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Stockfish giving deterministic results

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davidy22
davidy22
Jun 5, 2020
0
#1
So I installed the stock stockfish to use as the engine for a program and I decided to test it against itself. The engine seems to take the exact same line every game, settings at highest skill level and 20 moves deep. Someone's going to ask, so here's the only game that stockfish v11 will ever play against itself:

Is there a setting in the engine that I'm missing here for any kind of entropy?

kevinemery
kevinemery
Jan 10, 2022
0
#2

I don't think you'll see the same kind of determinism with Stockfish 14 NNUE as you saw with earlier versions of Stockfish.

tygxc
tygxc
Jan 10, 2022
0
#3

You can force it to continue from a position of your choice.

kevinemery
kevinemery
Jan 11, 2022
0
#4

I've looked into this a little bit and another thing that causes Stockfish to behave nondeterministically and come up with different lines and/or different weights from the same position on multiple runs is when Stockfish is running on multiple processor cores.  So you may see deterministic results running on a single-core laptop at chess.com/analysis, especially if you aren't using NNUE -- but then try it on a multi-core laptop and you'll see the nondeterminism.