TCEC and Chessdom announces partnership + start of Season 2

[Martin Thoresen]

Hi all,

Some of you already know about it but here is the official announcement of the partnership between TCEC and Chessdom.

This will bring a lot of articles and publicity about computer chess and should hopefully find new audiences around the world.

TCEC Season 2 will start 26th of August. Hope to see you all there!

Best,
Martin

[lucasart]

Good news. The more people are watching the tournament, the more fun it gets.

Is TCEC for SMP engines only ? Or can I enter my non-SMP engine ?

[brianr]

I am also looking forward to another outstanding tournament.

Regarding pondering, I hope with the expanded hardware that this time pondering will be allowed.
Time management emerged as a significant factor last time.
With pondering enabled each engine's full time management capabilities would be employed.
With the diminishing returns of parallel search, perhaps 8 CPUs v 8 would be enough to also still reward engines with "better" high-end parallel search.
8 v 8 with pondering might be a reasonable compromise instead of no pondering and 16 v 16.

In any case, thanks again for your efforts.

[Martin Thoresen]

Good news. The more people are watching the tournament, the more fun it gets.

Is TCEC for SMP engines only ? Or can I enter my non-SMP engine ?

Hi Lucas,

Season 2 will be SMP engines only. I considered your engine until I made that decision.

[Martin Thoresen]

I am also looking forward to another outstanding tournament.

Regarding pondering, I hope with the expanded hardware that this time pondering will be allowed.
Time management emerged as a significant factor last time.
With pondering enabled each engine's full time management capabilities would be employed.
With the diminishing returns of parallel search, perhaps 8 CPUs v 8 would be enough to also still reward engines with "better" high-end parallel search.
8 v 8 with pondering might be a reasonable compromise instead of no pondering and 16 v 16.

In any case, thanks again for your efforts.

There are many "if's and maybe's" regarding pondering.

Pondering will still be disabled for Season 2, mostly due to ChessGUI not printing the search info (depth/eval etc) correctly.

So if this gets fixed for Season 3 I might enable it then. But for Season 2, no ponder.

[pohl4711]

Hi all,

Some of you already know about it but here is the official announcement of the partnership between TCEC and Chessdom.

This will bring a lot of articles and publicity about computer chess and should hopefully find new audiences around the world.

TCEC Season 2 will start 26th of August. Hope to see you all there!

Best,
Martin

What about the new Fire-derivate Mars 1? It works with 8 cores, the AVX-compile is very fast (on 8 cores the nodes per second are higher than Houdini 3!) and it is strong. The LS-ratinglist testrun of Mars 1 is still running, but after 6500 games the score is around 3047 LS-Elo, which is clearly better than PanChess 00.537, Bouqet 1.7 beta and all other Ippolit-derivates. Mars 1 will be the new worlds number 6 (without the singlecore-engine Strelka, Mars even will be the new worlds number 5)!
I really hope, that TCEC will not ignore this strong, new engine...

Stefan

[Graham Banks]

What about the new Fire-derivate Mars 1? It works with 8 cores, the AVX-compile is very fast (on 8 cores the nodes per second are higher than Houdini 3!) and it is strong. The LS-ratinglist testrun of Mars 1 is still running, but after 6500 games the score is around 3047 LS-Elo, which is clearly better than PanChess 00.537, Bouqet 1.7 beta and all other Ippolit-derivates. Mars 1 will be the new worlds number 6 (without the singlecore-engine Strelka, Mars even will be the new worlds number 5)!
I really hope, that TCEC will not ignore this strong, new engine...

Stefan

Who is the author of this derivative?

[pohl4711]

What about the new Fire-derivate Mars 1? It works with 8 cores, the AVX-compile is very fast (on 8 cores the nodes per second are higher than Houdini 3!) and it is strong. The LS-ratinglist testrun of Mars 1 is still running, but after 6500 games the score is around 3047 LS-Elo, which is clearly better than PanChess 00.537, Bouqet 1.7 beta and all other Ippolit-derivates. Mars 1 will be the new worlds number 6 (without the singlecore-engine Strelka, Mars even will be the new worlds number 5)!
I really hope, that TCEC will not ignore this strong, new engine...

Stefan

Who is the author of this derivative?

Trap. I only know this nickname.

Stefan

[ZirconiumX]

What about the new Fire-derivate Mars 1? It works with 8 cores, the AVX-compile is very fast (on 8 cores the nodes per second are higher than Houdini 3!) and it is strong. The LS-ratinglist testrun of Mars 1 is still running, but after 6500 games the score is around 3047 LS-Elo, which is clearly better than PanChess 00.537, Bouqet 1.7 beta and all other Ippolit-derivates. Mars 1 will be the new worlds number 6 (without the singlecore-engine Strelka, Mars even will be the new worlds number 5)!
I really hope, that TCEC will not ignore this strong, new engine...

Stefan

Who is the author of this derivative?

Trap. I only know this nickname.

Stefan

Alarm bells ring crazily.

Trap has a history of ignoring the GPL, to the point where Norman Schmidt had to manually ask for people to take down the executable link.

I would steer clear of any of his executables, for the above reason.

Trap offered to work on Firenzina. Knowing his history, me and Dmitri declined.

Matthew:out

[pohl4711]

What about the new Fire-derivate Mars 1? It works with 8 cores, the AVX-compile is very fast (on 8 cores the nodes per second are higher than Houdini 3!) and it is strong. The LS-ratinglist testrun of Mars 1 is still running, but after 6500 games the score is around 3047 LS-Elo, which is clearly better than PanChess 00.537, Bouqet 1.7 beta and all other Ippolit-derivates. Mars 1 will be the new worlds number 6 (without the singlecore-engine Strelka, Mars even will be the new worlds number 5)!
I really hope, that TCEC will not ignore this strong, new engine...

Stefan

Who is the author of this derivative?

Trap. I only know this nickname.

Stefan

Alarm bells ring crazily.

Trap has a history of ignoring the GPL, to the point where Norman Schmidt had to manually ask for people to take down the executable link.

I would steer clear of any of his executables, for the above reason.

Trap offered to work on Firenzina. Knowing his history, me and Dmitri declined.

Matthew:out

Last TCEC Vitruvius played. A commercial Ippolit-derivative! No GPL, no sources, only a commercial .exe-file....
If this was OK, perhaps Mars should go commercial, too before TCEC starts?!

Stefan