Stockfish 12 Released, 130 Elo Points Stronger
Version 12 of the popular open-source chess engine Stockfish was released on Thursday. It is a major update that includes an efficiently updatable neural network and is significantly stronger than earlier versions.
According to the official Stockfish blog, version 12 of Stockfish plays significantly stronger than any of its predecessors: "In a match against Stockfish 11, Stockfish 12 will typically win at least 10 times more game pairs than it loses."
The rating difference compared to Stockfish 11 is estimated to be about 130 Elo points. This became clear from internal progression tests during development and was recently confirmed In Chess.com's computer chess environment where Stockfish+NNUE and Leela Chess Zero performed quite comparably.
The jump in strength is mainly the result of the introduction of NNUE, which stands for "efficiently updatable neural network." At the same time, Stockfish remains a CPU-only engine.
Stockfish 12 combines the brute-force computing approach of traditional Stockfish with the advanced evaluation capabilities of neural network chess engines such as AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero.
In the new version, two evaluation functions are available. Besides the classical evaluation function, there is now the NNUE evaluation which is computed with a neural network based on basic inputs. The network is optimized and trained on the evaluations of millions of positions.
Wotawa, 1937
German Chess Magazine #1979
This study is known to be a tough nut to crack for chess engines. On this author's computer, Stockfish 11 took 4 minutes and 54 seconds to show the winning move as its first choice. Stockfish 12 took only 38 seconds.
One early user wrote on Reddit: "From personal experience, Stockfish 12’s positional understanding is really unlike anything before it. Even Leela on extremely powerful hardware can seem blind to Stockfish 12’s search. Pretty much every major blindspot, like pawn structure weaknesses, seems gone in this new evaluation."
Stockfish 12 is available for download here with the neural network already embedded and ready to go. Chess.com expects to soon have Stockfish 12 available in our "max analysis" feature.
See also:
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
Peter's first book The Chess Revolution is out now!
Company Contact and News Accreditation:
Email: [email protected] FOR SUPPORT PLEASE USE chess.com/support!
Phone: 1 (800) 318-2827
Address: 877 E 1200 S #970397, Orem, UT 84097
