OpenBench Interlude

In last week's TCEC/CCC post, TCEC S24 DivP Finishing; Stockfish Wins CCC20 Blitz Final (April 2023), I ended saying,

In previous posts, I've mentioned OpenBench several times in passing. It's high time I devoted an off-week post to the concept. Maybe next week...

This being next week and if not today, maybe never, let's first look at those passing references:-

• 2022-09-05: Chess324 Is a Thing • 'OpenBench was featured in an August CCC event called, 'OpenBench Interlude #1'.'
• 2022-10-31: TCEC S23 Sufi, CCC19 Rapid : Both Underway • 'After a few exhibition events, including two in an 'OpenBench Interlude' series, the [CCC] launched a 'CCC19 Rapid' multi-stage event.'
• 2023-02-06: TCEC Swiss 4 Underway; CCC Mystery Matches • 'As I was writing this post, the [CCC] had just finished 'OpenBench Interlude #7 - Top 6'.'

What can we learn from the TCEC/CCC !commands? The TCEC's '!openbench', points to chess.grantnet.us, while the CCC says nothing.

The Grantnet.us page is largely incomprehensible, although it points to Discord.com and Github.com resources. Those are also incomprehensible. I assume that chess engine developers have access to a Rosetta stone that de-mystifies all of the above, which is all that really matters to the rest of us. The Wikipedia page Chess engine (wikipedia.org), says,

In 2019, Ethereal author Andrew Grant started the distributed computing testing framework OpenBench, based upon Stockfish's testing framework, and it is now the most widely-used testing framework for chess engines.

Wikipedia adds '[citation needed]' to the 'most widely-used' statement, but Wikipedia says that about nearly everything that doesn't have a footnote. The wiki at OpenBench (chessprogramming.org; 'last edited on 15 April 2021'), explains,

An open source chess engine testing framework authored by Andrew Grant, written in Python and licensed under the GNU GPL. It is inspired [by] Fishtest and makes use of distributed computing, allowing anyone to contribute CPU time to further improve the development of open source chess engines.

We're nearly two years down the road from that 'last edited' date. Maybe the next update will explain the purpose of the CCC competitions that are limited to OpenBench engines. The 'OpenBench Interlude #8' event mentioned in last week's TCEC/CCC post was won by no.1 Berserk, ahead of no.2 Ethereal, no.3 Rubi, and 12 other engines.