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@MichaelB7 MichaelB7 released this 02 Sep 23:35
· 258 commits to honey since this release
v12
b0721ed

Lewes

It is my pleasure to release Honey v12 and related binaries to chess enthusiasts everywhere.

Based on Stockfish v12 (official-stockfish@c306d83) its existence is solely based on the hard work by the very creative Stockfish team .

From the Official Stockfish GitHub Site - Release 12 Announcement

Stockfish 12 plays significantly stronger than any of its predecessors. In a match against Stockfish 11., Stockfish 12 will typically win at least ten times more game pairs than it loses.

This jump in strength, visible in regular progression tests during development[1], results from the introduction of an efficiently
updatable neural network (NNUE) for the evaluation in Stockfish, and associated tuning of the engine as a whole. The concept of the
NNUE evaluation was first introduced in shogi, and ported to Stockfish afterward. Stockfish remains a CPU-only engine, since the NNUE networks can be very efficiently evaluated on CPUs. The recommended parameters of the NNUE network are embedded in distributed binaries, and Stockfish will use NNUE by default.

Both the NNUE and the classical evaluations are available, and can be used to assign values to positions that are later used in alpha-beta (PVS) search to find the best move. The classical evaluation computes this value as a function of various chess concepts, handcrafted by experts, tested and tuned using fishtest. The NNUE evaluation computes this value with a neural network based on basic inputs. The network is optimized and trained on the evaluations of millions of positions.

The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts that contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free and open source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and very strong. We invite chess fans to join the fishtest testing framework and programmers to contribute on github.

Stay safe and enjoy chess!

The Stockfish team
End of v12 Announcement

With Honey Release 12, We are introducing "Oki Maguro" , which roughly translates to "Bug Tuna" . It was renamed as it is no longer functionally equivalent to Official Stockfish binary. The Oki Maguro name is is to honor our Japanese friends who provided the framework to developed the NNUE evaluation function , who they first introduced in a shogi engine as mentioned above. Larry Kaufman, Chess Grandmaster and expert Shogi player reported "Dolphin - Kristallweizen-kai is based on Stockfish, adapted for shogi. It is just incredibly strong. It is rated about a thousand elo above the world's top human player, and based on games with 2017 computer champ Elmo it is about equal to Alpha Zero" ( Google Shogi's engine )"

All of the Honey engines have the NNUE included in the binary. are also compressed to about 60% of the their original size and are designed for human play and analysis.

Be safe and have fun!
Michael Byrne

More binaries will be released over the next few days for various OS and CPUs.

Assets 5