The teamwork effort to share ideas and knowledge to write one of the strongest programs, which everybody may follow and share to learn and play for free, is definitely a challenging and motivating task, gathering both admiration and enviousness. The scientific and social value of strong open-source programs is indisputable. There is a wide range of opinions about strong open source chess engines affecting commercial and competitive interests, as well as monetary interests from computer chess users, who obtain a top engine for free. Further, the collaboration with the Leela Chess Zero team payed off, in providing billions of positions to train the new NNUE. Stockfish 14, released on July 02, 2021, further improved due to efforts by Tomasz Sobczyk and Gary Linscott in designing a new NNUE architecture in conjunction with a GPU accelerated trainer written in PyTorch. The release of Stockfish 13 on February 19, 2021, has been triggered by the start of sales of the Fat Fritz 2 engine by ChessBase, based on a recent development version of Stockfish with minor modifications. On September 02, 2020, Stockfish 12 was released with a huge jump in playing strength due to NNUE and further tuning of the engine. From that, the project is being developed and maintained by the Stockfish community.Ī synergy effect with the Shogi community led to the promising branch of Stockfish NNUE, courtesy of Nodchip, who introduced NNUE to Stockfish in 2019. In 2011, Marco Costalba and Joona Kiiski stepped down as Stockfish maintainers. Stockfish also referred another famous 'little fish', the then strongest chess engine Rybka.

Tord is Norwegian and Marco Italian, and there is a long history of stockfish trade from Norway to Italy (to Marco's home town of Vicenza, in fact). The name 'Stockfish' reflects the ancestry of the engine.

Starting out among the top twenty engines, Stockfish has quickly climbed in strength to become the world strongest chess entity as of 2018 - at least concerning the AlphaZero hype, public available chess entity. Marco forked the project from version 2.1 of Tord's engine Glaurung, first announced by Marco in Novem, and in early 2009 Joona's Smaug, a further Glaurung 2.2 derivative, was incorporated. An UCI compatible open source chess engine developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski and Gary Linscott, licensed under the GPL v3.0.

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