TCEC S14 Underway

After spending the last few weeks reviewing man vs. machine matches in the 1980s and 90s...

• 2018-12-03: 'Defending the Human Race?'
• 2018-12-10: Kasparov vs. the Early Engines
• 2018-12-17: 'I walked from one machine to the next'
• 2018-12-24: Words Matter • 'Garry doesn’t take money from his family'
• 2018-12-31: Kasparov's 1997 Team

...let's return to competitions from the 2010s. When we last visited the TCEC and the CCCC, both events had just finished their most recent seasons and were preparing to embark on new seasons:-

• 2018-11-12: Stockfish Wins TCEC Season 13 (and Everything Else) • 'What about TCEC Season 14? It starts today!' • 'CCC / CCCC / CCCCC; Some of those 'C's stand for Chess.com. The others stand for Computer Chess Championship.'
  
  
• 2018-11-19: Update on Two World Champions • 'Stockfish decisively won the Chess.com CCC2' • 'the engine to engine competitions will carry on for the next few months'

Taking TCEC Season 14 first, the first four divisions have finished and the Premier Division is underway. The following chart summarizes the results of the first four divisions.

TCEC - Top Chess Engine Championship - Archive

LCZero (aka Leela) and KomodoMCTS finished 1st/2nd in Divisions 1, 2, and 3, sometimes by a wide margin over the other engines. The Premier Division is being played at TCEC - Live, where Stockfish, LCZero, and Komodo are currently placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, followed by Houdini and KomodoMCTS in 4th and 5th of the eight engines. If this trend continues, we will see an epic final match between Stockfish, the world's best AB (alpha/beta) engine, and LCZero, the world's best *active* NN (neural network) engine.

For my next post in this series, I'll check on the current status of the CCCC.