Stockfish 4

[kranium]

wow,
now this is open-source development at it's extreme best

the distributed testing environment is extremely impressive, even more so the pace of progress being achieved by those involved!

Gary Linscott, Marco Costalba, and everyone involved gets huge cudos from me

please keep up this fantastic effort...very exciting to see

PS-
the sky is the limit!
(SETI@home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ has more than 3 million users helping analyze the telescope data)

[michiguel]

Stockfish 4 has been released. You can download at http://stockfishchess.org/ or browse the sources at https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish

Diffs from last version is: 43 files changed, 1534 insertions(+), 1703 deletions(-)

So 169 lines of code less but should be quite stronger than version 3. For interested people here is the breakdown of lines count.

Code: Select all

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                             20           2110           1619           5772
C/C++ Header                    21            636            570           1558
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            41           2746           2189           7330
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the first release where we have took full advantage of the power of our distributed and public testing framework. At one point we reached 41 active machines connected for a total of 136 cores and a compound testing power of 190M nps (nodes per second). This is even more noteworthy considering that Gary’s 24 core monster was offline at that moment.

But is the the ‘public’ part of our development model that is the real advantage we have and without which the improvement above SF 3 would have not been possible, no matter how hardware we throw at it.

So here is the list of developers that contributed to this release:

Code: Select all

Dan Schmidt
Dariusz Orzechowski
Eelco de Groot
Gary Linscott
jhellis3
Joona Kiiski
jundery
Leonid Pechenik
Marco Costalba
Reuven Peleg
Ryan Schmitt
Ryan Takker
Tom Vijlbrief
Uri Blass

A special thank to Daylen Yang, our precious webmaster and builder of the Mac binaries, to Peter Österlund for the Android version and to http://abrok.eu/stockfish/ from which I have, shameless, took the Windows binaries.

For the first time since Stockfish was borne, Jim Ablett didn’t compile the official builds and this is a big miss for us and for me in particular. I’d like to publicly thank him again for the help and support during all these years.

Finally a note for the user. In this version there is no more automatic detection of CPU count, so at startup Stockfish always defaults to 1 thread. In case you want to use more than one CPU you have to manually set the “Threads” UCI option accordingly.

Have Fun
SF Team

Great! Just in time for nTCEC (of course I do not believe the timing is a coincidence ). nTCEC will be very exciting since the final result now it is not certain! (probably for the first time)

Miguel
PS: Houdini, SF and Komodo will be head to head!

[IanO]

Finally a note for the user. In this version there is no more automatic detection of CPU count, so at startup Stockfish always defaults to 1 thread. In case you want to use more than one CPU you have to manually set the “Threads” UCI option accordingly.

Have Fun
SF Team

It doesn't work with HIARCS Chess Explorer on Mac. Even when setting the number of threads to 8 it keeps running with one thread. I just tried with ScidVsMac and there it works. So it's a HCE bug, not a problem from Stockfish... for Windows' HCE users : do you have the same problem ?

FYI, Hiarcs Explorer has some known issues with not reliably saving changes to engine parameters. Double-check that the Threads parameter actually did change. Try saving Preferences once with default parameters first, then go back to edit them. Try changing engine parameters from a different place (like Preferences > Engines), or changing more than one parameter at at time.

(After much fiddling, I finally got it to stick at 4 cores in my copy. Mark has it on his todo list to fix now that the WCCC is finished.)

[gladius]

Stockfish 4 has been released.

Great! Thanks Marco, and everyone involved in the SF project - whether contributing cores or patches. It's so cool to see all the great ideas people are testing.

[gerold]

Thanks Marco and team.
Working good in Arena.

Best,
Gerold.

[Don]

Nicely done and great work!!

Don

[zullil]

Stockfish Bench Intel 3970x
I assume this is one core

Total time <ms> : 2001
Nodes searched : 4132371
Nodes/second : 2065154

Everything works fine for me.

bench is run with one thread.

Nodes searched should be 4132374; I assume you got that but typed incorrectly.

[JuLieN]

Finally a note for the user. In this version there is no more automatic detection of CPU count, so at startup Stockfish always defaults to 1 thread. In case you want to use more than one CPU you have to manually set the “Threads” UCI option accordingly.

Have Fun
SF Team

It doesn't work with HIARCS Chess Explorer on Mac. Even when setting the number of threads to 8 it keeps running with one thread. I just tried with ScidVsMac and there it works. So it's a HCE bug, not a problem from Stockfish... for Windows' HCE users : do you have the same problem ?

FYI, Hiarcs Explorer has some known issues with not reliably saving changes to engine parameters. Double-check that the Threads parameter actually did change. Try saving Preferences once with default parameters first, then go back to edit them. Try changing engine parameters from a different place (like Preferences > Engines), or changing more than one parameter at at time.

(After much fiddling, I finally got it to stick at 4 cores in my copy. Mark has it on his todo list to fix now that the WCCC is finished.)

Thanks Ian. After insisting a bit it finally worked. The procedure seems to be:
- set the number of threads in the engine's preferences panel
- leave the panel by clicking ok
- click on "apply changes" in the engines' list
- close the engines' list
And when we're back to the engine's settings the modifications stick.

[melajara]

What a nice surprise, thank you very much

Thank you too for this special mention to Jim Ablett, we all sorely miss him, hopefully, from time to time he will still contribute to craft a special compile, say just to stay tuned

[pohl4711]

The testrun for my LS-ratinglist will start today (when the testrun of Gull 2.2 x64 is finished) on both machines and will end on Saturday...
The last LS-testrun of Stockfish was the development-version from August, 9, 2013 (3074 LS-Elo). Will Stockfish 4 be another step forward? And will it finally be stronger than Houdini 1.5a (3081 LS-Elo) and catch the title "best mp-freeware" from Houdini 1.5a???
Stay tuned!

Stefan

By the way: A big (very big!) thanx to all supporters and developers of this fantastic project!
It is a pleasure for me, to do some testwork with the development-versions for the LS-ratinglist in order to confirm Stockfish's progress against other strong opponents!

All completed tests (at least 10000 games played) of Stockfish development-versions for the LS-ratinglist since Stockfish 3.
A nice little view on a big progress in 100 days...

Stockfish 3: 3020 Elo (date:130430)
130519: 3037 Elo
130601: 3046 Elo
130623: 3054 Elo
130724: 3055 Elo
130727: 3061 Elo
130729: 3068 Elo
130809: 3074 Elo
Stockfish 4: ???

Stocki rulez!