New record: Stockfish crosses the 3700 elo mark
A historical achievement – the open source chess engine and reigning champion of the premier computer championship Top Chess Engine Championship – Stockfish has crossed the 3700 ELO mark. The engine by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, and the Stockfish community now sits at 3707 ELO in the Computer rating list, that you can find in the Ratings->TCEC ratings menu on the main page of Chessdom.com
Stockfish has played 260 games in the period with 61% score against opposition with average rating of 3625 ELO. That translates into a rating jump from 3672 to 3707 ELO, gained mainly during the events of TCEC Season 27 – Leagues, Cup, and Swiss. (replay TCEC S27 Superfinal here)
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The form can be filled in the actual website url.The closest opponent to Stockfish is the Alpha Zero young sister Leela Chess Zero. It is currently second on the rating list with 3670 ELO. While 37 points are a solid distance in computer chess, Leela Chess Zero actually maintains the pace and stays in the race (see the graph below)
Third is Berserk with 3617 ELO, which briefly interrupted its development, but now is back with fresh power. The biggest danger for Stockfish might come from the 4th engine on the list – lurking from behind is Obsidian with 3612 ELO. This might be close to 100 ELO below the playing strength of the leader, but Obsidian is relatively new engine and is developed by the 16 years old (!!!) Gabriele Lombardo.
This graph shows the progress of Stockfish from the time around the year 2021 to today. It compares the engine to Leela Chess Zero, Stoofvlees, KomodoDragon, and clearly shows the rapid rise of Obsidian. Each Top Chess Engine Championship season is marked on top, with the graph spanning from TCEC Season 19 to TCEC Season 27.
How does Stockfish compare to Stockfish from the past
Stockfish 13 was released February 19, 2021. It is the engine used as a benchmark in the computer rating list. Stockfish 13, which was unbeatable monster back in 2021, currently sits at 17th position in the rating list with 3522 ELO. This is close to 200 ELO less than the current version of Stockfish in just four years!
Furthermore, engines like Clover, Stoofvlees, Seer, Rofchade, Viridithas, Rubichess, Caissa, Ethereal, KomodoDragon, Ceres, Obsidian, Berserk, and Leela Chess Zero all sit ahead of Stockfish 13 in this list, showing the rapid growth and development of the whole computer chess sector
At this moment we have 4KiB (4096 bytes) size engines with playing strength 3100+ (see it to believe it)
More about the Top Chess Engine Championship
The new season of the strongest computer chess championship, where Stockfish will defend its title and ELO record is about to start (Official website / TCEC Twitch TV)
Top Chess Engine Championship, or TCEC for short, is the premier computer chess tournament that has been running since 2010. The use of long time controls high-end hardware results in exceptionally high-quality chess games. The tournament pits the best chess engines – software programs designed to play chess – against each other to determine the strongest among them.
A Top Chess Engine Championship season is a multi-month event that features a series of competitions, typically lasting around 3-4 months, with matches played continuously 24/7 and broadcast live online at the official website. Each season is structured to include several distinct tournaments, testing the engines across various formats and conditions. As of the current format, a season contains:
- Leagues Season: This is the core event where engines compete in a tiered league system. It starts with lower divisions (like a Qualification League) and progresses through higher divisions, culminating in the Premier Division. Engines move up or down based on their performance, with the top two from the Premier Division advancing to the TCEC Superfinal – a 100-game match to crown the “TCEC Grand Champion.”
- Cup: A knockout-style tournament featuring 32 engines. It consists of five single-elimination rounds, offering a different competitive dynamic from the league format.
- Swiss Tournament: A Swiss-system event where all participating engines (often 44 or more) play a set number of rounds (e.g., 11 rounds). Pairings are determined by performance, allowing for exciting matchups and opportunities for underdog engines to shine.
- Fischer Random Chess (FRC) Tournament: A competition using Chess960 rules aka Fischer Random, lately called and branded as Freestyle chess by Magnus Carlsen, where the starting positions of pieces are randomized. It typically involves preliminary leagues, semifinals, and a final league, with the top two engines advancing to a Superfinal of 50 games.
- 4k event – included in recent seasons, the TCEC 4k Event is a special competition within the Top Chess Engine Championship that challenges developers to create highly efficient chess engines with a strict size limit of 4 kilobytes (4KiB, or 4096 bytes). This constraint applies to the engine’s executable file or script, making it a unique test of programming skill, optimization, and creativity in computer chess. The idea is to see how strong a chess engine can be when stripped down to an extremely small footprint, harking back to the spirit of early computing challenges like those seen in demo competitions or even the minimalist systems used in the Apollo missions.