Komodo 8 vs Stockfish 5

 

    The CCLR discussion board had a post last month on two matches a member ran pitting these two engines against each other in a match. What I liked about the match was is that it was not conducted at blitz time limits. The time limit was 90 minutes with a 30 second increment. The only thing is, the computer used was an AMD FX-8350 8-core with 4GB hash per engine and the Syzygy 6-men tablebases. Thus the computer used was packing more gear than many people probably have.
     In any case the results of the first match was Komodo 8 won +9 -8 =33, but only when it won the last game. As a result of the match being so close rematch, also of 50 games was run, and this time it was Stockfish that took victory on the last game by a score of +8 -7 =35. Final result +16 -16 =68!
     When I reviewed the Komodo 8 engine on my book review Blog I wrote:

In answering the question as to which is best, the $60 Komodo 8 engine or the free Stockfish 5 engine, it depends on what you are going to do with it. If you are SERIOUS about playing on ICCF or LSS and have 8 or more cores and are willing to devote a tremendous amount of time to preparing your own well researched opening books and spend days analyzing positions, then by all means spend the money for Komodo 8. If you’re like me and only have a quad core laptop, play correspondence for fun and like to experiment with different openings (I have played the Sicilian Wing Gambit, the Urusov Gambit, the Grob and stupid stuff like 1.a4 and 1…a4, none of which have been outright refuted!!) then stick with Stockfish 5.

Based on the final results of a match at a decent time control it appears I was wrong. You might as well go for FREE and use Stockfish 5 no matter how much gear your computer is packing.