Happy 10th Anniversary, Stockfish!

In last week's post, Talking About Chess Engines, I noted,

The two stars of the chess engine world are Stockfish and Leela. [...] Both engines are open source and both have forums where their many fans can discuss current trends. I really should spend some time on both forums to catch up with their technical developments and just might do that.

The last time I spent time on Stockfish's FishCooking forum was Stockfish in a Straitjacket? (March 2018), so I had tons of material to review. It was time well spent. One thread informed,

• 2018-07-23: Stockfish 10th Anniversary • 'Is there any chance for next Stockfish 10 to be released 2 November 2018 as of 10 years of Stockfish first release back in 2008 and for name to be "Stockfish 10th anniversary"?'

The name of choice for the commemorative release was 'Stockfish X', but with only a few days to go, it doesn't look like anything special is going to happen. Another thread pointed to a series of graphs showing Stockfish's recent rating progress. This particular graph shows progress since the end of 2015, nearly 200 rating points.

Fishtest/wiki: Regression Tests

As I write this, Stockfish is playing the TCEC Season 13 final against Komodo and is leading +5-1=36, with another week or so to reach the match target of 100 games. The TCEC gives the engines' current respective ratings as 3519 and 3475.

The conventional wisdom is that people shouldn't play important chess games on their birthdays. I doubt that it matters much to engines.