Stockfish 1.0
Released 3 years ago on November 2, 2008
This is Stockfish, an UCI engine derived from Norwegian engine Glaurung 2.1.
Why Stockfish?
- It’s a fish :)
- It is produced in Norway and cooked in Italy.
Improvements over Glaurung 2.1
Some bugs have been fixed and some possible improvements have been scattered all along the code. In my private tests it seems stronger then Glaurung, especially on 32 bit system.
But possibly the biggest change is a rewrite of large parts of Glaurung code. I am particularly proud of movegen.cpp where I was able to cut more then 250 lines of code through the use of templates, and now move generation is a little bit faster too.
So I would kindly ask you to properly compile it and to give it a try in public tests. I know clones are not allowed, but I would think this one could lead to some surprise.
Known Issues
- As the original Glaurung 2.1, this engine is endian sensitive. Please read the README if you have a PowerPC Mac and you want to compile yourself.
- On 32 bit systems code must be compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing option, both under gcc and Intel C++ compiler, to avoid random crashes due to a pop_1st_bit() optimization. MSVC does not seem to have this problem.
Special thanks to Tord Romstad for his beautiful engine. It is very, very difficult to find a parameter that needs tuning. It seems everything has been thoroughly tested and optimized.
It’s a wonderful base to start off. If this engine, just few months of hacking, will demonstrate stronger then Glaurung it is mostly because of the very high quality of the original one.
