The Stockfish community has announced the latest release of its Open Source Chess Engine, the Stockfish 16.1.
In the developers’ 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 than it loses.
The neural network architecture has undergone two major updates and is currently in its 8th version.
The most important update is the removal of traditional handcrafted evaluation (HCE) and the transition to a fully neural network-based approach. In addition, Stockfish introduces a secondary neural network (Dual NNUE), used to quickly evaluate positions that are easily decided.
Stockfish has been one of the best chess engines in the world for several years; 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 February 2024, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world with an estimated Elo rating of 3634.
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.
