Stockfish Development Builds

Are the Stockfish developments builds usually stronger than the last release version (currently SF 8)?

What are the criterions to publish a new dev build? Does it e.g. need to perform statistically better via Fishtest compared to a previous dev build?

In general they are and the current dev build should be around 20 elo stronger than SF8 on short time control.

About criterions not 100% sure, but if you look at their test site ( http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests ), they test different patches (ideas) against the current master build to see if any improvement exists. If they pass (green patches) and get approved, they usually merge them with the current master build after a few such patches.

Then it gets published as new dev build, which you can find here: http://abrok.eu/stockfish/

And this site claims to have slightly faster builds compared to the official ones from abrok: http://chess.ultimaiq.net/stockfish.html

Thank you, will use the dev builds in this case since I assume they are a bit stronger. They might have some bugs here and there since they are not tested as good as the release version, but that's okay to me.

In fact it should have less bugs, since a few of the patches are bug fixes. Unless some new bugs are unexpectedly introduced of course. And the "Release" version is nothing else then a dev version from earlier, SF8 is dev build from Nov 1 2016. They just can´t bother to make a major numbered release for every added patch, that way you would have hundreds of versions in just one year and the common user would get confused.

It's been about a year since the last post on this thread.

any websites with even faster builds appear since then ?

thanx