Stockfish Battle Royale: Versions 1.0 to 14 Quadruple Round Robin Tournament

What is the strongest version of Stockfish? The latest version...duh!

Well I wanted to put that theory to the test by having every whole number release from 1.0 to 14 play against each other. All versions downloaded from the Stockfish Archive.

Participants (including release dates):

• Stockfish 1.0 - November 02, 2008
• Stockfish 2.0 - January 01, 2011
• Stockfish 3 - April 30, 2013
• Stockfish 4 - August 20, 2013
• Stockfish 5 - May 31, 2014
• Stockfish 6 - January 27, 2015
• Stockfish 7 - January 02, 2016
• Stockfish 8 - November 01, 2016
• Stockfish 9 - February 01, 2018
• Stockfish 10 - November 29, 2018
• Stockfish 11 - January 18, 2020
• Stockfish 12 - September 02, 2020
• Stockfish 13 - February 19, 2021
• Stockfish 14 - July 02, 2021

CCRL already does something like this with more versions, a vastly larger sample size, and much faster hardware, but I thought it would be fun to do anyway.

• OS: Windows 10 x64
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8750H (6 Cores)
• RAM: 8 GB
• GUI: Fritz 17
• Format: Quadruple Round Robin
• Time Control: 2 min + 1 sec increment
• No opening books or endgame tablebases

Results (open in a new tab to enlarge):

(*One game between SF 1.0 and SF 5 aborted because SF 1.0 "caused an exception")

SF 13 slightly edged out SF 14, but SF 12-14 are pretty much the same strength. You certainly can see the difference neural network training has made since it was implemented in SF 12.

Also, congrats to SF 3 for beating out SF 4, 5, and 6 rather convincingly!

SF 3 beats SF 8

SF 7 draws SF 14

SF 1.0 draws SF 8