Stockfish 19 • Hacker News Board

Re: Stockfish 19

#21

Post by petilon » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:27 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The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays.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/

If you like uncomplicated GUIs: http://mayura.com/chess/

Re: Stockfish 19

#22

Post by xenocratus » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #16

sinuhe69 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess someone can twit Hassabis and ask him :D He certainly has access.

who is Hassabis?

Demis Hassabis [1], co-founder of DeepMind

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

Re: Stockfish 19

#23

Post by eklitzke » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:46 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

It's widely believed so because Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper.

Re: Stockfish 19

#24

Post by alex1138 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

People perhaps won't remember the long history of computer chess at least how it played out in the 90s

There was a succession of interesting engines (I think The King used to win a number of computer tournaments, this is the one Chessmaster used, that wonderful audio-visual program, like Encarta but chess related) and then the big three of Fritz (match against Kramnik), Junior (match against Kasparov) and Shredder. And also HIARCS and later, Rybka (and Crafty, as well, touted as the open source chess engine)

Stockfish has been top dog (fish?) for a while now but there was a notable exception when AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) beat it, but these days of course Stockfish is far and away the best engine (I guess. I don't know how far behind Leela is)

And, yes, human vs computer chess has stopped being interesting for a while. There were some centaur chess (human and computer; humans using computers to analyze) competitions in the 2000s and some interesting things but nowadays of course your phone can handedly beat Magnus Carlsen and others without problems, reliably

Re: Stockfish 19

#25

Post by qlmos » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:48 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The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays.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/

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Re: Stockfish 19

#26

Post by Sopel » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:49 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

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Re: Stockfish 19

#27

Post by FartyMcFarter » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:50 AM UTC

nevi-me wrote: post #18

To show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)

Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).

Re: Stockfish 19

#28

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

stabbles wrote: post #11

Would be nice if they included a few "notable" games in the release notes. Presumably it's easy to highlight ones from benchmarks where the evaluation of Stockfish 19 is most significantly different from version 18?

They could but it's pretty much meaningless. You're bound to find outliers in favor of either engine, and the landscape is pretty chaotic

Re: Stockfish 19

#29

Post by Sopel » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

piker wrote: post #2

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

AlphaZero does not exist, as far as modern computer chess is concerned

Re: Stockfish 19

#30

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

gwd wrote: post #5

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…

Isn't one problem that it's hard to determine what equivalent compute is, for CPU search vs a neural net based engine like AZ or Leela?