MARK RUBERY CHESS
The ‘Thoresen Chess Engine Competition’ (TCEC) is a tournament that brings together the strongest chess engines in the world to do battle and late last year the program Stockfish won the 23rd edition of this ‘world championship’ defeating the Alpha Zero offshoot ‘ Lczero’ in their 100 game match (+ 27 =63 -10).
The man behind the event, Martin Thoreson, was interviewed a while back on chessdom.com from which follow a few extracts…
Q: What exactly an organization of a chess engine competition entails? What are some of the specifics of TCEC?
MT: TCEC is based on the idea of long time control and high quality games from which you can get a good picture of the strength and weaknesses of an engine.
Q: What do you think separates the men from the boys in chess engine world, in other words what makes the best chess engines stand out from the others?
MT: In recent years we have seen a very strong engine rise to the very top, and that is Stockfish. It is not commercial, meaning that anyone can use it for free. It has a public framework where anyone can donate computing power, and anyone can write code. I think it is hard for the other engine programmers, particularly those who work alone, to be able to compete with this. That is why I believe that commercial programs will have a very tough future ahead of them if they can’t step up their game. Komodo is a good example of a solid commercial engine, it has a very good evaluation and is widely recognized as the strongest positional chess engine. As for computing power in TCEC, it is equal to all participating engines as long as they can utilize 16 CPU cores. Not all engines can use this many CPU cores, so those will have a disadvantage. But I like to include amateur engines in the event as well since there aren’t many other arenas where they can watch their program battle it out with the big boys.
Q: Are there any famous games or entertaining moments from TCEC competitions that you could point out? MT:
A few moments come to mind, one in particular is a game from Season 5 where Houdini was totally oblivious to the danger of the position on the board. It played against Stockfish and at move 46 in a highly tactical position, Stockfish evaluated its own position at more than +7 pawns. Houdini was still hovering around 0 at that point, and the TCEC chat went crazy.
Q: What would Magnus Carlsen’s score be in a 10-game match against the best chess engine in the world?
MT: If Magnus was to play against any of the two finalists from the recent Superfinal of TCEC, I think he could manage a couple of draws at best. So my guess would be 9-1 in favour of the engines. Yes, the engines are pretty brutal against mortals.
The following position occurred in the 14th game of the 2022 TCEC Final after Lczero had just played 40…a5
Black has achieved a fortress position that cannot be breached, yet Stockfish was evaluating the position somewhat optimistically at +4.26 whilst Lczero judged it at +0.30 –a more sober assessment. Nevertheless White with commendable fighting spirit continued to probe before acquiescing to a draw at move 229!
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. - Bruce Lee