05 December 2022

TCEC Article PDFs

Commenting on games between chess engines requires three skills: 1) Knowledge of chess, 2) Knowledge of computing, and 3) Ability to write. GM Matthew Sadler has all three. Add to that an insider's knowledge of the TCEC and it's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of reporting on TCEC events.

Without much fanfare, GM Sadler has documented the TCEC Superfinal (aka Sufi) for the last ten seasons. The links to his efforts can be found on the menu bar for the TCEC 'Live Broadcast' page (see the 'TCEC / CCC Links' tab at the top of this page).

The image on the left has a list of current TCEC 'Articles'. As a bonus, articles by other TCEC insiders are also available from the same menu option.

In the few hours available for preparing this post, I wasn't able to review everything -- neither by GM Sadler nor by the others -- but what I did see was quality work. I imagine it will take many, many hours to study everything available.

Particularly interesting are insights about the TCEC culture. For example, a footnote from Sadler's most recent article says,

In TCEC lingo, a boom is understood as engine evaluation explosion away from 0.00, its opposite being a moob meaning evaluation implosion back in the general direction of 0.00. (Sufi_23, p.5)

Those are useful terms for a well known phenomenon; used in context (the italics are all mine):-

Stockfish had to hang its fishy head in shame as it moobed down to a 1.17 evaluation!

For two previous posts on this blog about Sadler:-

Now I just have to find the time to review all of the TCEC articles -or- as many as I can. First I'll load them onto my Kindle.

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