when they're already amazing? Is it simply that they look further down the tree of possibilities?
- ajkjk 6d agoPresumably a lot of it is in a better evaluation function. That is, when searching the tree, a better analysis of whether a specific position is beneficial and by how much. After all most of the tree searches do not end in checkmate, just in minute improvements which accumulate over many moves.
- kadoban 6d agoYes. The ways to improve are: faster search (which lets you search more deeply) or better evaluation of a position or better heuristics.
- Aachen 6d agoHow do you get better when you're already amazing? When you're amazing, you understand what you're doing and where to improve. For very complex systems, the improvements will be in confined areas (not rewriting everything but noticing a bug or reading about another project which found that some other hyperparameter works better). Or even if you have no idea, the simplest way would be making random tweaks and seeing which ones are advantageous
- abricq 6d agoFor those curious to see actual games played by top-level engines, the most famous French chess-commentator has a youtube plalist where he and french GM Matthieu Cornette analyzes some of these games. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiZ56cRXeIu3-zr-S7_XND3M3KDsMylDx&si=AXOw9Hr6l4wRnDZJ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiZ56cRXeIu3-zr-S7_XND3M3... GM Mathieu Cornette is an excellent chess analyist, might not be the best at banalazing, but he does find some amazing computer games. Engine games are often boring, so it's nice that they pick the good ones.
- RivieraKid 6d agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position. Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw. I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.
- lxgr 6d agoA faster engine is still very useful in practice, for example for position evaluations in game review. Not that an engine evaluation will always be helpful (the line in question making a position strong or weak might be effectively unplayable/impossible to find by a human), but it’s useful for studying nevertheless.
- VPenkov 6d agoThis sounds plausible. But otherwise, there are "tournaments" like the TCEC which is for bots only and the way it works is, the bots are adjusted to play a specific opening and they're on their own after the Nth move. Stockfish has been dominant for a long time. And a later version of Stockfish would outperform an earlier version given the same time control.
- kuboble 6d agoI believe this is not the case. The first reason is the optimization of the Transposition Table in stockfish. https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/tt.cpp#L270 https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/... Basically this optimization means that stockfish will sometimes take a bad read from a cache (so it will take an evaluation of the position from cache which was calculated for a different position). It's fairly random when this will trigger a bad play, but if you brute force vs any deterministic setup you will find it eventually. But even withtout it - you can just implement a kind of a brute-force heap of positions using stockfish's own eval and you can find wins from almost any position even on fairly high playout count. I got as far as 32M from different even starting positions, but I spent compute to find as many games as possible rather than as deep as possible. Example game: https://lichess.org/XVUjezMr#134 https://lichess.org/XVUjezMr#134 the collection of the games I found (vibecoded gui) https://kuboble.com/chess_ideas/ https://kuboble.com/chess_ideas/
- zkmon 6d agoGame engines, AI, robots and machines in general are establising a "goal horizon" for humans. This is unnecessary and counter productive way of using tools. Tools are supposed to work for us, not set goals or direction for us.
- vouaobrasil 6d agoBut as technology progresses and becomes more advanced, it does seem to set goals in all directions in that seems inevitable if we continue to 'collaborate' with modern technology. I mean, we no longer develop tools to help us out really, if you think about it. We develop tools to get ahead of other tools, to be faster than them, to protect ourselves from still other tools. I'd argue that as we condition ourselves into a state of constant development, we shouldn't even call these things "tools" anymore, but pieces of an organism that spurn us to upgrade and complete it at every step. Tools working for us only applies to local, simple tools that one person or a small communiity can basically understand and make, like a hammer. That's a tool. I wouldn't call a computer a tool any more just like I wouldn't say that our brain is merely a tool. It's more: it's an extension of us and even an integral part of us that modifies our very instincts and desires itself.
- zkmon 4d agoWe shouldn't condition ourselves to keep transforming these tools unto our masters. That's the point I was making. We don't the "goal horizon" that is reachable to machines but too far away for humans. There is no point in having that. Goals should be reachable to humans. Humans never needed deal with numbers larger than a few thousand. Centralization is driving the demand for super-human capabilities.
- strenholme 6d agoInteresting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice: https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25 Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] It shows that White is 3.53 pawns ahead—i.e. White is clearly winning. Run the above position in Stockfish 19, however, and Stockfish 19 at depth 25 says that, while White is ahead, it’s only a 1.2 pawn edge—Black supposedly still has good drawing chances. At a depth of 35 ply, Stockfish 19 sees that it’s a clear White victory (6.79 pawns ahead), but it takes far deeper search for Stockfish 19 to see the win compared to Stockfish 18. [1] To run the position, I type the following commands: position fen b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25 d go depth 25 I also see the issue on Lichess’s GUI by going to this URL: https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48
- kuboble 6d agoEvaluation doesn't matter as far as I understand. If 19 beats 18 in a match on billion playouts then it's a feature. Any usability of stockfish evaluation for human analysis is collateral. Unfortunately there seem to be no serious fork of stockfish that would care about usability for human analysis. I was recently doing some larger study and I stumbled upon a bug/feature of stockfish where it accepts small number of invalid cache reads for a lot of speed. It would result in infrequent blunders which however affected my analysis, so I removed this optimization in my fork.
- tsoj 6d agoUsability for human analysis will likely be more successful going a similar direction Maia is going with the lc0 like net trained to make human moves. SF is inherently so far removed from the human approach to chess (relatively speaking), that it would likely require a lot more work than just tuning it to work well on some positions.
- iamcreasy 6d agoNice. I wish these engines could explain why it is recommending certain move, or certain sequence of moves, using natural language - it would be very useful for learning.
- ViktorRay 6d agoI think an interesting problem would be for a LLM from OpenAI or Anthropic to try to learn chess from first principles and then use that knowledge to try and beat Stockfish. I wonder if anyone at those companies is trying to tackle this problem.
- tetec1 6d agoIt's probably quite challenging if you want to avoid chess information to be in the training data.
- crystaln 6d agoMy favorite chess quote: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." I find this to be very valid.
- binarymax 6d agoIs doing something you love, and practicing to the point of expertise, wasting your life? Replace chess with playing an instrument, or basketball. This quote is just exclusionary.
- Mr_Minderbinder 6d ago> This release introduces the SFNNv16 network architecture, reducing binary size by removing redundant threat features… This is nice to see. One of my few gripes with NNUE engines is their huge size compared with the old “HCE” engines I was accustomed to (which were usually hundreds of KiB or low single digit MiBs in size). I will trade off size for superior playing strength but at a certain point it becomes hard to keep justifying a 2x increase in size for what seems like ever diminishing practical returns. I am still searching for a strong NNUE engine that is ~10MiB or less. I have found Marvin, which is small at 1.8 MiB, but it is nowhere near as strong as Stockfish.
- nticompass 5d agoObligatory Tom7 video/papers: https://tom7.org/chess/ https://tom7.org/chess/ This was all I thought of when I read "Stockfish"