Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 15.1.
As usual, downloads will be freely available at stockfishchess.org/download
Elo gain and competition results
With this release, version 5 of the NNUE neural net architecture has been introduced, and the training data has been extended to include Fischer random chess (FRC) positions. As a result, Elo gains are largest for FRC, reaching up to 50 Elo for doubly randomized FRC (DFRC). More importantly, also for standard chess this release progressed and will win two times more game pairs than it loses against Stockfish 15. Stockfish continues to win in a dominating way all chess engine tournaments, including the TCEC Superfinal, Cup, FRC, DFRC, and Swiss as well as the CCC Bullet, Blitz, and Rapid events.
New evaluation
This release also introduces a new convention for the evaluation that is reported by search. An evaluation of +1 is now no longer tied to the value of one pawn, but to the likelihood of winning the game. With a +1 evaluation, Stockfish has now a 50% chance of winning the game against an equally strong opponent. This convention scales down evaluations a bit compared to Stockfish 15 and allows for consistent evaluations in the future.
ChessBase settlement
In this release period, the Stockfish team has successfully enforced its GPL license against ChessBase. This has been an intense process that included filing a lawsuit, a court hearing, and finally negotiating a settlement that established that ChessBase infringed on the license by not distributing the Stockfish derivatives Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6 as free software, and that ensures ChessBase will respect the Free Software principles in the future. This settlement has been covered by major chess sites (see e.g. lichess.org and chess.com), and we are proud that it has been hailed as a ‘historic violation settlement’ by the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Thank you
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts (thanks everybody!) that contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the fishtest testing framework and programmers to contribute to the project.
The Stockfish team
