Fairy-Stockfish 10.3 released

[Fabian Fichter]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

Release notes:

New

• User-defined variants
  • Variants can now be added at runtime via a configuration file, without the need to recompile the program.
  • A sample variants.ini including some documentation is attached to the release.
• Many new pre-defined variants. Major additions:
  • S-Chess
  • Ouk Chatrang (Cambodian chess)
  • Grand
  • Gothic
  • Shako

Improvements

• Various variant-specific playing strength improvements
  • Playing strength is improved in almost all supported variants.
  • Especially big improvements (>100 Elo) for drop and Losing chess variants, as well as Three-check, Horde and Racing Kings
• Merged recent changes from official Stockfish
• Reduced memory consumption

Fixes

• Resolved issue with mingw compilation
• Multiple fixes for pseudo-legal move validation leading to more stable and faster search
• Removed potential undefined behavior in drop variants

[Ferdy]

Congratulations variant positions can now be evaluated more accurately.

[MikeB]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

Release notes:

New

• User-defined variants
  • Variants can now be added at runtime via a configuration file, without the need to recompile the program.
  • A sample variants.ini including some documentation is attached to the release.
• Many new pre-defined variants. Major additions:
  • S-Chess
  • Ouk Chatrang (Cambodian chess)
  • Grand
  • Gothic
  • Shako

Improvements

• Various variant-specific playing strength improvements
  • Playing strength is improved in almost all supported variants.
  • Especially big improvements (>100 Elo) for drop and Losing chess variants, as well as Three-check, Horde and Racing Kings
• Merged recent changes from official Stockfish
• Reduced memory consumption

Fixes

• Resolved issue with mingw compilation
• Multiple fixes for pseudo-legal move validation leading to more stable and faster search
• Removed potential undefined behavior in drop variants

Excellent, +1

[George Tsavdaris]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

MANY thanks!

[Laskos]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

Release notes:

New

• User-defined variants
  • Variants can now be added at runtime via a configuration file, without the need to recompile the program.
  • A sample variants.ini including some documentation is attached to the release.
• Many new pre-defined variants. Major additions:
  • S-Chess
  • Ouk Chatrang (Cambodian chess)
  • Grand
  • Gothic
  • Shako

Improvements

• Various variant-specific playing strength improvements
  • Playing strength is improved in almost all supported variants.
  • Especially big improvements (>100 Elo) for drop and Losing chess variants, as well as Three-check, Horde and Racing Kings
• Merged recent changes from official Stockfish
• Reduced memory consumption

Fixes

• Resolved issue with mingw compilation
• Multiple fixes for pseudo-legal move validation leading to more stable and faster search
• Removed potential undefined behavior in drop variants

What GUIs are available to play some or all supported variants? Winboard would do? It is VERY interesting to check for the properties of variants having a strong engine for each.

[Fabian Fichter]

What GUIs are available to play some or all supported variants? Winboard would do? It is VERY interesting to check for the properties of variants having a strong engine for each.

For some variants (e.g., (mini-)shogi, makruk, capablanca, etc.) you can just try it out online at https://pychess-variants.herokuapp.com/, including playing against Fairy-Stockfish and afterwards letting it automatically analyze your game. You can find some more information on compatible GUIs on https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Usage. If you only want to play and do not need analysis, cutechess is a very good option, as it supports a large portion of the variants.

For some variants it is still difficult to find a GUI supporting it. Unless a variant is explicitly supported by any of the GUIs, WinBoard/XBoard is the best try (using the UCI2WB adapter). It usually works for moderate variants, but rarely if some special moves are involved (e.g., Kyoto shogi or the like). I am currently working on built-in XBoard protocol support in order to improve compatibility with WinBoard/XBoard. This and Xiangqi support currently are next on the agenda.

Worst case, if you e.g. just want to analyze whether a variant is balanced or not, you can of course still use the UCI protocol manually.

Edit: And talking about playing strength, you might also be interested in https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... g-strength.

[Guenther]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

I guess it supports crazyhouse?
In this case how is it related to Niklas Fiekas Stockfish which incorporates multivariant changes from Daniel Dugovic?
I have this one as an entry in the crazhouse section in my XB/UCI chronology.

https://github.com/niklasf/Stockfish/releases

[George Tsavdaris]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

New Fairy Stockfish (largeboard_x86-64-modern) 10.3, crashes Winboard.
I use Winboard 4.9.161222.
I had no problems at all with previous Fairy-Stockfish builds.

Commandline for Winboard is:
"fairy-stockfish-largeboard_x86-64-modern103.exe" -fd "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinBoard-AA\WinBoard\WinBoard\Stockfish" /variant="capablanca" -fUCI

Did anything change?

[Fabian Fichter]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

I guess it supports crazyhouse?
In this case how is it related to Niklas Fiekas Stockfish which incorporates multivariant changes from Daniel Dugovic?
I have this one as an entry in the crazhouse section in my XB/UCI chronology.

https://github.com/niklasf/Stockfish/releases

Yes, it supports crazyhouse as well as most other variants the multi-variant fork (used by lichess) also supports. I am co-author of that fork (e.g., the crazyhouse implementation and a large part of the playing strength improvements are from me) and the motivation for starting Fairy-Stockfish came from the fact that I wanted to have a more convenient way to support more variants, because in multi-variant Stockfish it is really tedious to add variants, and the addition of variants with fairy pieces is basically impossible. However, apart from the official Stockfish code, the two forks do not share much code, but I of course re-used my knowledge from developing it.

[Fabian Fichter]

Fairy-Stockfish (UCI/USI variant engine) version 10.3 is available:
https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfi ... ry_sf_10_3

New Fairy Stockfish (largeboard_x86-64-modern) 10.3, crashes Winboard.
I use Winboard 4.9.161222.
I had no problems at all with previous Fairy-Stockfish builds.

Commandline for Winboard is:
"fairy-stockfish-largeboard_x86-64-modern103.exe" -fd "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinBoard-AA\WinBoard\WinBoard\Stockfish" /variant="capablanca" -fUCI

Did anything change?

Which error did you get? The problem might be related to that by "-fUCI" you are using the built-in UCI2WB adapter, which is not able to parse the long variant list. Which was the last Fairy-SF version you used previously? Using my fork of the UCI2WB adapter might solve it.

Can you please try to start the "fairy-stockfish-largeboard_x86-64-modern103.exe" from the command line? Does it print "Fairy-Stockfish 10.3 64 POPCNT by F. Fichter"?

If you want, you can just create an issue on github at https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/issues, then we can try to solve the issue there and do not need to debug it in this thread.