Author: Disservin
Date: Sat Feb 24 18:15:04 2024 +0100
Timestamp: 1708794904
Stockfish 16.1
Official release version of Stockfish 16.1
Bench: 1303971
---
Stockfish 16.1
Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 16.1. As always, you can
freely download it at
https://stockfishchess.org/download and use it in the GUI
of your choice[1].
Don't forget to join our Discord server[2] to get in touch with the community of
developers and users of the project!
*Quality of chess play*
In our testing against its predecessor, Stockfish 16.1 shows a notable
improvement in performance, with an Elo gain of up to 27 points and winning over
2 times more game pairs[3] than it loses.
*Update highlights*
*Improved evaluation*
- Updated neural network architecture: The neural network architecture has
undergone two updates and is currently in its 8th version[4].
- Removal of handcrafted evaluation (HCE): This release marks the removal of the
traditional handcrafted evaluation and the transition to a fully neural
network-based approach[5].
- Dual NNUE: For the first time, Stockfish includes a secondary neural
network[6], used to quickly evaluate positions that are easily decided.
*UCI Options removed*
`Use NNUE` and `UCI_AnalyseMode`[7] have been removed as they no longer had any
effect. `SlowMover`[8] has also been removed in favor of `Move Overhead`.
*More binaries*
We now offer 13 new binaries. These new binaries include `avx512`, `vnni256`,
`vnni512`, `m1-apple-silicon`, and `armv8-dotprod`, which take advantage of
specific CPU instructions for improved performance.
For most users, using `sse41-popcnt` (formerly `modern`), `avx2`, or `bmi2`
should be enough, but if your CPU supports these new instructions, feel free to
try them!
*Development changes*
- Updated testing book: This new book[9], now derived exclusively from the open
Lichess database[10], is 10 times larger than its predecessor, and has been
used to test potential improvements to Stockfish over the past few months.
- Consolidation of repositories: Aiming to simplify access to our resources, we
have moved most Stockfish-related repositories into the official Stockfish
organization[11] on GitHub.
- Growing maintainer team: We welcome Disservin[12] to the team of maintainers
of the project! This extra pair of hands will ensure the lasting success of
Stockfish.
*Thank you*
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts (thanks
everybody!) 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 express our gratitude for the 10k stars[13] that light up our
GitHub project! Thank you for your support and encouragement – your recognition
means a lot to us.
We invite our chess fans to join the Fishtest testing framework[14], and
programmers to contribute to the project either directly to Stockfish[15] (C++),
to Fishtest[16] (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python), to our trainer
nnue-pytorch[17] (C++ and Python), or to our website[18] (HTML, CSS/SCSS, and
JavaScript).
The Stockfish team
https://abrok.eu/stockfish/
