Stockfish 19

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• Hacker News
• > 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.

  by Mr_Minderbinder
• Nice.

  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.

  by iamcreasy
• For 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_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.

  by abricq
• Correct 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.

  by RivieraKid
• A 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.

  by lxgr
• The post literally says

  > against Stockfish 18, this new release brings an Elo gain of up to 44 points, and wins more than three times as many game pairs as it loses.

  by computably
• I 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/...

  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

  the collection of the games I found (vibecoded gui) https://kuboble.com/chess_ideas/

  by kuboble
• This 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.

  by VPenkov
• 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.
  by tweakimp
• It's a fun project, start here: https://chessprogramming.org
  by thrance
• Naive monte carlo on a phone from 10 years ago is likely enough unless you're quite good at chess
  by monster_truck
• I 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 :)

  by fileeditview
• Wouldn't be that hard in my case
  by hyperbolablabla
• Join the Stockfish discord server! There is a very active community who builds their own chess engines there.

  (If you ever end up going for it, don't use AI it takes away a lot of the fun)

  by tsoj
• 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

  by herbstein
• 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

  by alex1138
• The next closest is probably Torch currently
  by tsoj
• Alpha Zero Chess never made their code or models public. Leela is based on the same ideas as Alpha Zero Chess, but its model and code are public and uses crowd sourcing to generate and refine the model.

  Stockfish uses a combination of classic Alpha-Beta pruning along with a type of AI called NNUE to evaluate positions.

  by strenholme
• > 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).

  by kadoban
• 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?

  by stabbles
• 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
  by Sopel
• For when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.
  by ZiiS
• 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/

  by haunter
• If you like uncomplicated GUIs: http://mayura.com/chess/
  by petilon
• 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..

  by fileeditview
• 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.
  by 0x00cl
• Shameless self promotion:

  If you’re a Mac user and want something with native look and feel, there is also The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton (TestFlight beta):

  https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY

  There are also iOS and watchOS versions, but those can’t run 3rd party engines like Stockfish.

  by Oreb
• I 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.

  by jan_m_savage
• Real life is a game of risk/reward rather than a game of deep calculation. You can't "calculate" life because there are too many variables and unknowns. You have to simply pick a path and either accept the risks or mitigate them.
  by wavemode
• Main thing I took away from chess when I used to play is it's just another exercise to work parts of your brain. I preferred 3+0 and 5+0 chess because of the low time commit, ease to move next, and the tradeoff between most correct move and most optimal move to cause the opponent to expand more of their time trying to figure out what you were doing.

  I hit about 2k Elo on lichess playing the 3+0/5+0 and I have no regrets!

  by SecretDreams