STOCKFISH(6)

💖 STOCKFISH 💖

okay bestie, so you found stockfish — the free UCI chess engine that calculates chess moves, and honestly? she's that girl. this is the STOCKFISH(6) manual page, and i'm gonna walk you through it like we're texting at 2am. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

stockfish — free UCI chess engine, to calculate chess moves 👑

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

stockfish

that's it. that's the whole vibe. no flags, no fuss, just her. 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

this manual page documents the stockfish command, and fr fr it's giving essential reading.

stockfish is an UCI chess engine, to calculate chess moves. periodt.

Stockfish is a free UCI chess engine derived from Glaurung 2.1. but — and this is the part people always get confused about — she is not a complete chess program. she needs some UCI compatible GUI (like XBoard with PolyGlot, eboard, Jose, Arena) in order to be used comfortably. so basically she's the brains and the GUI is the face card, and together they slay. 🎀

read the documentation for your GUI of choice for information about how to use Stockfish with your GUI. no cap, do your homework bestie.

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🧠 CPUs & Threads (the part where you gotta pay attention) 🧠

this version of Stockfish supports up to 8 CPUs, but has not been tested thoroughly with more than 2. 😭

the program tries to detect the number of CPUs on your computer and set the number of search threads accordingly, but please be aware that the detection is not always correct. so it's therefore recommended to inspect the value of the "Threads" UCI parameter, and to make sure it equals the number of CPU cores on your computer.

and if you are using more than four threads, it is recommended to raise the value of "Minimum Split Depth" UCI parameter to 6. ⭐

not me begging you to double-check your Threads value. the auto-detection is lowkey unreliable, i said what i said. 🙈

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📚 Opening book 📚

this version of stockfish has experimental support for PolyGlot opening books. ✨

for information about how to create such books, consult the PolyGlot documentation. iykyk.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

okay so here's the thing, and it's a little iconic of her honestly:

• this program does NOT follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes.

that's the whole options section. she said "no flags, only vibes." 💀

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

communication with UCI commands is documented by "The UCI Communication Protocol" in /usr/share/doc/stockfish/engine-interface.txt. go read it, bestie, it's right there. 📖🌸

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

stockfish was written by <Romstad Tord <tord@glaurungchess.com>> and Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>. absolute legends, we stan. 👑

this manual page was written by Oliver Korff <ok@xynyx.de>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others). shoutout to Oliver fr fr. 💖

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🌈 that's the whole page 🌈

and that's a wrap on the STOCKFISH(6) manual, bestie — source and version info says she's from October 10, 2009, so she's an elder icon and still ate. go run her, set your "Threads" correctly, and have the most slay game of chess of your life. mwah 💅🫶💜