Stockfish developers released the new version of the chess engine Stockfish 18 on January 31. According to the developers, in tests against Stockfish 17, the new release brings an Elo gain of up to 46 points and wins four times as many game pairs as it loses.

The engine’s neural network is now better at seeing which pieces are under attack, making its positional judgment more accurate and human-like. A new “Shared Memory” feature lets multiple Stockfish processes share the same brain data, making it much more efficient for computers running many analyses at once. The engine’s search can now better recognize drawn positions like stalemates and fortresses.

Stockfish is a free, open-source chess engine first released on November 2, 2008. Stockfish is widely considered one of the strongest chess programs in the World. The latest version of the engine is available for download on the Stockfish official website.

Credit: stockfishchess.org