TCEC - Thanks Martin and congrats to the winner Komodo

[gordonr]

I realise that this has been mentioned in the Komodo TCEC release thread, etc. but I wanted to separately thank Martin for his organisation of the great TCEC tournament and to congratulate the Komodo team on winning it - a nice tournament win as a fitting tribute to Don's work. It was a pleasure to watch all these top level games.

Gordon

[Martin Thoresen]

Hi Gordon, thanks for this! Much appreciated. I hope all of you will be back for Season 3 in late January.

[velmarin]

I join the congratulations, a huge event, congratulations to the winner and all participants.

Greeting and thank you Martin, the event went smoothly and well run.

[Vinvin]

May be it's time to wonder what makes TCEC an awesome event :

- Nice layout (board, menus, game score, ranking, ...)
- Easy way to follow the games/tournaments, html page
- Live chat
- Latest (even beta) versions of engines
- Top and average engines
- Qualification/elimination is fair
- Wide and short book, engines have to show their strength in opening
- Long time control allow deep thinking and so, interesting games
- Engines updated/debugged between stages
- Poll to know spectators opinions
... more ?

Thanks a lot Martin !

[beachknight]

Congrats Martin for excellent online presentation for 3 months.
Best,

[lkaufman]

I realise that this has been mentioned in the Komodo TCEC release thread, etc. but I wanted to separately thank Martin for his organisation of the great TCEC tournament and to congratulate the Komodo team on winning it - a nice tournament win as a fitting tribute to Don's work. It was a pleasure to watch all these top level games.

Gordon

Thanks to all for the congratulations (I'm sure Don would have done so), and thanks to Martin for a well-run event. Usually I'm quick to suggest improvements to various events and tests, but I'm hard-pressed to think of much I would have done differently. I guess my only suggestion would be to select openings where White's advantage (according to Komodo, Houdini, and 2/3 of Stockfish eval averaged) on a very deep search is between 0.1 and 0.2 coming out of book, which is about "par" for serious chess. They can be exciting openings, just not too one-sided or the result of poor play by White. The actual choices in this event didn't favor anyone due to color reversal, but perhaps made the match effectively a bit shorter than necessary. But anyway this is a detail, very well thought out format and good execution of the idea.

[PaulieD]

Thank you Martin !

I loved the opening choices and the fact that they were color reversed positions and not from an opening book.
The whole entire event was very well managed...Hats off to you and your support team

Also congrats to Larry and Don (RIP) for a well fought battle which ultimately led to a new champion!!! Komodo TCEC!

[Nelson Hernandez]

I'm working on a solution to the openings issue that factors in 1) play balance, 2) apparent draw avoidance, 3) commonness and 4) difficulty, defined as the degree to which the leading engines disagree, adjusting their outputs in accord with their respective evaluation scaling much as you propose.

Expressing these four factors as percentile ranks corresponding to each opening position, it will then be an easy matter to weight each category differently as we proceed through the five stages of the competition and use the consolidated figure to select openings. Difficulty, for example, would be unimportant in Stage 1 but be quite important in the Superfinal. Commonness would be desirable in Stage 1 but become progressively less important. Play balance and draw avoidance would be relatively constant in importance through the stages, though draw avoidance is less important in Stage 1 and more important in the Superfinal.

At the moment I'm assembling the data. It'll be a close-run thing to have everything in place prior to the start of next season but I feel confident the grand design will be in place. It's quite an undertaking; the foundation is over 44,000 GM-produced positions after eight moves.

Much more detail to follow when the project is completed.

[Modern Times]

Chess960 is so much easier Of course, Komodo and many other engines don't play it... but Houdini and Stockfish do.

[Kohflote]

Yes, an excellent tournament organized by Martin.

Thank you!

Best regards,
Koh, Kah Huat