TCEC Season 7

After that little detour for FIDE Federation Codes (Unofficial!), let's return to the main subject of engines, specifically Houdini, Komodo, Stockfish. The biggest event for engines is undoubtedly the Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC).

TCEC season 7 finished at the end of last year with the announcement Komodo is the new TCEC Grand Champion. Detailed results for the multi-stage tournament are at TCEC Archive, where the 'News' button leads to TCEC @ Facebook.com. I located Facebook posts for the results of each stage and built the following table.

• 2014-10-07: Stage 1a
• 2014-10-24: Stage 1b
• 2014-11-10: Stage 2
• 2014-12-01: Stage 3
• 2014-12-16: Stage 4
• 2014-12-27: Superfinal

This composite image shows the crosstables for stages two through four.

The last round 'Superfinal' between Komodo and Stockfish was a 64-game match where the adversaries played both White and Black on 32 hand picked openings. A note in the TCEC Archive explains,

The 32 openings that will be seen in season 7’s Superfinal have been selected by IM Erik Kislik, one of the world’s top (and hardest-working) opening theorists, a chess teacher, writer and advisor to grandmasters. After a lively email exchange during last season we agreed in principle that the Superfinal’s openings should be carefully hand-selected and well diversified by “pawn structures”.

The Superfinal finished in Komodo's favor +7-4=53, with White winning all decisive games. How does the TCEC stack up against the 'official' world computer championship? As I discovered last year, in Guardian of the WCCC, some experts consider the TCEC to be the 'De-facto World Computer Chess Championship'. My page on the World Chess Championship : Computer Chess lists Junior as the winner of the two most recent WCCC tournaments in 2011 & 2013. Junior was eliminated in stage 3 of TCEC season 7, finishing well behind the four engines that qualified to stage 4.

An International Computer Games Association (ICGA) page at icga.leidenuniv.nl offers '2015 ICGA Tournament Rules and Event Information' (browser warning: 'This Connection is Untrusted : The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.'). The document starts,

The 21th World Computer Chess Championship will take place from June 29 – July 5, 2015 in Leiden, the Netherlands, in the Snellius building of the Leiden University. We are grateful to LIACS and the Boerhaave Museum that they have offered to sponsor and organize five events in cooperation with the ICGA, viz. the 21th WCCC, the 5th WCSC, the 2015 World Computer Chess Blitz Championship, the Computer Olympiad, and the 14th Advances in Computer Games Conference (ACG2015).

TCEC season 7 generated considerable interest in the chess world. Will the 21st WCCC generate similar interest?

Star Trek Chess

It was slim pickings for this current edition of Top eBay Chess Items by Price. My short list had only one item: 'Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess ~ 1st US Edition ~ 1959 Hardcover'; it listed for $550 and sold for $450, 'Best offer accepted'.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959: First Edition, First Printing as stated. In Near Fine condition, in a Very Good dust jacket with $2.95 intact. Pages lightly toned, light offsetting to end papers. Previous owner details in ink on front free end paper. Cloth shows light edge wear. The dust jacket shows foxing, sunning and edge wear, with a chip at the top of the front panel and a short closed tear to the rear. A lovely copy overall of this scarce chess title.

A sought-after item with 253 views, it was visually unattractive. Time to return to Chess Set Brands and Character Families, where I discovered that 'eBay has built-in categories for chess sets'. Given the recent death of Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015), a post on Star Trek sets would be appropriate. Unfortunately, eBay no longer offers the built-in filters for brands and families, so I constructed my own composite view from the top six items of the past three months.

Given that the series on 'Top eBay Chess Items' is approaching its fifth anniversary, it's coincidental that the second post in the series was Peter Ganine and Star Trek, featuring a photo of Nimoy's Spock with the 3-D version of the set. Another post, Chess Sets, 'Never Been Used', mentioned three varieties of Star Trek set: a 25th Anniversary set, a 3-D set, and an 'Official Next Generation' set. Are there others?

Super Bowl Chess

The description for this photo said,

Captured on the fly from the NBC broadcast of Katy Perry's halftime show during the 2015 Super Bowl. The imagery of the entire show was fantastical. In this segment, based on Perry’s "Dark Horse" song, the theme (apart from her costume) was chessmen on a chessboard; the chess pieces' faceted design resulted in the cubist polygons of my image.

Given all the noise around this year's halftime show, this was the first time I heard that chess played a role.

Katy goes cubistic, 2/01/15 © Flickr user John E. Branch Jr. under Creative Commons.

The chess sequence starts at 1:50 into this Youtube clip: Super Bowl - Katy Perry - Halftime Show Performance 2015 - ORIGINAL.

Photos of February

Last month the stats for my m-w.com domain (links to specific resources are on the right) showed an unexpected jump that lasted about a week, with page views nearly doubling during that time. At the end of the month I downloaded the domain's log file, plugged it into my log analysis database, and started looking for a reason for the jump. I didn't need to look at the entire week in question. The first day of the jump showed that a search spider was collecting pages for something, so I assumed that the other big days were similar.

While I was in the log, I also looked at a few other things. One useful analysis concerns 'page not found' errors, as in Most 'HTTP 404' Are External Errors. Based on my log analyses, I could write a tutorial on the techniques that hackers use to explore a site's vulnerabilities.

One thing I've always wanted to do -- but never found the time -- is to analyze the popularity of the various images stored on the site. This blog, for example, has all of its images stored in a single directory, '/CFAA/', making it easy to count and compare the number of times that different images are accessed.

The most popular image in the month of February was used in Titled Players and Their Continents, not too surprising given that it was one of the first posts of that month. Since nine of the top ten images were also posted in February, I eliminated those from consideration along with a few images from end-January. That left the following images as the most popular, meaning that the corresponding blog post was also relatively popular.

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Magnus Looks Like That Guy?

My server log doesn't tell me why this post is so popular. The referring page is nearly always some national variation of www.google.com, like google.bg or google.co.uk, with no additional info.

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Chess in Africa - FIDE Members

The popularity of this image was no surprise to me. The post often appears on the list of most popular posts for a given week, with people searching for a map of Africa.

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'A Holy Grail to Cookie Jar Collectors'

This post/image and most of the following are from my ongoing eBay series. I'm approaching the fifth anniversary of this series (?!) and plan to write a post about it in the next week or so.

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Engine Block Chess

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Lord of the Rings, Trilogy Edition

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King Kong vs. Godzilla

This is from another post that frequently appears in the list of top posts for a week. There appear to be many people who are fascinated by these two monsters.

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Capodimonte Figurines
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What else can I say? There's no accounting for taste.

March 1965 'On the Cover'

Last month's February 1965 'On the Cover' showed George Koltanowski on the cover of Chess Life. This month we find him on Chess Review.

Left: 'On the Move'
Right: 'Chess on Ch.11'

Chess Life

Craig Huneke, a 13-year old player who was the youngest entrant in the Oklahoma Open last December, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Harold V. Huneke of Norman, Okla. Craig is one of hundreds of school children who now regularly play in USCF tournaments throughout the country. Watch out for the masters of the future -- they're already playing in the tournaments of today! • Photo by Norman "Transcript"

In CL's January rating list (see January 1965 'On the Cover'), 'Huneke, C. (Cal.)' was listed at 1786.

Chess Review

On the cover of TV Prevue of the Chicago Sun-Times, the chessic display of George Koltanowski (in color) appeared, January 10-16, announcing 30 weeks of Chess on Channel 11. We learn from the publication that George is host of a weekly TV program, 10 PM Thursdays. He recounts chess history: "the story of Caissa, chess goddess invented by the Germans, who decides the way a player's luck will run", discussion of stamps commemorating Capablanca and the slating of a match between Mikhail Botvinnik and Alexander Alekhine in 1946 just before the latter died are samples.

He gives instruction on chess, spiced with anecdotes. In some programs, he deals with his specialty, blindfold chess, playing it against 13-year old David Moore (not blindfolded). And he concludes each program with a problem to be solved by the viewers and answered at the next session.

Look alive! If the program is not coming your way, it may come -- especially if you ask for it in TV offices. We presume it's now on tape which can be run in your neighborhood.

According to Wikipedia, George Koltanowski was 61 years old at the time of his TV show. He was one of the great American chess promoters of all time and featured in another post, Chess Ads - Paul Masson.

FIDE Federation Codes (Unofficial!)

Just one more crack at FIDE Country and Federation Codes, I promise! I compared my list to Chessgames.com's 3-letter FIDE Country Codes, found a few discrepancies, made the necessary changes, and updated my page on FIDE Country and Federation Codes (unofficial).

Note the word 'unofficial' in the title, followed by the warning 'In process & preliminary! Use with caution!!' This page has no official connection to FIDE and exists only because FIDE hasn't recognized the need to do the same.

For my next post in this blog's Monday series, I'll return to engine operators, last seen in Houdini, Komodo, Stockfish. There's plenty to be said there.

Pedagogical Pecking Order

A recent post on this blog, Inaccurate Data on the Rating List, listed eight FIDE titles awarded for organizational activities. After I wrote the post, I started to wonder what those titles mean. What, for example, is the difference between an instructor and a trainer?

I didn't have to look too hard for an answer. The Fide.com page Handbook :: B. Permanent Commissions has a chapter, 07. Regulations for the Titles of Trainers. Here we find a simple answer to my simple question.

1. Trainers’ Titles
1.1. FIDE & TRG recognise the following titles (in descending order of expertise):
1.1.1. FIDE Senior Trainer (FST)
1.1.2. FIDE Trainer (FT)
1.1.3. FIDE Instructor (FI)
1.1.4. National Instructor (NI)
1.1.5. Developmental Instructor (DI)

A little further down there is an explanation of the quailifications for the four titles through FIDE Trainer (FT). The highest title, FST, requires 'a ballot among the five TRG Board members', where TRG stands for 'FIDE Trainers' Commission'.

1.2.6. Evaluation Tables
1.2.6.1. Highest FIDE or National Rating (strength). Counts 20% on final title:
1.2.6.2. FIDE titles. Evaluation according to the Lecturer. Counts 10% on final title:
1.2.6.3. Attendance. Evaluation according to the Lecturer. Counts 10% on final title:
1.2.6.4. Bibliography - Published Material. Evaluation according to the Lecturer. Counts 10% on final title:
1.2.6.5. Experience as noted in the CV. Counts 20% on final title:
1.2.6.6. Written Exams. Counts 30% on final title.
1.2.6.7. According to the total result of the previous evaluation tables, the titles are awarded as following [...]

I couldn't find a list of 'five TRG Board members', but I suppose it means the first five positions on the page for Trainers' Commission (TRG). What sort of title could I hope to get? Giving myself the number of points indicated for the first two categories and an average score (50%) for the last four categories...

1.2.6.1 160
1.2.6.2 0
1.2.6.3 50
1.2.6.4 50
1.2.6.5 100
1.2.6.6 150

...I get 510 points! That puts me in the NI range. Assuming I could overcome my natural laziness and achieve a full score (100%) for the last four categories, I would get an additional 350 points. The new total of 860 points would put me just into the FT range. In reality, I think I would have trouble getting even 50% in the categories for 'Bibliography' and 'Experience', meaning that the highest title to which I could realistically aspire would be FI.

As for the three other titles, IA and FA are described in 06. Regulations for the Titles of Arbiters, and IO is described in 09. Regulations on Seminars & Title Award for Organizers. Those titles are most certainly out of reach for me.