Chess Engine Match

[Vinnie Frevert]

TopChess Engine Championship, formerly known as Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC or nTCEC), is a computer chess tournament that has been run since 2010. It was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin Thoresen until the end of Season 6; from Season 7 onward it has been organized by Chessdom. It is often regarded as the Unofficial World Computer Chess Championship because of its strong participant line-up and long time-control matches on high-end hardware, giving rise to very high-class chess.[1][2] The tournament has attracted nearly all the top engines compared to the World Computer Chess Championship.

The TCEC competition is divided into seasons, where each season happens over a course of a few months, with matches played round-the-clock and broadcast live over the internet. Each season is divided into several tournaments: a Leagues Season, a Cup, a Swiss tournament, a Fischer Random Chess tournament. Additionally, seasons contain various bonus contests, like the 'Viewer Submitted Opening Bonus'.

Prior to season 21, there was originally one tournament in each season. This tournament consisted of several qualifying stages and one "superfinal", and the winner of the superfinal is called the "TCEC Grand Champion" until the next season. Prior to season 11, the tournament used a cup format, while starting in Season 11, the tournament used a division system. Starting in season 13, there was also a cup tournament consisting of the top 32 engines in the main tournament, resulting in a 5-round single elimination tournament.[7]

Pondering is set to off. All engines run on mostly the same hardware[8] and use the same opening book, which is set by the organizers and changed in every stage. Large pages are disabled, but access to various endgame tablebases is permitted. Engines are allowed updates between stages; if there is a critical play-limiting bug, they are also allowed to be updated once during the stage. In previous seasons, if an engine crashes 3 times in one event, it is disqualified to avoid distorting the results for the other engines; however, starting in TCEC Season 20, an engine is allowed to crash any number of times without being disqualified from the current event, although the engine will still be disqualified from future events unless the crash is fixed.[9] TCEC generates an Elo rating list from the matches played during the tournament. An initial rating is given to any new participant based on its rating in other chess engine rating lists.

There is no definite criterion for entering into the competition, other than inviting the top participants under active development from various rating lists which can run on their Linux platform. Originally, TCEC used Windows instead of Linux. In addition, either XBoard or UCI protocol are required to participate. [10]

Usually chess engines that support multiprocessor mode are preferred (8-cores or higher), and engines in active development are given preference. Since TCEC 12, engines like LCZero which use GPUs for neural processing were supported.

Initially, the list of participants was personally chosen by Thoresen before the start of a season. His stated goal was to include "every major engine that is not a direct clone".[11] In TCEC 13, DeusX was banned due to being a clone of Leela, and in TCEC 20, Houdini, Fire, Rybka (engine in Fritz up to TCEC 16), and Critter were banned due to allegations of plagiarism.

If you want to beat the Sicilian Najdorf as white, make a copy of the Megadatabase Black Wins and rename it Najdorf (Black). If you want to win with the Sicilian Najdorf as black, make a copy of the Megadatabase White Wins and rename it Najdorf (White).

I use this approach to see attacking lines by engine match ups for any opening I wish to study as White or Black. Of course, your practical games will be different, but you will have a strategy in mind for each opening you are interested in playing as white or black.

When I said the cheating thing, I wasn't talking about you desert_chess. I was talking to that other guy who commented. Saying learn to play chess but then you see his page and it's closed with games that show he clearly cheated lol sorry about that, I should have made that a little more clear.

Windows 11 was a disaster, should never have upgraded from windows 10. Windows 10 was supposed to be Microsoft's last release anyway, so what happened? I also have been having trouble installing stockfish on windows.

Microsoft never officially stated that Windows 10 would be the last Windows. (It was just one developer talking off the cuff, and the news media ran with it.) Anyway, from what I've heard, there's not much difference between 10 and 11, other than a few minor tweaks. You could always reinstall Win 10, but you'd have to know what you're doing. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

When you click on engine match, right below the Engine vs engine tab, you should see the tabs white, and black. Click on one of them, let's say white, and click define. From there, you should see the list of kibitzers(analysis engines) that you have installed on fritz. Do the same thing for black, and you're ready! BTW, I was having the same problem too when I first got Fritz, you kinda need to explore the software to learn about a lot of it's features.

When playing an engine vs engine match what are reasonable things I should be doing. I have the engine installed. My pieces in a 5 minute blitz take about 15 seconds to make the first move? That is putting me way behind right from the start. Are there prep things I should be doing? Also does an opening book make a difference? Most of this is from competitor website chessbase and I don't play these often but wondering why my engine is somewhere else at the start of the game? Thank you

You have to have a high chess rating (2200+) to understand engine games. The moves are extremely subtle, and without a deep appreciation for the game most of the variations will be quickly forgotten by the mind.

Maybe I should say it differently. I'm playing an engine vs. engine match. My machine seems to make moves slowly. What is the reason? Its not the win loss that bothers me its the sloweness of my computer moves?

This allows you to stage automatic engine matches between two computer opponents. You can also play an engine against itself, that is, to test the quality of different openings books. In the engine dialog box you can specify which engines should play, which books they should use, time limits, number of games, etc.

Define: These two buttons allow you to select and configure the engines. You can set the hash table size, the use of endgame tablebases, the openings book and possibly the engine parameters. You can give an Elo rating for the engine. The left engine has white in the first game.

Move limit: This limits the length of individual games. The number gives the number of ply (half-moves) after leaving the openings book. In the database, the games are stored without a result, but with an evaluation symbol.

First game: If you use an openings database, you can specify which position the match should start from. and one with black. If both programs are using the same openings book, or if you are using an openings database like the Nunn match, each engine will play the same opening with white, and then with black.

On the top of the screen there is more information: You can see names of the programs, the current score, number of draws, and the result in percentage. You can also see the tournament performance in Elo, with the standard deviation in square brackets, and the certainty (in percent) that the performance lies within this margin of error.

A special engine-engine database is used to store all games from engine matches. It is by default, the database c:\My Documents\[User]\ChessBase\CompBase (unless you have specified otherwise during the installation).

Engine Testing,

the process either to eliminate bugs and to measure performance of a chess engine. New implementations of move generation are tested with Perft, while new features and tuning of search and evaluation are verified via SPRT testing, (historically) test-positions and by playing matches against other engines.

Running sets of test-positions with number of solutions per fixed time-frame is useful to prove whether things are broken after program changes or to get hints about missing knowledge. But one should be careful to tune engines based on test-position results, since solving (possible tactical) test-positions does not necessarily correlate with practical playing strength in matches against other opponents.

Generally speaking, for testing changes that don't alter the search tree itself, but only affect performance (eg. move generation) can be tested with given fixed nodes, fixed time or fixed depth. In all other cases the time management should be left to the engine to simulate real tournament conditions. On the other hand, debugging is much easier under fixed conditions as the games become deterministic.

A side from the type of time control one also has to decide on how much time should be spent per game, ie. what the average quality of the games should be like. While one can test more changes in the a certain time at short time controls, it is also relevant how a certain change scales to different strengths. So for example should one increase the R in Null move pruning to 3 in depths > 7, this change may only be effectively tested on time controls where this new condition is triggered frequently enough, ie. where the average search depth is far greater than seven. It is hard to generalize, but on average changes of the search functions (LMR, nullmove, futility or similar pruning, reductions and extensions ) tend to be more sensitive to the time control than the tuning of evaluation parameters.

During testing the engines should ideally play the same style of openings they would play in a normal tournament, so not to optimize them for different types of positions. One option is to use the engines own opening book or one can use opening suites, a set of quiet test positions. In the latter case the same opening suit would be used for each tournament conducted and furthermore each position is played a second time with colors reversed. With these measures one can try to minimize the disparity between tests caused by different openings.

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