Stockfish 4

[Mike S.]

Thank you very, very much!

At least in computer chess, the power of money is now defeated. Is that good or bad? I am not a philosopher.

P.S. I am currently running a match against Komodo CCT at 0:30m+0.250s ponder=on, and under these conditions, it seems that Komodo is way superiour: Intermediate result is 70% for Komodo. Maybe it gets better, only 30 from 80 games have been played.

[IWB]

Hello Marco,

Unfortunately the 64bit SSE compile is not running for me.

I use W-XP64 on an AMD Phenom II and the 64bit engine is crashing immediately. It is however running on W7 and an i5-2500k

Of course it might be something completly different but I suspect that we have the same problem we had in the past. We discovered that to squeeze out the last quarter of a percent in the compile fails as one of the compile options is to compile for W7 and not for XP. Actually we compared in the past and there were exactly NO difference in speed between these two possibilities.

Right now I can't test the engine properly and hope that this can be fixed.

Bye
Ingo

[Martin Thoresen]

Time for you to move on from ancient operating systems Ingo.

[IWB]

Time for you to move on from ancient operating systems Ingo.

I know, I know ...

But there are 3 reasons why this is difficult:

1. 8 Computers need a license (Money)
2. 8 perfectly running computers upgrade (time)
3. 1 + 2 to get no difference in the result

Basicaly I hesitate because there would be no need if the compilers do not touch the "otimize for W7" button (and there is no gain in speed from XP64 (wich is WServer2003, it is not the ancient normal XP!) to W7!)

Bye
Ingo

[Stonewall]

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

Thank you Stockfish Team for this update.

[IWB]

There is one more point.

Houdini and Komodo have an autodetection for SSE and both take care about older OS and Hardware. They invest more time in customers than a purly development driven project like Stockfish.

Thst is OK for Stockfish as they have a different intension but a pitty for the end user. Rigth now there is no 64 Windows compile without SSE which excludes all Intel Core2 and many AMD users ...

But i agree, my problem (if it is the OS) is a special one. But I am sure sooner or later I will ge a working compile, it is just that a few people have to wi for a result now

Bye
Ingo

[Modern Times]

Hello Marco,

Unfortunately the 64bit SSE compile is not running for me.

I use W-XP64 on an AMD Phenom II and the 64bit engine is crashing immediately. It is however running on W7 and an i5-2500k

Of course it might be something completly different but I suspect that we have the same problem we had in the past. We discovered that to squeeze out the last quarter of a percent in the compile fails as one of the compile options is to compile for W7 and not for XP. Actually we compared in the past and there were exactly NO difference in speed between these two possibilities.

Right now I can't test the engine properly and hope that this can be fixed.

Bye
Ingo

I already highlighted this twice a few posts back

AMD Phenom II users need to go to
http://abrok.eu/stockfish/

to get an X64 compile that works, i.e.
stockfish_13082009_x64_modern.exe

The non-SSE4.2 x64 one is not in the download package from stockfish.org.

[IWB]

At

http://abrok.eu/stockfish/

I found a normal 64 bit compile which is around 3% slower on than the SSE compile. 3% is hard to express in Elo and it is basicaly the diffeence between the last official compile and the development compiles, so nothing to worry about. (Thx Piotr)

I will wait for a few hours to see if someone can produce a XP64 SSE compile, if not I will use the normal one ...

Bye
Ingo

[IWB]

I already highlighted this a few posts back

AMD Phenom II users need to go to
http://abrok.eu/stockfish/

to get an X64 compile that works, i.e.
stockfish_13082009_x64_modern.exe

The non-SSE4.2 x64 one is not in the download package from stockfish.org.

Thx I found that too.

Nonetheless, I think the compile "for modern computers" which is done for W7 is useless as there is no speed increase.

I'll wait a few hours maybe someone is doing a SSE compile for XP64. But the difference is marginal to th enormal x64 compile.

Thx again
ingo

[Modern Times]

It isn't an XP64 issue. It doesn't work on W7 or W8 on AMD Phenom II either. The compile clearly expects the full Intel SSE4.2 instruction set to be present, which is not the case on our CPUs.