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As of August 6, the efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE)evaluation haslandedin the Stockfish repo!

Both the NNUE and the classical evaluations are available, and can beused to assign a value to a position that is later used in alpha-beta(PVS) search to find the best move. The classical evaluationcomputes this value as a function of various chess concepts, handcraftedby experts, tested and tuned using fishtest. The NNUE evaluationcomputes this value with a neural network based on basic inputs. Thenetwork is optimized and trained on the evaluations of millions ofpositions at moderate search depth.

The NNUE evaluation was first introduced in shogi, and ported toStockfish afterward. It can be evaluated efficiently on CPUs, andexploits the fact that only parts of the neural network need to beupdated after a typical chess move. The nodchiprepository provides additionaltools to train and develop the NNUE networks.

The performance of the NNUE evaluation relative to the classicalevaluation depends somewhat on the hardware, and is expected to improvequickly, but is currently on > 80 Elo on fishtest:

Stockfish 12 is not expected to be released imminentlywe want sometime to let this major change bake for a bit. But you might still wantto try out NNUE! Three simple steps:

This patch is the result of contributions of various authors, fromvarious communities, including: nodchip, ynasu87, yaneurao (initial portand NNUE authors), domschl, FireFather, rqs, xXH4CKST3RXx, tttak,zz4032, joergoster, mstembera, nguyenpham, erbsenzaehler, dorzechowski,and vondele.

This new evaluation needed various changes to fishtest and thecorresponding infrastructure, for which tomtor, ppigazzini, noobpwnftw,daylen, and vondele are gratefully acknowledged.

The first networks have been provided by gekkehenker and sergiovieri,with the latter net being the current default.

Guidelines for testing new nets can be foundhere.

Integration has been discussed in various Github issues:

The pull requests:

This will be an exciting time for computer chess, looking forward toseeing the evolution of this approach.

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Introducing NNUE Evaluation - Stockfish - Open Source Chess Engine