More TCEC Bonus Events; CCC9 Starts

A Monday post means another look at the two world class engine-to-engine competitions that I've been following for the past few months. A week ago, in TCEC S15/S16 Bonus; CCC8/-9 Demos, the highlights were:-

TCEC: The 'S15 - Champions Bonus' is still running with about 75% of the games having been played. Leela, the winner of S15 is trailing the four versions of Stockfish that won S11 through S14. The TCEC has released a few details about S16. • CCC: The CCC is still running a series of exhibition events. The current event, dubbed 'Rapid Romp', has three engines and is also about 75% completed. Leela is trailing both Brainfish and Leelenstein, with a minus score against both adversaries.

Let's have an update on that.

TCEC: The 'Champions Bonus' ended as expected. The Stockfish version that won S14 finished first, the version that won S13 finished second, and so on. The only variance from the expected rank was Leela's fifth place finish. As winner of S15, it could reasonably have been expected to finish higher. The results for the first eight engines are shown in the following chart.

The TCEC is currently running a 'Rapid Bonus' with 14 engines. Why these engines were chosen and what the result will tell is anybody's guess. The event will finish in about a week and a half, when we should see the start of S16.

CCC: After 'Rapid Romp' (three engines; 1st: Brainfish, 2nd: Leelenstein 3rd: Leela; two points separating first and last), the demo events continued with

• Historical World Championship Replays
• Warmup II

The site is currently running 'CCC9: The Gauntlet Qualification', with 12 engines, including Leela and Stockfish. The rules say,

Qualification: 5 rounds, 12 engines
Quarterfinals: 7 rounds, 10 engines
Semifinals: 20 rounds, 6 engines
Finals: 100 rounds, 2 engines
Time control: 5m + 2s (10m+5s for the finals)

The demo event 'Historical World Championship Replays' was based on the openings from 100 games of World Championship matches, starting with the 1886 Steinitz - Zukertort match, through the 2018 Carlsen - Caruana match. The FIDE Knockout World Championships were not considered. Brainfish finished ahead of Leela +7-3=190, with Black winning as many games as White. What's Brainfish?

!brainfish: Stockfish with an opening book

For more about the Brainfish engine, use the search function to find previous posts on this blog. Like the TCEC's 'Rapid Bonus', it's not clear what the CCC's World Championship openings were supposed to prove, if anything. I imagine that most of the engine games deviated from their grandmaster stem games soon after the mandatory opening ended. The selection might be suitable for an anthology of best WCC games.

[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. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]