Stockfish 15.1

Official release version of Stockfish 15.1

Bench: 3467381

---

Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 15.1.

As usual, downloads will be freely available at stockfishchess.org/download

*Elo gain and competition results*

With this release, version 5 of the NNUE neural net architecture has
been introduced, and the training data has been extended to include
Fischer random chess (FRC) positions. As a result, Elo gains are largest
for FRC, reaching up to 50 Elo for doubly randomized FRC[1] (DFRC).
More importantly, also for standard chess this release progressed and
will win two times more game pairs than it loses[2] against
Stockfish 15. Stockfish continues to win in a dominating way[3] all
chess engine tournaments, including the TCEC Superfinal, Cup, FRC, DFRC,
and Swiss as well as the CCC Bullet, Blitz, and Rapid events.

*New evaluation*

This release also introduces a new convention for the evaluation that
is reported by search. An evaluation of +1 is now no longer tied to the
value of one pawn, but to the likelihood of winning the game. With
a +1 evaluation, Stockfish has now a 50% chance of winning the game
against an equally strong opponent. This convention scales down
evaluations a bit compared to Stockfish 15 and allows for consistent
evaluations in the future.

*ChessBase settlement*

In this release period, the Stockfish team has successfully enforced
its GPL license against ChessBase. This has been an intense process that
included filing a lawsuit[4], a court hearing[5], and finally
negotiating a settlement[6] that established that ChessBase infringed on
the license by not distributing the Stockfish derivatives Fat Fritz 2
and Houdini 6 as free software, and that ensures ChessBase will respect
the Free Software principles in the future. This settlement has been
covered by major chess sites (see e.g. lichess.org[7] and chess.com[8]),
and we are proud that it has been hailed as a ‘historic violation
settlement[9]’ by the Software Freedom Conservancy.

*Thank you*

The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
(thanks everybody!) that contribute their expertise, time, and resources
to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely
available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the
fishtest testing framework and programmers to contribute to the
project[10].

The Stockfish team

[1] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/638a6170d2b9c924c4c62cb4
[2] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/638a4dd7d2b9c924c4c6297b
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Competition_results
[4] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-chessbase/
[5] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/public-court-hearing-soon/
[6] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/chessbase-stockfish-agreement/
[7] https://lichess.org/blog/Y3u1mRAAACIApBVn/settlement-reached-in-stockfish-v-chessbase
[8] https://www.chess.com/news/view/chessbase-stockfish-reach-settlement
[9] https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/nov/28/sfc-named-trusted-party-in-gpl-case/
[10] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/

src/misc.cpp

@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ namespace Stockfish {
 namespace {
 
 /// Version number or dev.
-const string version = "dev";
+const string version = "15.1";
 
 /// Our fancy logging facility. The trick here is to replace cin.rdbuf() and
 /// cout.rdbuf() with two Tie objects that tie cin and cout to a file stream. We