Fritz 18 Neuronal

[WuShock]

Just got this today ...

Starting today, all Fritz18 users will receive an additional engine as a free update: Fritz18 Neuronal. The new engine Fritz18 Neuronal achieves an increase in playing strength of about 120 ELO points compared to the classic Fritz18 engine at shorter time controls. Simply start Fritz18 and start the automatically offered update! Then the new engine will be installed!

The classic Fritz18 engine has a manually optimised rating function and achieves a playing strength of about 3300 ELO. In the new Fritz18 Neuronal engine, the rating function has been replaced by a fast neuronal network (NNUE), enabling play 120 ELO points better, (i.e., achieving about 3,400+ ELO). NNUE stands for "Efficiently updatable neural network", the abbreviation being read from right to left because the idea was first published in Japanese in connection with shogi.

The special feature of NNUEs is that they are relatively small, and can be efficiently evaluated incrementally during the search. NNUEs do not require a GPU - the instruction set extensions of modern CPUs (SSE2, AVX2 or AVX-512) are sufficient. The fastest version of Fritz 18 Neuronal, which uses the AVX-512 instruction set, achieves approximately the same number of nodes (NPS) as Fritz 18; the AVX2 version (all modern CPUs) is only 5% slower.

A total of approx. 5 million games were played, and from these, 400 million rated positions were generated for training the net. The first net was trained based on evaluations from 200,000 self-play games of Fritz18, then in a further 80 training iterations, a total of about 300 intermediate versions of the net were tested and the best net was chosen step by step.
So: Start Fritz18! Install the update! Important: only for Windows 64 Bit!

[Luecx]

Just got this today ...

Starting today, all Fritz18 users will receive an additional engine as a free update: Fritz18 Neuronal. The new engine Fritz18 Neuronal achieves an increase in playing strength of about 120 ELO points compared to the classic Fritz18 engine at shorter time controls. Simply start Fritz18 and start the automatically offered update! Then the new engine will be installed!

The classic Fritz18 engine has a manually optimised rating function and achieves a playing strength of about 3300 ELO. In the new Fritz18 Neuronal engine, the rating function has been replaced by a fast neuronal network (NNUE), enabling play 120 ELO points better, (i.e., achieving about 3,400+ ELO). NNUE stands for "Efficiently updatable neural network", the abbreviation being read from right to left because the idea was first published in Japanese in connection with shogi.

The special feature of NNUEs is that they are relatively small, and can be efficiently evaluated incrementally during the search. NNUEs do not require a GPU - the instruction set extensions of modern CPUs (SSE2, AVX2 or AVX-512) are sufficient. The fastest version of Fritz 18 Neuronal, which uses the AVX-512 instruction set, achieves approximately the same number of nodes (NPS) as Fritz 18; the AVX2 version (all modern CPUs) is only 5% slower.

A total of approx. 5 million games were played, and from these, 400 million rated positions were generated for training the net. The first net was trained based on evaluations from 200,000 self-play games of Fritz18, then in a further 80 training iterations, a total of about 300 intermediate versions of the net were tested and the best net was chosen step by step.
So: Start Fritz18! Install the update! Important: only for Windows 64 Bit!

400 million rated positions. Thats like nothing. Any idea on the network weights size? cant really be half-kp or anything related since you would literally just produce trash when training that on such little data.

[WuShock]

If anybody has any luck with it , let me know where you find the update .......

[Wwqlcw]

I had to download and reinstall from my "downloads" on ChessBase; the Fritz 18 Neuronal came up then.

[WuShock]

I uninstalled , reinstalled and still can't find it . I guess I'll have to wait for the hackers to put it out on the net somewhere .......

[reflectionofpower]

where is the update??? They obviously did not check to see if it worked or the nuances of it

[reflectionofpower]

I had to download and reinstall from my "downloads" on ChessBase; the Fritz 18 Neuronal came up then.

I just checked that and Fritz 18 Neuronal was not there?

[cc2150dx]

That's the way Chessbase works. It can take days, even weeks to receive updates.

[Jim Logan]

I'm not sure why everyone seems to have so many issues. I opened Fritz 18, and it prompted my that an update was available. I accepted, and it installed. The new engine was there. In fact, when I opened Chessbase 16, the new engine was listed there as well. I did nothing special.

[Eduard]

I see no update (German Fritz 18).