A poll to gauge interest in possible tournament

[Kirill Kryukov]

When WBEC and ChessWar both ended in 2012, IMO the computer chess community lost two important proving grounds for chess authors. To be sure, there still exist some great tournaments such as TCEC, Graham's Amateur series, Geert's Country Chess, and Gsei's Web tournament to name a few. However, of those mentioned only Gsei's Web tournament uses own books, learning, multiple cores, and pondering. However, at the present time the Gsei tournament has a limited field. WBEC and ChessWar were expansive tournaments, running over 100 engines with each edition. Each of these tournaments allowed many engines to be run in competitive conditions and provided valuable feedback and enjoyment to the authors.

I do not think that I can replace either one of these tournaments. And I am not trying to compete with any existing tournament. However, I am interested in conducting competitive tournaments involving engines of all levels of strength, using everything built into each engine to play chess. I would like to gauge how interested the community is in my proposal. So please vote in the poll, and feel free to express your opinion in this thread.

Yes. Personally I'd very much welcome another amateur tournament to use as reference for my own experiments. However I believe the most important factor is whether it's fun for you to do. Good luck!

[mloftus955]

I think this is a great idea. Not having WBEC and ChessWar has left a void indeed. CCRL is still doing a great job.


Mark

[Tom Likens]

I loved Leo's tournament. It was my favorite tournament website. His format of 4 games / round was interesting and the quality of the games was high. Plus he was just a class act. I was so sorry to hear of his health issues. I think the community would appreciate something similar. Good luck to you Adam if you decide to pursue it. You'll have my support.

regards,
--tom

[Adam Hair]

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to vote and give their opinions. It appears the majority of members who voted would like to see an everything on tournament. I was going to do run such a tournament anyway. However, it is due to the positive response that I have started creating a website and will try to clear some technical hurdles in order to make the tournament more like what Leo and Oliver did.

I will create another thread soon in order to solicit opinions on rules and conditions (in addition to those already submitted). One decision that I have made is the name: Everything ON Computer Chess Tournament, or EON for short.

[tpetzke]

Yes, and since the electrical power consumption of computers running chess engines is rather high a tournament is not even totally unrelated to an energy producing company.