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Stockfish


Stockfish is widely regarded as the world's strongest chess engine. It's an open-source project developed by a large community of contributors. Its codebase serves as the foundation for numerous derivative engines and clones. The latest official release is Stockfish 17.1. Based on initial testing, this version appears to be slightly stronger than Stockfish 17.0.

Rating Chess Engine Diary CEDR=3766

  •  AVX2 - Recommended for most users | Intel (2013+) and AMD (2015+)
  • POPCNT - A bit slower than AVX2 | Intel (2008+) and AMD (2011+)
  • VNNI-512
  • VNNI-256
  • AVX-512 - A bit faster than BMI2 | AMD Zen 4+
  • BMI2 - A bit faster than AVX2 | Intel (2013+) and AMD Zen 3+
  • 64-bit - Very slow, but works on all 64-bit CPUs.



Stockfish 17.1 engine succeeds in Android tournament. See entry: Stockfish 17.1 wins Android Chess Engines Tournament, 2025.04.08-09.

Stockfish - optimal settings

To get the best possible evaluation or the strongest move for a given position, the key is to let Stockfish analyze long enough, using a recent release (or development version), properly selected for the CPU architecture.

The following settings are important as well:

Threads
Set it to the maximum minus 1 or 2 threads.
Set the number of threads to the maximum available, possibly leaving 1 or 2 threads free for other tasks.
SMT or Hyper-threading is beneficial, so normally the number of threads available is twice the number of cores available.
Consumer hardware typically has at least 4-8 threads, Stockfish supports hundreds of threads.

Hash
Tip
The Hash can be any value, not just powers of two. The value is specified in MiB.

Gameplay
Some general guidelines (for games played using 1 thread) are:

Ultra-bullet games (10s+0.1s) a value of 16 (default).
Bullet games (60s+0.6s, aprox. 1+0 or 1+1) a value of 64.
Blitz games (180s+1.8s, aprox. 3+2) a value of 192.
Longer time controls or games played with more threads will require more hash.
60s+0.6s with 8 threads would require a hash of 64 * 8 = 512.

Analysis
Depending on how long you want to leave Stockfish analyzing a position for the amount of hash needed will vary.
For shallow analysis (e.g. depth 24 or 1 million nodes), a hash of 64 or 128 should be enough.
For deep analysis set it to as much as you can afford given the available memory in your system, leaving some memory for the operating system and other applications.

MultiPV
Set it to 1.
A value higher than 1 weakens the quality of the best move computed, as resources are used to compute other moves.


Official prerelease Stockfish dev-20250513
Stockfish dev-20250513 download (all file: avx2, avx512, bmi2, sse41-popcnt, vnni256, vnni512, 64)

Official Stockfish pre-release: Stockfish dev-20250629




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