Stockfish 13

It is our pleasure to release Stockfish 13 to chess fans worldwide.
As usual, downloads are freely available at

https://stockfishchess.org

The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
who contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free
and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and
very strong. We would like to thank them all!

The good news first: from now on, our users can expect more frequent
high-quality releases of Stockfish! Sadly, this decision has been
triggered by the start of sales of the Fat Fritz 2 engine by ChessBase,
which is a copy of a very recent development version of Stockfish
with minor modifications. We refer to our statement on Fat Fritz 2
and a community blog for further information.

This version of Stockfish is significantly stronger than any of its
predecessors. Stockfish 13 outperforms Stockfish 12 by at least
35 Elo. When playing against a one-year-old Stockfish, it
wins 60 times more game pairs than it loses. This release features
an NNUE network retrained on billions of positions, much faster network
evaluation code, and significantly improved search heuristics, as
well as additional evaluation tweaks. In the course of its development,
this version has won the superfinals of the TCEC Season 19 and
TCEC Season 20.

Going forward, the Leela Chess Zero and Stockfish teams will join
forces to demonstrate our commitment to open source chess engines and
training tools, and open data. We are convinced that our free and
open-source chess engines serve the chess community very well.

Stay safe and enjoy chess!

The Stockfish team

Stockfish 12

It is our pleasure to release Stockfish 12 to users world-wide

Downloads will be freely available at

https://stockfishchess.org/download/

This version 12 of Stockfish plays significantly stronger than
any of its predecessors. In a match against Stockfish 11,
Stockfish 12 will typically win at least ten times more game pairs
than it loses.

This jump in strength, visible in regular progression tests during
development[1], results from the introduction of an efficiently
updatable neural network (NNUE) for the evaluation in Stockfish[2],
and associated tuning of the engine as a whole. The concept of the
NNUE evaluation was first introduced in shogi, and ported to
Stockfish afterward. Stockfish remains a CPU-only engine, since the
NNUE networks can be very efficiently evaluated on CPUs. The
recommended parameters of the NNUE network are embedded in
distributed binaries, and Stockfish will use NNUE by default.

Both the NNUE and the classical evaluations are available, and
can be used to assign values to positions that are later used in
alpha-beta (PVS) search to find the best move. The classical
evaluation computes this value as a function of various chess
concepts, handcrafted by experts, tested and tuned using fishtest.
The NNUE evaluation computes this value with a neural network based
on basic inputs. The network is optimized and trained on the
evaluations of millions of positions.

The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
that contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free
and open source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and
very strong. We invite chess fans to join the fishtest testing
framework and programmers to contribute on github[3].

Stay safe and enjoy chess!

The Stockfish team

[1] https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/wiki/Regression-Tests
[2] 84f3e86
[3] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/

Stockfish 11

Official release version of Stockfish 11.

Bench: 5156767

Release notes: c3483fa

Stockfish 10

Official release version of Stockfish 10.

Source code (zip)
Source code (tar.gz)

This is also the 10th anniversary version of the Stockfish project, which
started exactly ten years ago! I wish to extend a huge thank you to
all contributors and authors in our amazing community :-)

Bench: 3939338

Stockfish 9

Official release version of Stockfish 9

Bench 5023629

sf_7

Stockfish 7

Bench: 8355485

No functional change