TCEC S15 Div3 Finishes; CCC7 Starts

Another Monday, another look at the top-two ongoing engine competitions. I'll summarize last week's report, TCEC S15 Div4 Finishes; Stockfish Wins CCC6, with:-

TCEC: S15 division 3 is currently underway. [...] The AI/NN engine AllieStein (Allie + Stein) was one of the two qualifying [from division 4]. • CCC6: According to reports on other sites, the site is preparing CCC7. In the meantime, it is conducting the 'Bongcloud Bonus (10|10)'.

TCEC: This week's situation is an echo of last week's: S15 division 2 is currently underway. The AI/NN engine AllieStein was one of two qualifying from division 3. With the event nearing the 3/4 mark, AllieStein is in second place.

CCC: The Bongcloud event, a thematic opening tournament using 1.e4 e5 2.Ke2 as the first moves, finished as expected. White managed to draw a few games, which determined the final ranking shown in the following diagram. Chess is a game of logic and 2.Ke2 is a weak attempt to defy that logic. All other things being equal, poor moves lead to a loss.

Chess.com issued a report on CCC6:-

• 2019-03-21: Computer Chess Championship Plays Blitz After Stockfish Defends Title • 'The Chess.com Computer Chess champion Stockfish defended its sixth straight title last weekend as it bested the machine-learning engine Lc0 [Leela] in a heads-up match that went the distance to the maximum number of games.'

The same report outlined the plan for CCC7.

The CCC7 field includes the "big four" engines of Stockfish, Lc0, Houdini and Komodo, and adds three more neural-network engines that are expected to challenge for the finals in Antifish, Leelenstein and Allie.

That makes four AI/NN engines: Lc0, Antifish, Leelenstein and, Allie. The report continued,

Stage one of CCC7 is a 24-player round-robin, where each engine will play every other engine three times as White and three times as Black. The top four engines from stage one will advance to a 100x round-robin final stage.

Four AI/NN engines, four places in the CCC7 final stage. This is an event worth watching.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page.]