Stockfish 17

Official release version of Stockfish 17

Bench: 1484730

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Stockfish 17

Today we have the pleasure to announce a new major release of Stockfish. As
always, you can freely download it at https://stockfishchess.org/download and
use it in the GUI of your choice.

Don’t forget to join our Discord server[1] to get in touch with the community
of developers and users of the project!

*Quality of chess play*

In tests against Stockfish 16, this release brings an Elo gain of up to 46
points[2] and wins up to 4.5 times more game pairs[3] than it loses. In
practice, high-quality moves are now found in less time, with a user upgrading
from Stockfish 14 being able to analyze games at least 6 times[4] faster with
Stockfish 17 while maintaining roughly the same quality.

During this development period, Stockfish won its 9th consecutive first place
in the main league of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC)[5], and the 24th
consecutive first place in the main events (bullet, blitz, and rapid) of the
Computer Chess Championship (CCC)[6].

*Update highlights*

*Improved engine lines*

This release introduces principal variations (PVs) that are more informative
for mate and decisive table base (TB) scores. In both cases, the PV will
contain all moves up to checkmate. For mate scores, the PV shown is the best
variation known to the engine at that point, while for table base wins, it
follows, based on the TB, a sequence of moves that preserves the game outcome
to checkmate.

*NUMA performance optimization*

For high-end computers with multiple CPUs (typically a dual-socket architecture
with 100+ cores), this release automatically improves performance with a
`NumaPolicy` setting that optimizes non-uniform memory access (NUMA).  Although
typical consumer hardware will not benefit, speedups of up to 2.8x[7] have been
measured.

*Shoutouts*

*ChessDB*

During the past 1.5 years, hundreds of cores have been continuously running
Stockfish to grow a database of analyzed positions. This chess cloud
database[8] now contains well over 45 billion positions, providing excellent
coverage of all openings and commonly played lines. This database is already
integrated into GUIs such as En Croissant[9] and Nibbler[10], which access it
through the public API.

*Leela Chess Zero*

Generally considered to be the strongest GPU engine, it continues to provide
open data which is essential for training our NNUE networks. They released
version 0.31.1[11] of their engine a few weeks ago, check it out!

*Website redesign*

Our website has undergone a redesign in recent months, most notably in our home
page[12], now featuring a darker color scheme and a more modern aesthetic,
while still maintaining its core identity. We hope you'll like it as much as we
do!

*Thank you*

The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts (thanks
everybody!) who contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free
and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and very strong.

We would like to express our gratitude for the 11k stars[13] that light up our
GitHub project! Thank you for your support and encouragement – your recognition
means a lot to us.

We invite our chess fans to join the Fishtest testing framework[14] to
contribute compute resources needed for development. Programmers can contribute
to the project either directly to Stockfish[15] (C++), to Fishtest[16] (HTML,
CSS, JavaScript, and Python), to our trainer nnue-pytorch[17] (C++ and Python),
or to our website[18] (HTML, CSS/SCSS, and JavaScript).

The Stockfish team

[1] https://discord.gg/GWDRS3kU6R
[2] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/66d738ba9de3e7f9b33d159a
[3] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/66d738f39de3e7f9b33d15a0
[4] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/wiki/Useful-data#equivalent-time-odds-and-normalized-game-pair-elo
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Top_Chess_Engine_Championship
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Chess.com_Computer_Chess_Championship
[7] official-stockfish#5285
[8] https://chessdb.cn/queryc_en/
[9] https://encroissant.org/
[10] https://github.com/rooklift/nibbler
[11] https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/releases/tag/v0.31.1
[12] https://stockfishchess.org/
[13] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/stargazers
[14] https://github.com/official-stockfish/fishtest/wiki/Running-the-worker
[15] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
[16] https://github.com/official-stockfish/fishtest
[17] https://github.com/official-stockfish/nnue-pytorch
[18] https://github.com/official-stockfish/stockfish-web

src/misc.cpp

@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ namespace Stockfish {
 namespace {
 
 // Version number or dev.
-constexpr std::string_view version = "dev";
+constexpr std::string_view version = "17";
 
 // Our fancy logging facility. The trick here is to replace cin.rdbuf() and
 // cout.rdbuf() with two Tie objects that tie cin and cout to a file stream. We