TCEC Rapid is scheduled to start this September after Stage 3 of the Top Chess Engine Championship. It will be a 32 engines double round robin with a total of 992 games. The time control is 25 min + 10 sec.
The competition starts September 9th at 20:00 CEST and games can be followed live with analysis at the official website.
See the full list of the engines
Updated engines
As per the request of the large part of the audience, engine authors were allowed to submit engine updates and specific rapid versions. A total of 12 of the 32 engines used that right – Arasan, Bobcat, Chiron, Fizbo, Fruit, Ginkgo, Hannibal, Komodo, Laser, Nirvana, Stockfish, and Texel.
Opening book
Thanks to TCEC openings expert Nelson Hernandez, this stage is going to have an opening book and interesting variety of starting positions with depth 4 ply. Nelson Hernandez explains the details himself, “Two-move (four ply) openings have been assigned to all 992 games. Openings will be repeated in the second circuit, wherein engines will play the opposite color that they played in the first circuit. Thus Game 1 will feature the same engines playing opposite colors in Game 497. The openings have been selected from a library of 237 different openings that represent over 92% of positions achieved after two moves in my database. Positions after two moves comprising the 8% not covered in the library are either rarely seen in human and engine games or extremely one-sided. Opening library positions picked for each engine will never be repeated more than three times for each time it plays white or black, and in a large majority of cases will be seen only one or two times.
