TCEC S16 Final Underway; Leelenstein Wins CCC10

Last week's report on two world class engine-vs-engine competitions, TCEC S16 DivP & CCC10 Final Nearly Complete, saw both nearing the end of an advanced stage. To summarize that report:-

TCEC: The Premier Division will finish later today. Stockfish is almost certain to qualify for the final match. The other two engines are neck-and-neck. • CCC: Leelenstein and Stockfish finished tied for 1st/2nd in the 'CCC10 Semifinals', thereby advancing to the final match.

Both competitions finished their respective stages within a day after the report. What happened then?

TCEC: The Premier Division finished with Stockfish, AllieStein, and LCZero at 1st/2nd/3rd, each separated by a half-point. The following chart shows the top four of the eight participating engines.

After 22 games in the 100-game final match, Stockfish has a two point lead over AllieStein. The match will last another week and a half.

CCC: Leelenstein beat Stockfish by a score of +19-15=166 in the CCC10 final. No plans for CCC11 have been announced.

I've been tracking the two competitions weekly since Results: TCEC S14-P / CCC3 S3 (January 2019). The time has come to close the series and move on to other topics. I'll summarize the previous nine months in the next 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]

TCEC S16 DivP & CCC10 Final Nearly Complete

Last week's post, TCEC S16 DivP & CCC10 S3 Both Underway, summarized, 'Both the TCEC and the CCC have reached the stage that will determine the participants in the finals.' More specifically:-

TCEC: The Premier Division has another week to run with three engines -- AllieStein, LCZero, and Stockfish -- within a half point of each other. • CCC: The 'CCC10 Semifinals' stage is underway with three engines -- Stockfish, Lc0, and Leelenstein -- well ahead of the other three.

The current status of the two engine-vs-engine competitions is summarized below.

TCEC: The Premier Division will finish later today. Stockfish is almost certain to qualify for the final match. The other two engines are neck-and-neck.

CCC: Leelenstein and Stockfish finished tied for 1st/2nd in the 'CCC10 Semifinals', thereby advancing to the final match. The following chart shows that Lc0 was well behind the two finalists.

Chess.com issued a report, CCC10 Finals: Leelenstein vs Stockfish. Of the 200 games scheduled for the 'CCC10 Finals', 190 games have already been played. Leelenstein has a narrow but convincing lead over Stockfish.

[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]

2019 US Chess Delegates Meeting

Look like it wasn't really The Last Sociology Post (*; August 2019). How could it have been when there is so much compelling material to be reviewed (the following video had 34 viewers in its first month!):-

US Chess 2019 Delegates Meeting 1.1 (2:43:37) • 'Published on Aug 22, 2019'

The description added only that the meeting was held on a Saturday:-

Part 1 of the Saturday Delegates Meeting for US Chess

For more of the same from Youtube's USChessFederation channel, see:-

• US Chess 2019 Delegates Meeting 1.2
• US Chess 2019 Delegates Meeting Part 2
• 2019 US Chess Awards Ceremony

If that doesn't satisfy your appetite for the ins-and-outs of chess administration, see last year's Delegates Meeting and US Chess Annual Awards [Full Video] (August 2018)

(*) The most recent post in this blog's series on The Sociology of Chess (November 2016)

The End of Daily Blogging

I ended last week's post, Breaking the 3000 Barrier, with a short statement of direction:-

This current post is no.2999 on this blog, making tomorrow's post [Beyond AlphaZero] no.3000. It's a goal I've been working toward since the beginning of the year, because it will be the last regular post on the blog. Some of the ongoing series need to be closed separately, but I'll look at those some other time.

I tackle those ongoing series on a weekly cycle:-

Sunday: I've been rotating monthly through eBay, Youtube, Flickr, and sociology. These are all subjects that expand on some random, chess-related topic, where I always learn something new. I'll continue with some of these until I finally close the blog.

Monday: Since the beginning of the year, I've been following the TCEC and CCC engine tournaments. I'll continue with these for the near future, but might decrease the frequency of posts.

Tuesday/Thursday: These are free days, unrelated to any series, so I'll stop. This current post is the last.

Wednesday: I'll continue with my World Chess Championship Blog at least through the end of the current cycle. Who will challenge Magnus next year?

Friday: I use Friday posts to develop topics that can't be covered in 1-2 posts. The most recent post in the current series was 'Beyond AlphaZero', which is a good stopping point.

Saturday: Two posts a month have been for Chess960 (FRC). I'll continue at least through the climax of the FWFRCC (FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship) in November.

Chess is a wonderful subject and there are much worse pastimes. Whether you've been a regular or an occasional visitor to this blog, I offer a big 'Thank You!' and I hope you'll continue to stop by from time to time.

TCEC S16 DivP & CCC10 S3 Both Underway

To summarize last week's post TCEC S16 DivP & CCC10 S2 Both Underway:-

TCEC: The 'Premier Division', to determine which two engines will compete in the Superfinals, is underway with eight engines. • CCC: The 'CCC10 Quarterfinals' are underway with 11 engines.

In the world's strongest engine-vs-engine competitions, what's changed since then?

TCEC: The Premier Division has another week to run. Three engines -- AllieStein, LCZero, and Stockfish -- are currently within a half point of each other, two points ahead of the rest of the field.

CCC: As Chess.com reported in CCC10 Quarterfinals Finished; CCC10 Semis Start Now!, six engines advanced from the quarterfinals. The following chart shows a partial crosstable for those six, with Stockfish, Lc0, and Leelenstein finishing well ahead of the others. None of the other engines managed to win against the top three.

The 'CCC10 Semifinals' stage is currently underway with the same three engines again well ahead of the other three. When I gathered the basic info for this post, the schedule said the event would finish in a couple of days, but later an announcement appeared that said, 'Due to unexpected hardware issues, CCC10 Semifinals will resume [later]'.

Both events have reached the stage that will determine the participants in the finals. If the tournaments progress as the intermediate results show, we will see two AI/NN engines battling against each other -or- Stockfish against one of those 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]

Four Player Chess Pawns

Whether these are chess Pawns or Parcheesi pieces, their messages are identical.

Photo top middle: Mentoring © Flickr user Marco Verch under Creative Commons.

'Mentoring' and 'Support' look the same, as do 'Diversity' and 'Friends'. Is there another message here? It looks like The Last Flickr Photo (August 2019) wasn't.

Beyond AlphaZero

For the last two months, I've used this blog's Friday post to wander around topics relevant to AlphaZero:-

• 2019-07-19: Interpreting AlphaZero • 'What can we learn from black box models? '
• 2019-07-26: AlphaZero's Zeros • Engine evaluations of '0.00'
• 2019-08-02: Winning Percentage to Centipawns
• 2019-08-09: 'Game Changer' PGN
• 2019-08-16: The Value of Deep Learning
• 2019-08-23: A Chess Epiphany • 'Would Demis Hassabis have been more useful to society as a professional chess player?'
• 2019-08-30: Playing Without a Horizon
• 2019-09-06: 'Game Changer' PGN Explored

As everyone knows by now, although AlphaZero never played in a neutral, supervised competition, it was quickly copied by Leela Chess Zero (aka Lc0, LCZero), which improved rapidly to become one of the strongest chess engines in the world. Leela has since been joined by other AI/NN engines, which are also making a mark in the engine-vs-engine competitions that I've been following since the beginning of the year. Not too long ago, in TCEC S16 Qualification; CCC9 Bonuses (July 2019), I reported,

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 [LCZeroCPU], is in third place. TCEC chat commands point to resources describing the three NNs [see links].

ScorpioNN and Stoofvlees first survived the qualification stage, then the two league stages (finishing ahead of another NN engine, FireNNb, along the way), and are currently playing in the TCEC Premier Division. There they were joined by two other NN engines, LCZero and AllieStein, along with four non-NN engines: Stockfish, Houdini, Komodo, and KomodoMCTS.

As for the other engine-vs-engine event, the CCC, four NN engines competed in the qualification stage. I reported last week in TCEC S16 L1 Finished; CCC10 S1 in Trouble, that the tournament did not go smoothly. In spite of the difficulties, all four NN engines -- Lc0, Stoofvlees, DarkQueen, and Leelenstein -- eventually qualified to the next stage.

The upshot of this activity is that the NN engines and the non-NN engines are roughly equal in strength. Will this continue or will one of the two technologies soon prove dominant?