Stockfish 19 crushes its predecessor by up to 44 Elo points
Stockfish 19 is out, and in tests against Stockfish 18 it gains up to 44 Elo while winning more than three times as many game pairs as it loses. The release brings universal binaries that auto-detect CPU features, a new SFNNv16 network architecture that drops redundant threat features and adds pawn-pair features, and native support for RISC-V, LoongArch, and WebAssembly.
In tests against Stockfish 18, this new release brings an Elo gain of up to 44 points, and wins more than three times as many game pairs as it loses.
- strenholme
Interesting bug or regression.
Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice:
https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.html#RookSacAccepted - https://lichess.org/lwiPq9wB#48 - White to move
FEN: b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25
Run the above position in Stockfish 18 with a depth of 25: [1] It shows that White is 3.53 pawns ahead—i.e. White is clearly winning.
Run the above position in Stockfish 19, however, and Stockfish 19 at depth 25 says that, while White is ahead, it’s only a 1.2 pawn edge—Black supposedly still has good drawing chances.
At a depth of 35 ply, Stockfish 19 sees that it’s a clear White victory (6.79 pawns ahead), but it takes far deeper search for Stockfish 19 to see the win compared to Stockfish 18.
[1] To run the position, I type the following commands:
position fen b2r3r/k4p1p/p2q1np1/Np1P4/3p1Q2/P4PPB/1PP4P/1K2R3 w - - 0 25
d
go depth 25
I also see the issue on Lichess’s GUI by going to this URL:
- nevi-me
To show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)
- jan_m_savage
I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life.
I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.
- RivieraKid
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position.
Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.
I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.
- haunter
The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays. Anyways some of the best options are not even mentioned like
Nocheto https://nocheto.sallyx.org/ (this my favorite)
ChessMD https://chessmd.org/
PyChess https://pychess.github.io/about/
- stabbles
Would be nice if they included a few "notable" games in the release notes.
Presumably it's easy to highlight ones from benchmarks where the evaluation of Stockfish 19 is most significantly different from version 18?
- ZiiS
For when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.
- iamcreasy
Nice.
I wish these engines could explain why it is recommending certain move, or certain sequence of moves, using natural language - it would be very useful for learning.