Hello,
I was wondering to what depth a 15 second move search would allow - Im used to putting a pgn for a correspondence game into a stockfish engine and waiting for it to get to depth 30 before selecting the move I want to play
Greetings!
I just did some very crude checks. There’s quite a bit of variance; I see sometimes, Stockfish is reporting a depth of 127 on a 15 second search, so I’ve filtered those out. (Perhaps that’s when the syzygy tablebases fully kick in?)
The rough averages over a relatively small sample:
VPS servers for free/trial tier: average depth 26
D-1540 servers: average depth 32
I think it has a lot to do with how many and which pieces are on the board.
You can see how deep the search got by looking at the engine output - clicking on the “Stockfish” link displayed below the move will bring it up; you can look at the last depth reported to see how far it got.
depth 20 on the one i just tried which is move 4 - no good for me but thanks
my mistake, that was level 20 on a 5 second search - still only level 24 though on a 15 sec search, is this increased with a paid membership?
Correct! It is. My understanding is that you’ll see higher depths during mid and end game as there’ll be fewer pieces on the board.
Basically the way paid vs free works is this:
With the trial / free version, your moves are calculated on a VPS (virtual server) using a single processor core.
For paid members, we have a bunch of 8-core D-1540 dedicated servers, and their moves are routed to those servers. So the move will be calculated for the full 15 seconds but using all 8 processor cores, so it’s able to evaluate more positions and get deeper.
Also, for stronger moves you can use the latest Stockfish “dev build”. You can see how those builds are performing here: