To 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 :)
Probably 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).
The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays.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
Whenever 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.
Depending 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.
My 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.
On 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.
Technically 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.
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 very slightly ahead.
That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
They 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.
People 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
To 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 :)
Probably 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).
Would 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?
They could but it's pretty much meaningless. You're bound to find outliers in favor of either engine, and the landscape is pretty chaotic
The 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/ (this my favorite)
ChessMD https://chessmd.org/
PyChess https://pychess.github.io/about/
If you like uncomplicated GUIs: http://mayura.com/chess/
I really like ChessX ( 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..
I 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.
For when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.
Whenever 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.
Depending 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
Wouldn't be that hard in my case
Same. Probably a few if-then statements would be enough to beat me :'(
Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?
My 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.
Isn'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?
I guess someone can twit Hassabis and ask him :D He certainly has access.
who is Hassabis?
Demis Hassabis [1], co-founder of DeepMind
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...
AlphaZero does not exist, as far as modern computer chess is concerned
On 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.
It's widely believed so because Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper.
Technically 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.
> 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 very slightly ahead.
That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
yes 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
They 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.
Like a red headed stepchild.
People 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