TCEC S16 Qualification; CCC9 Bonuses

Although last week's post on the two major, ongoing engine-vs-engine tournaments, TCEC S16 Starts; CCC9 Finishes, summarized three weeks of play, the action at the time of the post was relatively low-key:-

TCEC: S16 is just getting started. • CCC: The 'Gauntlet Bonus II', a 200 game match between Leela and Stockfish, is currently underway and is too close to call.

What happened during the intervening week?

TCEC: The first stage of S16, the Qualification League, is well underway. Two neural network (NN) engine newcomers, ScorpioNN and Stoofvlees, are currently leading, while a third NN, ChessFighterNN, is fighting to stay out of last place. A Leela clone running on CPUs instead of GPUS, is in third place. TCEC chat commands point to resources describing the three NNs:-

• Scorpio (chessprogramming.org)
• Stoofvlees (ditto; the name is Dutch for 'beef stew' - why was it chosen?)
• Chess Fighter Neural Net (talkchess.com)

CCC: The 'Gauntlet Bonus II' finished with Leela beating Stockfish by a narrow, but convincing +29-25=146. The 'Gauntlet Bonus III' with five engines bashing each other over 15 double rounds (300 games total) is just getting started. Why all the bonus events? A chat command,'!whyb', explains,

We also sometimes run bonuses while we are working on new features and bug fixes that we want to have done before the next "official" tournament.

Both the TCEC Qualification League and the CCC Gauntlet Bonus III have another week to run. They might be finished in time for next week's post.

[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]