Stockfish (chess)
Free and open-source chess engine / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It can be used in chess software through the Universal Chess Interface.
Developer(s) | The Stockfish developers[1] |
---|---|
Initial release | November 2, 2008; 15 years ago (2008-11-02) |
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | C++ |
Operating system | Microsoft Windows macOS Linux iOS Android |
Type | Chess engine |
License | GPL-3.0-or-later[3] |
Website | stockfishchess |
Stockfish has been one of the best chess engines in the world for several years;[4][5][6] it has won all main events of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) and the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship (CCC) since 2020 and, as of May 2024, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world with an estimated Elo rating of 3634.[7]
The Stockfish engine was developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski, and was derived from Glaurung, an open-source engine by Tord Romstad released in 2004. It is now being developed and maintained by the Stockfish community.[8]
Stockfish historically used only a classical hand-crafted function to evaluate board positions, but with the introduction of the efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) in August 2020, it adopted a hybrid evaluation system that primarily used the neural network and occasionally relied on the hand-crafted evaluation.[9][10][11] In July 2023, Stockfish removed the hand-crafted evaluation and transitioned to a fully neural network-based approach.[12][2]