Stockfish 16

Stockfish 16

Official release version of Stockfish 16

Bench: 2593605

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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/