Standard mode is usually the stronger mode objectively, while MCTS mode is usually better at setting problems for human opponents as it does not assume perfect defense.
Other features added since Komodo 13 include Armageddon mode, more levels, Personalities, and Auto-Skill. The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts who contribute their expertise, time, and resources to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely available, and very strong. As usual, downloads are freely available at. A new feature with Dragon 2 is “MCTS Optimism”, which allows the user to make Dragon “trust” its own judgments more while being less confident in predicting the opponent’s moves. It is our pleasure to release Stockfish 13 to chess fans worldwide. Yes, you can do this with freeware, but after using freeware programs for years, I wanted something with a bit more polish. databases from chess books) and work through them.
Also the MultiPV play of standard mode is dramatically improved from the initial dragon release, again by about a hundred elo! Based on our testing, we now believe that Dragon 2 in standard mode is the strongest engine for analysis on most computers when displaying more than four lines of play at once. My major use of Fritz 13 is to download online game databases (e.g.
We believe that Dragon will play in a more human-like style than standard Komodo since it relies on learning what actually works in games rather than just on pre-assigned values for eval terms.Īlthough Dragon 2 is only slightly stronger than the initial dragon version in standard mode, the MCTS mode when running under Windows is dramatically improved, about a hundred elo. Dragon also won the 2021 TCEC Swiss championship (normal chess). Our testing also shows that Dragon is especially strong in Fischerandom (960) chess, which was confirmed when Dragon won the TCEC FRC 2021 championship. The improvement is due to the embedded neural network providing much more accurate evaluation and also in some sense gaining an extra ply or so of search by “seeing” some tactics that a normal eval won’t spot. With four threads, the gains were 198 elo in MCTS and 184 elo in standard mode. The reinforcement learning phase for Dragon is in its infancy, but is already showing great promise.ĭragon 2 is a huge strength improvement over Komodo 14.1, the last pre-dragon release, about 210 elo in standard mode, at CCRL blitz time control on one thread based on 10,000 game direct matches. Training an NNUE network based on this evaluation was both an advantage and a challenge, requiring experimentation with architectures and data generation of billions of positions. I recommend you to try SCID or scid vs pc, these are great free GUI like Fritz. Komodo has a great deal of chess knowledge in its evaluation. Fritz is a pretty advanced interface and you probably dont need most of it. Dragon uses NNUE (Neural Network Updated Efficiently) technology, originally developed for the game of shogi.