license: mit
task_categories:
- other
tags:
- chess
- stockfish
- self-play
- pawn
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: data/train-00000-of-00001.parquet
- split: validation
path: data/validation-00000-of-00001.parquet
- split: test
path: data/test-00000-of-00001.parquet
Stockfish Self-Play (nodes=1)
1M games of Stockfish 17 self-play at 1 node per move. Pre-tokenized in the PAWN training format.
At nodes=1, Stockfish evaluates each position with a single NNUE forward pass (no tree search). Despite the lack of search, the NNUE evaluation head produces surprisingly strong play — far from random. Games exhibit coherent openings, reasonable piece development, and tactical awareness, though blunders are more frequent than at higher node counts. This makes the dataset a useful intermediate between fully random games and strong engine play.
Schema
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
tokens |
list[int16] |
PAWN token IDs per ply (variable length, max 255) |
game_length |
uint16 |
Number of half-moves |
result |
string |
Game result (1-0, 0-1, 1/2-1/2, *) |
Token vocabulary: 4,278 tokens (1 PAD + 4,096 grid moves + 176 promotions + 5 outcomes). See the PAWN architecture docs for details.
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("thomas-schweich/stockfish-nodes1")
game = ds["train"][0]
print(game["tokens"]) # [919, 3300, 659, ...]
print(game["result"]) # "0-1"
print(game["game_length"]) # 74
Or with Polars:
import polars as pl
df = pl.scan_parquet("hf://datasets/thomas-schweich/stockfish-nodes1/data/*.parquet")
print(df.head(5).collect())
Generation
Games were generated with Stockfish 17 using the Rust UCI engine interface in the PAWN repository (engine/src/engine_gen.rs).
Parameters:
- Nodes per move: 1 (single NNUE evaluation, no search)
- Opening diversity: MultiPV=5 with softmax temperature sampling throughout the full game
- Temperature: 1.0 (1 pawn difference ≈ e-fold probability ratio)
- Max ply: 500 (games exceeding this are drawn)
- Workers: 16 parallel engines, deterministic seeds (10000–10015)
- Format: zstd-compressed Parquet
License
MIT. Stockfish self-play data — no human game data.