To show you how strong Stockfish 19 is compared to 18, I used to lose 100% against 18, and I now lose 100% against 19, probably faster. Time to fire up En Croissant and see :)
For me (having written my own tiny 400 line chess engine, that now I'm not able to beat - sure I'm not a good player, but still), the reason to have Stockfish is not really to play against it, and then inevitably lose, but to use it to show which moves are best. I assume that's how most (hobby and professional) chess players use Stockfish nowadays.
Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).
I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life.
I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.
The GUI page is a bit out of date imo, or I'm not sure how does the selection work because there are countles GUI options nowadays. Anyways some of the best options are not even mentioned like
Amused me the first time I ran En Croissant, it lets you download existing chess databases and one of those (Caissabase) was my project from years ago :).
I don't play Chess much any more but others have taken up the Chess DB mantle (with slightly different criteria).
I do find it ironic that a project I did in a couple of days for myself and chucked online in case it was useful is still kicking around though.
If you like En Croissant there is a nice fork called Pawn Appetit that does all the same things and adds some other QoL bits and bobs.
Whenever I see another Stockfish update I dream of the day that I sit down and code my own chess bot that is good enough to beat me. I would be so happy if I manage to do that.
Depending on your feelings on being spoiled on the general techniques, and an approach to implement them, Sebastian Lague made a great two-part series on building a chess engine. It's specific enough that you have an idea of the techniques involved, without dwelling enough with the details to make implementing your own futile.
I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time.
The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.
From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)
My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.
Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.
I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.
The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.
One way would be to calculate a cost per game, factoring in both electricity and an amortized cost of the hardware, maybe having a penalty too for extra time run (e.g., if focusing only on hardware depreciation and electricity, 1 minute of TPU would translate to 2 weeks of CPU, that 2 weeks of waiting still costs you something). Obviously this isn't stable, as relative prices of GPUs and memory shift over time, and it's somewhat sensitive to setup; but done right it's probably more "what a user actually wants to know", in terms of what it would take to get equivalent performance.
On average, yes. Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like. But on a game to game basis Lc0 can still win some games, depending on the starting position. It's rare that Lc0 can win both black and white starting from the same position, tho.
There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.
Technically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.
Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming out very slightly ahead.
That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
They basically replaced the static position evaluation function with a NN approach and kept the rest of the tree search mostly intact.
I ran fishtest on an old cluster for a while. Was nice to watch the stockfish team methodically improving things. Basically, every commit has to show it can beat the main branch before it gets merged.
People perhaps won't remember the long history of computer chess at least how it played out in the 90s
There was a succession of interesting engines (I think The King used to win a number of computer tournaments, this is the one Chessmaster used, that wonderful audio-visual program, like Encarta but chess related) and then the big three of Fritz (match against Kramnik), Junior (match against Kasparov) and Shredder. And also HIARCS and later, Rybka (and Crafty, as well, touted as the open source chess engine)
Stockfish has been top dog (fish?) for a while now but there was a notable exception when AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) beat it, but these days of course Stockfish is far and away the best engine (I guess. I don't know how far behind Leela is)
And, yes, human vs computer chess has stopped being interesting for a while. There were some centaur chess (human and computer; humans using computers to analyze) competitions in the 2000s and some interesting things but nowadays of course your phone can handedly beat Magnus Carlsen and others without problems, reliably
I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.
Presumably it's easy to highlight ones from benchmarks where the evaluation of Stockfish 19 is most significantly different from version 18?
Nocheto https://nocheto.sallyx.org/ (this my favorite)
ChessMD https://chessmd.org/
PyChess https://pychess.github.io/about/
Anyways. Now I can use an even better Stockfish to benchmark my own engine..
I don't play Chess much any more but others have taken up the Chess DB mantle (with slightly different criteria).
I do find it ironic that a project I did in a couple of days for myself and chucked online in case it was useful is still kicking around though.
If you like En Croissant there is a nice fork called Pawn Appetit that does all the same things and adds some other QoL bits and bobs.
https://youtu.be/U4ogK0MIzqk
The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.
From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)
Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.
I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.
The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.
Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming out very slightly ahead.
That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
I ran fishtest on an old cluster for a while. Was nice to watch the stockfish team methodically improving things. Basically, every commit has to show it can beat the main branch before it gets merged.
There was a succession of interesting engines (I think The King used to win a number of computer tournaments, this is the one Chessmaster used, that wonderful audio-visual program, like Encarta but chess related) and then the big three of Fritz (match against Kramnik), Junior (match against Kasparov) and Shredder. And also HIARCS and later, Rybka (and Crafty, as well, touted as the open source chess engine)
Stockfish has been top dog (fish?) for a while now but there was a notable exception when AlphaZero (which later became Leela? I'm not sure) beat it, but these days of course Stockfish is far and away the best engine (I guess. I don't know how far behind Leela is)
And, yes, human vs computer chess has stopped being interesting for a while. There were some centaur chess (human and computer; humans using computers to analyze) competitions in the 2000s and some interesting things but nowadays of course your phone can handedly beat Magnus Carlsen and others without problems, reliably