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@MichaelB7 MichaelB7 released this 03 Oct 03:10
· 195 commits to honey since this release
v12r1
f31d7a8

Lewes

It is my pleasure to release Honey v12-R1 and related binaries to chess enthusiasts everywhere.

Based on current-dev-Stockfish 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 introduced "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. In addition with the R1 release, the binary now includes 55 Syzygy tablebases, including KRPvKR. Type s at the command line to view all of the command line shortcuts. I would like to call out Stockfish developer @mstembera for his SF code that added Syzygy tablebases to the binary.

Also with this release, the bench command now 96 test positions - including many that are still very tough for today's computers.
35 of these very hard chess positions were posted on Talkchess

Note - the x86-64 download includes Weakfish. Weakfish is designed only to play weaker human level chess and is released only at the base x86-64 version. It is also available as a separate download.

The last round of testing before release:

4800 game(s) loaded
ResultSet>elo
ResultSet-EloRating>mm 0 1
00:00:00,00
ResultSet-EloRating>r
Rank Name                 Rating   Δ     +    -     #     Σ    Σ%     W    L    D   W%    =%   OppR
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 Honey-12-R1           3145   0.0    9    9  1600  928.5  58.0  407  150 1043  25.4  65.2  3091
   2 Bluefish-12-R1        3144   1.4    9    9  1600  926.5  57.9  400  147 1053  25.0  65.8  3091
   3 Oki-Maguro-12-R1      3136   8.5    9    9  1600  901.0  56.3  379  177 1044  23.7  65.2  3093
   4 stockfish-092820      3131   4.7    9    9  1600  888.5  55.5  353  176 1071  22.1  66.9  3094
   5 Black-Diamond-12-R1   3083  48.0    9    9  1600  749.5  46.8  241  342 1017  15.1  63.6  3103
   6 Stockfish-11r99       2961 121.5    9    9  1600  406.0  25.4  103  891  606   6.4  37.9  3128
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Δ = delta from the next higher rated opponent
  # = number of games played
  Σ = total score, 1 point for win, 1/2 point for draw

ResultSet-EloRating>los
                     Ho Bl Ok st Bl St
Honey-12-R1             59 95 99100100
Bluefish-12-R1       40    92 98100100
Oki-Maguro-12-R1      4  7    78100100
stockfish-092820      0  1 21    99100
Black-Diamond-12-R1   0  0  0  0   100
Stockfish-11r99       0  0  0  0  0

Note: Was the last current-dev-Stockfish prior to the NNUE commit. I named it Stockfish 11r99. About 180 Elo gain since then with NNUE and the subsequent patches in about 2 months.

Be safe and have fun!
Michael Byrne

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