26 July 2014

Stockfish, the Strong

Which engine is the strongest at chess960? According to Chessdom.com, it's Stockfish, as in Stockfish is TCEC double champion.
The TCEC Grand champion Stockfish, modification 260614, won another prestigious computer chess competition – the Fischer Random Chess (FRC) tournament, organized as a TCEC Season 6 Special Event. [...] The reigning champion Stockfish was convincing with 25/28 points, leaving the runner-up Houdini 4 full 3 points behind. Critter 1.6a took the bronze, collecting 17,5 points.

TCEC is, of course, the Thoresen Chess Engines Competition. In May, Chessdom posted an Interview with Martin Thoresen – organizer and director of TCEC, where we learn that

Some people refer to TCEC as the "unofficial Computer World Championship". The organization ICGA is hosting the official World Championship, but they have lost a lot of interest over the years – in particular because none of the strongest engines are participating there and they play very few games.

and that

I [Thoresen] was a part of the CCRL rating list prior to starting TCEC. I ran a lot of test games for them, but it really didn’t interest me as much after a while – I was more interested in organizing tournaments and broadcasting it for others to watch

I downloaded the PGN file containing the games from the event and will look at it in another post. These games will make a valuable addition to my own copy of the Chess Jungle's database; see Chess960 Database, Part II for more info.

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