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Top Chess Engine Championship
Top Chess 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. The tournament has attracted nearly all the top engines compared to the World Computer Chess Championship. After a short break in 2012, TCEC was restarted in early 2013 (as ''nTCEC'') and is currently active (renamed as TCEC in early 2014) with 24/7 live broadcasts of chess matches on its website. Since season 5, TCEC has been sponsored by Chessdom Arena. Overview Basic structure of competition The TCEC competition is divided into seasons, where each season happens over a cour ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Chess
Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a Chess title, chess grandmaster or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to Smartphone, smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish (chess), Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, GNU Chess, Fruit (software), Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms. Computer chess applications, whether implemented in hardware or software, use different strategies than humans to choose their moves: they use Heuristic (computer science), heuristic methods to build, search and evaluate Tree (data structure), trees representing sequences of moves from the current position and attempt to execute ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chess
Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The players, referred to as White and Black in chess, "White" and "Black", each control sixteen Chess piece, pieces: one king (chess), king, one queen (chess), queen, two rook (chess), rooks, two bishop (chess), bishops, two knight (chess), knights, and eight pawn (chess), pawns, with each type of piece having a different pattern of movement. An enemy piece may be captured (removed from the board) by moving one's own piece onto the square it occupies. The object of the game is to "checkmate" (threaten with inescapable capture) the enemy king. There are also several ways a game can end in a draw (chess), draw. The recorded history of chess goes back to at least the emergence of chaturanga—also thought to be an ancesto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chess960
Chess960, also known as Fischer Random Chess, is a chess variant that randomizes the starting position of the pieces on the back rank. It was introduced by former world chess champion Bobby Fischer in 1996 to reduce the emphasis on opening preparation and to encourage creativity in play. Chess960 uses the same board and pieces as classical chess, but the starting position of the pieces on the players' is randomized, following certain rules. The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings unfeasible. Players instead must rely on their skill and creativity. Randomizing the main pieces had long been known as ''shuffle chess'', but Fischer introduced new rules for the initial random setup, "preserving the dynamic nature of the game by retaining for each player and the right to castle for both sides".Gligorić (2002), p. 40. The result is 960 distinct possible starting positions. In 2008, FIDE added Chess960 to an appendix of the Laws of Chess. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 20
The 20th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 1 December 2020 and ended on 1 February 2021. The defending champion was Stockfish, which defeated Leela Chess Zero in the previous season's superfinal. The season 20 superfinal was a rematch between the same two engines. Stockfish once again came out ahead, winning by 6 games (+14 -8 =78). Overview TCEC underwent some major changes for season 20. There were a plethora of new engines participating in the Qualification League for the first time. Furthermore, two major new rules changes went into effect: # Engines are no longer disqualified if they crash three times, although crashes are still treated as losses. # The "TCEC win rule", which stated that games are adjudicated as won if both engines showed a +10 eval or greater for 5 consecutive moves, is abolished. Instead, games are played until mate, 3-fold repetition, the 50-move rule is reached, a Syzygy 6-piece tablebase position is reached, or if the "TCEC draw rule ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 19
The 19th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 6 August 2020 and ended on 16 October 2020. The season 19 superfinal was a rematch between Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, the same two engines that had contested the superfinal in the previous two seasons. Stockfish, the defending champion, won by 9 games (+18 -9 =73). Overview The format of TCEC Season 19 is largely unchanged from that of Season 18. The only difference is that the time control in the superfinal is once again 120 minutes + 10 seconds per move, increased from 90 min + 10s in Season 18. The rules are also largely unchanged, with the only significant addition being r-mobility as a tiebreak criterion. This tiebreak depends on the number of legal moves available to both sides in the last phase of the game; the side with the fewer legal moves loses. Tiebreak rules The tiebreak rules for TCEC Season 19 are: #For any event except the superfinal: the number of crashes. #Head-to-head score. #Number of wins. # S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 18
The 18th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 4 May 2020 and ended on 3 July 2020. The defending champion was Leela Chess Zero, which defeated Stockfish in the previous season's superfinal. The two season 17 superfinalists qualified again for the superfinal. This time Stockfish won, winning by 7 games (+23−16=61). Overview For this season, there are five leagues: the Qualification League (QL), League Three, League Two, League One, and Premier Division. Two engines promote in every league, with the top two engines of the Premier Division contesting a 100-game superfinal. Updates are allowed only between League Three and League Two, between League One and Premier Division, and between Premier Division and the superfinal. In a small change to previous seasons' rules, draw adjudication now occurs if the evaluations of both engines are within +/− 0.15 for five consecutive moves, after move 35. This increases the threshold of evaluation compared to +/− 0.08 for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 17
The 17th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 2 January 2020 and ended on 22 April 2020. TCEC Season 16 3rd-place finisher Leela Chess Zero won the championship, defeating the defending champion Stockfish 52.5-47.5 in the superfinal. Season 17 featured for the first time two separate leagues, one for GPU-based engines and one for CPU-based engines. TCEC also raised the computing power available to both CPU and GPU engines. The hardware for CPU engines was doubled to 88 cores, while the hardware for GPU engines was raised to 4 RTX 2080 Ti's. Overview In keeping with its identity as a competition run at long time controls on high-end hardware, TCEC secured a hardware upgrade for the competing CPU engines. Among other changes, the number of cores available is doubled from 44 to 88, the operating system used is now Linux, and Syzygy endgame tablebases are now cached directly in the RAM for faster access. Because this upgrade advantages CPU engines compared to GPU engi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AllieStein
Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source chess engine and volunteer computing project based on Google's AlphaZero engine. It was spearheaded by Gary Linscott, a developer for the Stockfish chess engine, and adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine. Like Leela Zero and AlphaGo Zero, early iterations of Leela Chess Zero started with no intrinsic chess-specific knowledge other than the basic rules of the game. It learned how to play chess through reinforcement learning from repeated self-play, using a distributed computing network coordinated at the Leela Chess Zero website. However, as of November 2024 most models used by the engine are trained through supervised learning on data generated by previous reinforcement learning runs. , Leela Chess Zero has played over 2.5 billion games against itself, playing around 1 million games every day, and is capable of play at a level that is comparable with Stockfish, the leading conventional chess program. His ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 16
The 16th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 15 July 2019 and ended on 13 Oct 2019. The season showed how fast neural network-based engines were progressing relative to traditional ones, with neural network-based engines making up half of Premier Division for the first time. Furthermore, AllieStein, a neural network-based engine that had reached Premier Division last season, made its first appearance in the superfinal after finishing second in Premier Division. Nonetheless, a traditional engine – Stockfish – won both Premier Division and the superfinal. Overview Structure TCEC changed its format for this season again, with the aim of allowing more chances for new engines to climb the rankings. This is in turn necessary because of the fast pace of development in computer chess, with numerous very strong engines emerging quickly. The superfinal and Premier Division were kept, but the lower divisions were replaced by three leagues: a Qualification League, League ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 15
The 15th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on the 6 March 2019 and ended on 12 May 2019. The season featured for the first time two separate Division 4s, the winners of which moved to a playoff for promotion to Division 3. Also notable is the emergence of a new neural network-based engine based on AlphaZero, AllieStein, which reached the premier division, and Leela Chess Zero's victory in the superfinal, which marks the first time a neural-network engine has won the superfinal. Overview Structure The season was structured into six divisions: two Division 4s (4a and 4b), Division 3, Division 2, Division 1, and the Premier Division. In Division 4, the top two engines advanced to a playoff against each other, with the top two finishers moving up to Division 3. The structure from Division 3 onward remained consistent with previous seasons: the top two engines in each division advanced to the next higher division, while the bottom two engines were relegated. The top tw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leela Chess Zero
Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source chess engine and volunteer computing project based on Google's AlphaZero engine. It was spearheaded by Gary Linscott, a developer for the Stockfish chess engine, and adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine. Like Leela Zero and AlphaGo Zero, early iterations of Leela Chess Zero started with no intrinsic chess-specific knowledge other than the basic rules of the game. It learned how to play chess through reinforcement learning from repeated self-play, using a distributed computing network coordinated at the Leela Chess Zero website. However, as of November 2024 most models used by the engine are trained through supervised learning on data generated by previous reinforcement learning runs. , Leela Chess Zero has played over 2.5 billion games against itself, playing around 1 million games every day, and is capable of play at a level that is comparable with Stockfish, the leading conventional chess program. His ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TCEC Season 14
The 14th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship took place between 17 November 2018 and 24 February 2019. Stockfish was the defending champion, having defeated Komodo in the previous season's superfinal. The season is notable for two things: the emergence of two strong, new engines, the Komodo variant Komodo Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) and the neural network engine Leela Chess Zero, and the dramatic superfinal. Komodo MCTS and Leela fought their way from Division 4 and Division 3 respectively to the Premier Division, with Leela further qualifying for the superfinal against Stockfish. The superfinal was a topsy-turvy affair with the lead changing hands several times. It finished as the closest superfinal TCEC has ever seen, with Stockfish winning by a single game, 50.5–49.5 (+10 =81 -9). Overview Structure The season comprised five divisions: from the lowest Division 4 to the Premier Division. The top two engines of each division promote to the division above, while th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
