Stockfish+NNUE, Strongest Chess Engine Ever, To Compete In CCCC
What happens when you combine the brute-force computing power of Stockfish with the positional understanding of AlphaZero (or Leela Chess Zero)?
The chess world is about to find out! Starting July 20 at 8 a.m. Pacific / 17:00 Central Europe possibly the strongest chess engine ever, Stockfish+NNUE, will debut in the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship.
Stockfish+NNUE has broken new ground in computer chess by incorporating a neural network into the already incredibly powerful Stockfish chess engine. This hybrid chess monsterpiece is estimated to perform better than the current Stockfish 11 who recently defeated Leela Chess Zero in the TCEC, giving it a solid claim to being the strongest chess engine in the world
Stockfish+NNUE is a creation by H. Noda (and others). Instead of being merely a "piece-counter," it looks at the whole position at once, in the style of Leela Chess Zero. But, thanks to new tricks borrowed from shogi engines, Stockfish+NNUE is able to maintain incredible speeds on the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship's strong hardware, calculating something like 60 million positions per second, compared to 40,000 positions per second for Leela Chess Zero or 100 million positions per second for regular Stockfish. This allows it to keep its tactical ability while running on standard CPUs.
How strong is Stockfish+NNUE? Testing from multiple sources has it beating the latest Stockfish by 30 Elo. Even old NNUE versions have been able to convincingly defeat the latest Komodo. Here are some sample victories and most of the played games are available at https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship#event=postccc14-komodo-vs-stockfishnnue and https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship#event=postccc14-stockfishnnue-vs-stoofvlees.
Ready to see Stockfish+NNUE in action? Watch the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship debut of Stockfish+NNUE at Chess.com/ccc! It will be taking on the latest version of Leela Chess Zero in 200 games of 3+2 before playing the latest version of Stockfish under the same conditions. Each match is estimated to take about 36 hours. The book for the match is available here.
