TCEC/CCC Head Scratching

Last week's post in this series about ongoing engine tournaments, Stockfish, Leela et al, saw both main tournaments in mid-event. Let's have an update.

TCEC: TCEC Cup 2 finished while I was working on this post and Chessdom.com was quick to post the results: First major title for a Neural Network in chess: LC0 wins TCEC Cup; the post includes an image showing the event's brackets. For a reaction from the Leela forum, see Leela wins TCEC Cup.

The Season 14 Superfinal match starts today between Stockfish and Leela (LCZero). But hang on ... Two weeks ago in Results: TCEC S14-P / CCC3 S3, I reported,

The TCEC 'epic final match' didn't materialize. Komodo finished a half-point ahead of LCZero and Houdini, setting up another superfinal match between Stockfish and Komodo. This pairing echoes TCEC S12 and S13, where Stockfish won both superfinal matches.

The post included a copy of the S14-P crosstable, which is still in the TCEC archive, labelled 'Crosstable for TCEC Season 14 - Division P'. That Chessdom post 'First major title' said,

Lc0 did not have a direct match against Stockfish in the TCEC Cup this year. However, it defeated in the final Houdini - a version that has won the TCEC Championship and that eliminated Stockfish at the semi-final. At its own semi-final Lc0 defeated another multiple times TCEC champion -- Komodo -- thus confirming that the second place in the Premier Division was a deserved one.

I checked a few other resources and couldn't find the source of the discrepancy, so I'll come back to it later. In the meantime, see TCEC Season 12 - the 12th Top Chess Engine Championship for a recap of TCEC S12, 'the second in a new series of analytical articles on past TCEC events'.

CCC: In the previous post, we left Chess.com's engine event in the middle of CCC4. For the final result, see Stockfish Wins Computer Chess Championship Bullet; 'Escalation' Next (chess.com). The Escalation event (labeled 'CCC5') is a round robin format where the lowest rated engines play each other in the early rounds and the highest rated engines start play in the later rounds. The 'Stockfish Wins [CCC4]' article says,

Lc0 also managed the impressive feat of scoring dead even with Stockfish head-to-head in the tournament, at +3-3=14 in their 20 games together. Lc0 was the only engine to score a win against Stockfish in the event. These two engines began a 100-game bonus match, in progress now, which at press time Stockfish was leading comfortably at 35.5/66.

The article includes links to resources for the results of recent CCC events. I'll look at them more closely at the same time I resolve the TCEC S14 Superfinal discrepancy. It appears that checking on these competitions once a week is not enough.

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To save a few minutes each time I catch up with the TCEC/CCC, I collected the most important links and recorded them in a blog page, TCEC/CCC Links. The same link appears at the top of each post on this blog after 'Home, M-W.com, etc'. For a few less frequently used forum resources, see Talking About Chess Engines (October 2018).