The new TCEC Season 7 graphic by Santiago Méndez
The second stage of the Top Computer Chess Championship TCEC starts today with a brilliant field of average 3000+ ELO. The favorites Stockfish, Komodo, Houdini, and Gull, as well as ten more engines are starting the competition tonight, live at the official website.
This stage of TCEC is unique – the engines will not be allowed to use opening books, making TCEC a pure lab for beautiful novelties. This is the first time TCEC excludes opening books in search of discoveries of novelties and new lines, something very probable given the strength of the engines and the monster processing power of the super-computer behind TCEC.
With the chess engines rapidly developing, TCEC Stage 2 will create specific interest among the proffesional GMs and IMs as well as the computer engineers themselves. Last year Stage 2 registered more than 500 000 unique visitors to the official website, or half of the total 1 million that followed the games. With TCEC website preparing a special Carlsen – Anand broadcast, this number can be exceeded.
Participants
From Stage 1: Gull 3, Critter, Chiron, Stockfish 160914, Protector, Hannibal, and Cheng4
From Stage 2: Komodo 8, Houdini, Naum, Junior, Jonny, Texel, and Senpai
TCEC so far
Komodo wins TCEC Season 5 / Stockfish wins Season 6/ Gull wins Stage 1a / Houdini wins Stage 1b
Rules of TCEC Stage 2
Stage 2 consists of the 14 engines that qualified from Stage 1. It is a single round robin. The top 8 move on to Stage 3 while the rest are out of TCEC for the current Season.
Each engine can use up to all 16 cores of the processors, for the full power of the engine. The time control is 120 minutes + 30 seconds added per move for the whole game. The top 8 move on to Stage 3.
