Classical Stockfish

[DrCliche]

I see - appologies for the misinformation. I assume the conclusion that using pre-NNUE SF is likely to be the strongest SF without using NNUE still holds?

That may still be true for the time being, but likely won't be for too much longer. Most of Stockfish's improvements are to search, which in general seems to help regardless of the evaluation function. (Or even regardless of the game, see Shogi!)

So even if search parameters are tuned for hybrid evaluation, search in general is still continually improving overall, which in turn ensures Stockfish is also improving even with NNUE disabled. (Plus people do still occasionally improve the handcrafted evaluation function, as well.)

[JohnWoe]

I see - appologies for the misinformation. I assume the conclusion that using pre-NNUE SF is likely to be the strongest SF without using NNUE still holds?

That may still be true for the time being, but likely won't be for too much longer. Most of Stockfish's improvements are to search, which in general seems to help regardless of the evaluation function. (Or even regardless of the game, see Shogi!)

So even if search parameters are tuned for hybrid evaluation, search in general is still continually improving overall, which in turn ensures Stockfish is also improving even with NNUE disabled. (Plus people do still occasionally improve the handcrafted evaluation function, as well.)

People are holding too much onto HCE. Yes it took blood, sweat and tears (+ a few megatonnes of C2O) to tune it over the years. It's got nothing to NN. It's time to let HCE go and step into pure NNUE world!

[Madeleine Birchfield]

I see - appologies for the misinformation. I assume the conclusion that using pre-NNUE SF is likely to be the strongest SF without using NNUE still holds?

That may still be true for the time being, but likely won't be for too much longer. Most of Stockfish's improvements are to search, which in general seems to help regardless of the evaluation function. (Or even regardless of the game, see Shogi!)

So even if search parameters are tuned for hybrid evaluation, search in general is still continually improving overall, which in turn ensures Stockfish is also improving even with NNUE disabled. (Plus people do still occasionally improve the handcrafted evaluation function, as well.)

On the other hand, I believe the Stockfish team is currently experimenting with a NNUE/NNUE hybrid and preliminary results have shown it to be about 20 Elo above current NNUE/Handcrafted.

[Ozymandias]

Isn't NNUE/Handcrafted an NNUE hybrid itself?

[MikeB]

There are some patches for the handcrafted eval, but using the newest SF without NNUE on is likely worse than using the last SF before NNUE was added, as everything is now tuned to work best with NNUE, even the handcrafted eval.

Somewhat incorrect. The handcrafted eval is tuned for the highest strength with NNUE=false, not to match NNUE. New classical eval patches are validated with NNUE=false tests.

The search function is tuned to work best with the NNUE/HCE hybrid.

I see - appologies for the misinformation. I assume the conclusion that using pre-NNUE SF is likely to be the strongest SF without using NNUE still holds?

I assume so, I haven't tested it, but I have heard that pure classical is now regressive vs the last commit before NNUE. Easy enough to test I suppose, but to me it doesn't really matter (to me) and it would just be a waste of time (for me).

[thewhip]

The last Classic Stockfish is 200904 what is playing on chess.com

And how do you know that this is the version currently playing on chess.com?