Monday, May 25, 2015

The best open source chess engine "Stockfish"

Lofoten_Reine_Stockfish.jpg
Stockfish,
an UCI compatible open source chess engine developed by Tord RomstadMarco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski. Marco forked the project from version 2.1 of Tord's strong engine Glaurung, first announced by Marco in November 8, 2008 [1] . Starting out among the top twenty engines, it has quickly climbed in strength.The name "Stockfish" reflects the ancestry of the engine. Tord is Norwegian and Marco Italian, and there is a long history o

Science versus Commerce?

There is a wide range of opinions about strong open source chess engines affecting commercial and competitive interests, as well as monetary interests from computer chess users, who obtain a top engine for free. The scientific and social value of strong open source programs is indisputable. The teamwork effort to share ideas and knowledge to write one of the strongest programs, which everybody may follow and share to learn and play for free, is definitely a challenging and motivating task, gathering both admiration and enviousness. Obviously, professional programmers of commercial chess programs are not that enthusiastic about the development, and need to improve further and/or focus more on secondary features or other business concepts like on-line play and/or user interface issues rather than on pure playing strength.

Also many hobbyist chess programmers feel in antagonism as well, not only caused by Stockfish with its highly respected authors, and before by Fruit and slightly Crafty, but from Ippolit and all its successors by pseudonymous authors and disputed origin. The implications on commercial and competitive computer chess are not quite clear, but presumably the decrease in number of participants of over the board tournaments will progress and clone suspicions may float like a Sword of Damocles over the scene, whether programmers took ideas too literally or not.
 

Testing Framework

The Stockfish Testing Framework called Fishtest [3] is a web application written by Gary Linscott [4] [5] mainly in Python under the Pyramid Application Development Framework [6], to distribute games across different machines to reduce the test latency and increment throughput. Started in early 2013 with Stockfish 3.0, Fishtest has hundreds of contributors, as of May 2014, 744 testers and 52 developers [7] active in testing ideas and tweaks [8], to make Stockfish the strongest open source or even chess program of the world. 

Tournament Play

Stockfish is top contender of the prestigious Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC), reaching the superfinals at season 4season 5 and season 6 so far, losing season 4 from Houdini and season 5 from Komodo TCEC, both narrow matches with 23 - 25, but won the season 6 superfinal versus Komodo 7 conveniently with +13=45-6 and 35½ - 28½. This version but without tablebases was released in May 31, 2014 as Stockfish 5 [9]. Successor Stockfish 141214 qualified for the TCEC Season 7 Superfinal in December 2014, versus Komodo again, this time with the better end for Komodo 8 successor 1333 with 33½ - 30½..

GM+Rybka vs. Stockfish

On July 19, 2014, Stockfish 5 played a four game match versus Daniel Naroditsky plus Rybka 3 (2008), 45 minutes plus 30-second increment. Stockfish won 3½ - ½ [10] [11]. A few weeks later the experiment continued with Hikaru Nakamura in Burlingame, California [12]. Supported two games by Rybka 3, Nakamura lost ½ - 1½, two games with pawn odds (Stockfish both Black without h- and b-pawn) ended ½ - 1½ in favour to Stockfish 5 as well. It played the latest development build compiled for OS X running on a 3 GHz 8-Core Mac Pro [13]

Tuning


Release Dates

  • Stockfish 1.0 : November 02, 2008
  • Stockfish 1.01 : November 03, 2008
  • Stockfish 1.1 : December 06, 2008
  • Stockfish 1.1a : December 08, 2008
  • Stockfish 1.2 : December 29, 2008
  • Stockfish 1.3 : May 02, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.3.1 : May 03, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.4 : July 05, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.5 : October 04, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.5.1 : October 11, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.6 : December 25, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.6.1 : December 25, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.6.2 : December 31, 2009
  • Stockfish 1.6.3 : February 02, 2010
  • Stockfish 1.7 : April 08, 2010
  • Stockfish 1.7.1 : April 10, 2010
  • Stockfish 1.8 : July 02, 2010
  • Stockfish 1.9 : October 02, 2010
  • Stockfish 1.9.1 : October 05, 2010
  • Stockfish 2.0 : January 01, 2011
  • Stockfish 2.0.1 : January 04, 2011
  • Stockfish 2.1 : May 04, 2011
  • Stockfish 2.1.1 : May 08, 2011
  • Stockfish 2.2 : December 29, 2011
  • Stockfish 2.2.1 : January 06, 2012
  • Stockfish 2.2.2 : January 14, 2012
  • Stockfish 2.3 : September 15, 2012
  • Stockfish 2.3.1 : September 22, 2012
  • Stockfish 3 : April 30, 2013
  • Stockfish 4 : August 20, 2013
  • Stockfish DD : November 29, 2013
  • Stockfish 5 : May 31, 2014
  • Stockfish 6 : January 27, 2015

Ports


See also


Publications


Forum Posts

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015


External Links

Chess engine

Rating Lists

Matches

Interviews

Misc


References

  1. ^ Stockfish 1.0 by Marco CostalbaCCC, November 02, 2008
  2. ^ Lofoten - Seeing is believing - The fisheries
  3. ^ glinscott/fishtest · GitHub
  4. ^ Get Involved - Stockfish - Powerful Open Source Chess Engine
  5. ^ Fishtest Distributed Testing Framework by Marco CostalbaCCC, May 01, 2013
  6. ^ The Pyramid Web Framework — The Pyramid Web Framework v1.5
  7. ^ Stockfish Testing Framework - Users
  8. ^ Stockfish Testing Framework
  9. ^ Stockfish 5 by Marco CostalbaCCC, May 31, 2014
  10. ^ Can a GM and Rybka beat Stockfish? by GM Daniel NaroditskyChess.com, August 08, 2014
  11. ^ GM and Rybka vs. Stockfish by Robert Maddox, CCC, August 09, 2014
  12. ^ Nakamura vs Stockfish, public match 8/23 by Jesse L, CCC, August 17, 2014
  13. ^ Stockfish Outlasts "Rybkamura" by FM Mike KleinChess.com, August 24, 2014
  14. ^ exoticorn/stockfish-js · GitHub
  15. ^ Part 1 covers HoudiniRybkaKomodoStockfishCritterNaumChiron and Spike
  16. ^ exoticorn/stockfish-js · GitHub
  17. ^ SPSA Algorithm
  18. ^ Stockfish for 39 dollars by Matthias GemuhCCC, August 26, 2010
https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Stockfish

No comments:

Post a Comment