TCEC S17 L1 & CCC12 Bonus Series Ongoing

Two weeks ago, the previous report on the two ongoing, world-class engine vs. engine competitions that I've been following for more than a year was TCEC S17 L1 Underway; CCC12 Bonus Series. To summarize the situation at that time:-

TCEC: S17 L2 finished with 8 of the 16 engines qualifying into L1, which was underway. • CCC: CCC12 was won by Lc0, which beat Leelenstein in the final match. After the event ended, the CCC ran a series of bonus matches.

The situation at the time of that report was much the same as the current situation.

TCEC: L1 is still underway and has reached the second of its two double round robins. Ethereal has a small but clear lead over the other 15 engines. Another six engines are all within two points of each other in the competition for the other three qualifying spots into the next stage.

CCC: The site continues with bonus events -- another half-dozen events have been played since that previous report. The current event is 'Trillion-Node Throwdown II', a match between Lc0 and Stockfish. I couldn't find any trace of 'Throwdown I'.

The event played before 'Throwdown II' was called 'Lc0-T59 Madness', a four-engine event with Lc0, Lc0 CPU, and two other CPU engines. The result is shown in the following crosstable.

The technical info for the four engines at the bottom of the chart indicates that the same version of Lc0 was running on both a GPU configuration and a CPU config. A recent forum post, Leela CPU becomes Top 5 engine (talkchess.com), explains,

As smaller net T59 10x128 become stronger and stronger, Lc0 without graphic cards will also be a top-5 engine.

That means 'a top-5 CPU engine', which means the AI/NN engines running only on CPUs can compete equally with the non-AI/NN engines on their own turf. Is this another significant milestone for the AI/NN engines?

[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]