Stockfish 19

#1

Post by atiedebee » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

Stockfish 19
stockfishchess.org

Re: Stockfish 19

#2

Post by piker » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

Re: Stockfish 19

#3

Post by tumdum_ » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:32 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...

Re: Stockfish 19

#4

Post by mattr03 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have

Re: Stockfish 19

#5

Post by gwd » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.

Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.

I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.

The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.

Re: Stockfish 19

#6

Post by haunter » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays.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/

Re: Stockfish 19

#7

Post by lynx97 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

mattr03 wrote: post #4

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have

They basically replaced the static position evaluation function with a NN approach and kept the rest of the tree search mostly intact.

I ran fishtest on an old cluster for a while. Was nice to watch the stockfish team methodically improving things. Basically, every commit has to show it can beat the main branch before it gets merged.

Re: Stockfish 19

#8

Post by 0x00cl » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

haunter wrote: post #6

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/

I have tried En Croissant and its personally its a nice GUI and easy to use. It allows you to download stockfish and others right from their GUI.

Re: Stockfish 19

#9

Post by ZiiS » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

For when you need another decimal place of accuracy deciding what you should have moved instead of hanging your queen.

Re: Stockfish 19

#10

Post by sapiogram » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

Technically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.