McBrain Engine

     As you know, Stockfish 8 has been out for quite some time while Komodo 11 has come out just recently. On May 22, 2017 Komodo 11.01 was released and was claimed to be about 10 elo stronger than Komodo 10.4 and 55 elo stronger than Komodo 10. It's major improvements were in other areas. 
     As of June 24, on the CCLR 40/40 rating list Komodo 11.01 is one rating point ahead of Stockfish 8, but in head-to-head encounters Stockfish leads by a score of +4 -2 =22, so it seems that SF is still the best engine. 
     What I wanted to do was see if any of the SF developmental engines are better than SF8, so I visited the abrok site and downloaded Stockfish_17062123_x64. I won't discuss the supposed improvement in this version as I have no idea what “The idea is that chances are the tt-move is best and will be difficult to raise alpha when playing a quiet move.” means.
     However, I did run a match of 4-minute games between this engine and SF8 and the results were that the developmental version scored +1 -0 =9. Clearly there's not much difference between the two engines. 
     Another engine that caught my attention was McBrain which is based on Stockfish. In a 4-minute, six game match between SF8 and McBrain 2.5 the result was that McBrain won by a score of +2 -1 =3. McBrain has an interesting style, but it does seem a bit slower than SF. Obviously these short tests at a fast time limit cannot be considered conclusive, but if anyone is interested in tinkering with engines, these two are worth a look.