28 September 2020

TCEC S19 Preparing Sufi; CCC15 Still Halted

Two weeks ago, in the previous report on two long-running series of engine vs. engine competitions, I noted 'this post might turn out to be one of the shortest in the series'. To summarize that post, TCEC S19 DivP Chugging Along; CCC15 Halted (September 2020), making it even shorter:-

TCEC: The Premier Division (DivP) has reached the fifth of eight all-play-all rounds. • CCC: Because of technical problems, the CCC15 'Round 2' matches were halted about half way through. The site is currently running a series of CPU-only exhibition events.

This current post promises to be equally short.

TCEC: DivP is the equivalent of the Candidates tournament in the FIDE World Championship cycle. It finished with the results shown in the following crosstable.

Stockfish and LCZero finished 1st/2nd to qualify into the S19 final match (aka Superfinal, aka Sufi). Stockfish won the eight-game mini-matches against all seven of the other competitors, including a +1-0=7 score against LCZero, losing only one game, to Komodo, along the way. LCZero was +5-1=1 in mini-match play, drawing the match with third place Alliestein after all eight games were drawn.

The Sufi should start this week. TCEC planning says it will last about 17 days.

CCC: There is no news on the technical problems affecting the GPU engines.The only information on the site informs,

!next • Four rounds of CCRL Ratings Standardization, 200 games each.

For more about the the Computer Chess Rating Lists, see CCRL (chessdom.com). The CCC is currently conducting the second of the four rounds. I could find no explanation of what is meant by 'Ratings Standardization'. Since the matches involve two engines, I suppose the goal is to verify that the results of the 200-game matches are close to the expected score calculated by the CCRL rating difference between the two 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]

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