Stockfish Level 2
Ena Baccari
I've watched a couple of games where people play against stockfish level 8 on lichess, and they pretty much lose all the time. Is it possible for someone to beat a level 8 computer in any time between 3+0 and 15+0?
In very rare cases, Stockfish will incorrectly evaluate a complicated position, unless given a minute or two to think. If a human were to get in such a position in a 3 0 game, Stockfish could make a fatal blunder.
IMHO playing against Stockfish level eight is a lost cause when playing against its full 16 quad core processors and basically unlimited flash storage, no matter the time constraints. Magnus Carlson stated a couple of years ago that he always lost against that computer program. The lichess version is but a shadow of its real self.
I used LiChess's Advanced Search feature to search for games with Stockfish level 8 playing blitz. Stockfish has lost against bots multiple times, but I did not find any verifiable losses against humans.
My winning games against Stockfish and Komodo. This is for real. I have played over 50 thousand engine games, of which more than 10 thousand against Stockfish, and a large number against Komodo, so I have my fair share of wins. Read the book to learn what openings are suitable to handle the machines, how to impose your style of play, and how to approach the game in a tactically relevant way. The games are amply commented and diagrammed. You thought competition between humans and machines has already ended? Not at all, it has just started!
Today I decided to play against stockfish level 8. I play the whole game very carefully, patiently exchanging pieces. His play is very annoying because it has very deep ideas behind the moves. While the strong player can make a mistake, stockfish plays very accurate and is ready to punish any inaccuracy.
Yes, sorry. I see that line is a draw now.
The trouble with engines is they never blunder and every more is better than average.
I guess you could look at Fischer-Unzicker 21 Sep 1970 19th Olympiad Siegen 1970 which is a straight Exchange Variation win for ideas. You know how it is, you have to have something dynamic going on, as in this case doubled pawns and hope you can use a 4 v 3 advantage before the bishop pair get lively.
Maybe 10. Ng5 is better as SF will clearly play the same 9 moves if you try again. Still reckon the machine would find 10. ... Ke7 though.
Stockfish has been one of the best chess engines in the world for several years;[4][5][6] it has won all main events of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) and the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship (CCC) since 2020 and, as of July 2024, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world with an estimated Elo rating of 3634.[7]
The Stockfish engine was developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski, and was derived from Glaurung, an open-source engine by Tord Romstad released in 2004. It is now being developed and maintained by the Stockfish community.[8]
Stockfish historically used only a classical hand-crafted function to evaluate board positions, but with the introduction of the efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) in August 2020, it adopted a hybrid evaluation system that primarily used the neural network and occasionally relied on the hand-crafted evaluation.[9][10][11] In July 2023, Stockfish removed the hand-crafted evaluation and transitioned to a fully neural network-based approach.[12][2]
Stockfish supports Chess960, which is one feature that was inherited from Glaurung.[15] The Syzygy tablebase support, previously available in a fork maintained by Ronald de Man, was integrated into Stockfish in 2014.[16] In 2018 support for the 7-men Syzygy was added, shortly after becoming available.[17]
Stockfish has been a very popular engine on various platforms. On desktop, it is the default chess engine bundled with the Internet Chess Club interface programs BlitzIn and Dasher. On mobile, it has been bundled with the Stockfish app, SmallFish and Droidfish. Other Stockfish-compatible graphical user interfaces (GUIs) include Fritz, Arena, Stockfish for Mac, and PyChess.[18][19] Stockfish can be compiled to WebAssembly or JavaScript, allowing it to run in the browser. Both chess.com and Lichess provide Stockfish in this form in addition to a server-side program.[20] Release versions and development versions are available as C++ source code and as precompiled versions for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux 32-bit/64-bit and Android.
The Stockfish engine essentially consists of three parts: board representation, heuristic tree search, and board evaluation. Board representation is about coding a chess board state efficiently so that it can be efficiently stored and searched over. Heuristic tree search approximates minimax tree search, which would be too slow to perform. Board evaluation takes in a board representation and gives it a score for how "good" the board is (i.e. the estimated chances of winning).[21]
Starting with Stockfish 12 (2020), a neural network board evaluation function was incorporated. In Stockfish 16.1 (2024), the classical board evaluation functions were removed, leaving just the neural network.[2]
The program originated from Glaurung, an open-source chess engine created by Romstad and first released in 2004. Four years later, Costalba, inspired by the strong open-source engine, decided to fork the project. He named it Stockfish because it was "produced in Norway and cooked in Italy" (Romstad is Norwegian, Costalba is Italian). The first version, Stockfish 1.0, was released in November 2008.[22][23] For a while, new ideas and code changes were transferred between the two programs in both directions, until Romstad decided to discontinue Glaurung in favor of Stockfish, which was the more advanced engine at the time.[24] The last Glaurung version (2.2) was released in December 2008.
Around 2011, Romstad decided to abandon his involvement with Stockfish in order to spend more time on his new iOS chess app.[25] On 18 June 2014 Marco Costalba announced that he had "decided to step down as Stockfish maintainer" and asked that the community create a fork of the current version and continue its development.[26] An official repository, managed by a volunteer group of core Stockfish developers, was created soon after and currently manages the development of the project.[27]
Changes to game-playing code are accepted or rejected based on results of playing of tens of thousands of games on the framework against an older "reference" version of the program, using sequential probability ratio testing. Tests on the framework are verified using the chi-squared test, and only if the results are statistically significant are they deemed reliable and used to revise the software code.
After the inception of Fishtest, Stockfish experienced an explosive growth of 120 Elo points in just 12 months, propelling it to the top of all major rating lists.[31] In Stockfish 7, Fishtest author Gary Linscott was added to the official list of authors in acknowledgement of his contribution to Stockfish's strength.
In June 2020, an efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) fork introduced by computer shogi programmers called Stockfish NNUE was discussed by developers.[33][34] In July 2020 chess news reported that Stockfish NNUE had "broken new ground in computer chess by incorporating a neural network into the already incredibly powerful Stockfish chess engine."[35] A NNUE merge into Stockfish was then announced and development builds became available.[36][37]
"The NNUE branch maintained by @nodchip has demonstrated strong results and offers great potential, and we will proceed to merge ... This merge will introduce machine learning based coding to the engine, thus enlarging the community of developers, bringing in new skills. We are eager to keep everybody on board, including all developers and users of diverse hardware, aiming to be an inclusive community ...the precise steps needed will become clearer as we proceed, I look forward to working with the community to make this happen!"
On 2 September 2020, the twelfth version of Stockfish was released, incorporating the aforementioned neural network improvement. According to the blog announcement, this new version "plays significantly stronger than any of its predecessors", typically winning ten times more game pairs than it loses when matched against version eleven.[38][39]
Ever since chess.com hosted its first Chess.com Computer Chess Championship in 2018, Stockfish has been the most successful engine. It dominated the earlier championships, winning six consecutive titles before finishing second in CCC7. Since then, its dominance has come under threat from the neural-network engines Leelenstein and Leela Chess Zero, but it has continued to perform well, reaching at least the superfinal in every edition up to CCC11. CCC12 had for the first time a knockout format, with seeding placing CCC11 finalists Stockfish and Leela in the same half. Leela eliminated Stockfish in the semi-finals. However, a post-tournament match against the loser of the final, Leelenstein, saw Stockfish winning in the same format as the main event. After finishing second again to Leela in CCC13, and an uncharacteristic fourth in CCC14, Stockfish went on a long winning streak, taking first place in every championship since.
In December 2017, Stockfish 8 was used as a benchmark to test Google division DeepMind's AlphaZero, with each engine supported by different hardware. AlphaZero was trained through self-play for a total of nine hours, and reached Stockfish's level after just four.[182][183][184] In 100 games from the normal starting position, AlphaZero won 25 games as White, won 3 as Black, and drew the remaining 72, with 0 losses.[185] AlphaZero also played twelve 100-game matches against Stockfish starting from twelve popular openings for a final score of 290 wins, 886 draws and 24 losses, for a point score of 733:467.[186][note 2]
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