The team behind the Stockfish chess engine has announced the release of Stockfish 14.1. The update comes almost four months after the previous stable release and improves the engine’s Elo rating by 17 points and wins three times more game pairs than it loses. According to Computer Chess Rating List, Stockfish 14 has an Elo rating of 3549 so an additional 17 points put Stockfish 14.1 at around 3566 – that’s a huge 684 point lead over the best human chess player, Magnus Carlsen.
Over the last few months, the team said it had been preparing this update to include a more advanced NNUE (neural network) architecture and various search improvements have been included. The team said that at these lofty heights of play, draws are very common and during Neowin’s brief four-game test between Stockfish 14.1 and Stockfish 14 all the results came out as a tie.
For those of you who want to see how long you can last against the latest Stockfish release, you can follow our guide on setting up Stockfish in a program called PyChess. While you’re sure to be defeated (not even the world champion can beat Stockfish), it can be fun to see how many moves you can hold out. As it analyses positions deeply, it’s ruthlessly efficient at taking your pieces and landing a checkmate.
As Stockfish is built by a community of enthusiasts, the team asks chess fans to join the fishtest testing framework to help improve the engine and programmers are offered the opportunity to join in with the coding work. You can learn more about participating on the Get Involved page.