Comparison Stockfish 10 vs. 9

I noticed the analysis board elsewhere was already using Stockfish 10, so I had to check, and sure enough the official webpage of the engine has 10 already released. I expected a tweet about it at least.

Anyway, as the title suggests, I set up a mini-match between Stockfish 10 and 9 to see how stronger it really is (according to the devs, should be about 50 Elo points stronger). Both engines ran on their default settings on a 5-core processor each using one thread.

I set up 12 25-minute rapid games, 30 5-minute blitz games and 100 1-minute bullet games with results:

Rapid 25 minutes: Both SF versions are equal, 1 to 1, 10 draws

Blitz 5 minutes: Stockfish 10 wins 4 to 0, 26 draws

Bullet 1 minute: Stockfish 10 wins 49 to 19, 32 draws

Stockfish 10 is more or less equal to its predecessor in longer time control, but has stronger calculating abilities when it comes to short games. Total performance would be +85 Elo, according to the Fritz cross table.

Now I'm not much of a chess engine geek so I bet I set up some things inaccurately, but it was just a fun experiment with which to spend the weekend. Can't wait to see how SF10 fares against AlphaZero.

Which Stockfish 10 engine did you use? 10_x64, 10_x64_bmi2 or 10_x64_popcnt? 

both were the basic x64 versions