Stockfish 12 Released, 130 Elo Points Stronger

Happy Labor Day. It’s not quite Christmas, but something was left under the tree – Stockfish 12. As anticipated in a previous post the Stockfish developers decided to officially incorporate the NNUE neural net processing into a Stockfish Release (read about it here). This UCI engine can be installed just like previous Stockfish versions with the additional step of downloading the neural net component into the same directory as the Stockfish executable. As on any platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) the engine needs to be configured via the configuration dialog before use. Since the Stockfish NNUE is much simpler than the leela lc0 neural net the corresponding configuration is much simpler too. The only potential gotcha is that there are different versions of the Stockfish executable tuned to different generations of the CPU. Start at the top of the download list and if it crashes during configuration then download the next one in the list. Feel free to send me a note if you get stuck on anything. Have fun!