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]   |
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Stockfish (chess)
Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It can be used in chess software through the Universal Chess Interface. Stockfish has consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists and, as of October 2022, is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world. It has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 13 times and the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship 19 times. Stockfish is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott, Tord Romstad, Stéphane Nicolet, Stefan Geschwentner, and Joost VandeVondele, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers. It is derived from Glaurung, an open-source engine by Tord Romstad released in 2004. Features Stockfish can use up to 1024 CPU threads in multiprocessor systems. The maximal size of its transposition table is 32 TB. Stockfish implements an advanced alpha–beta search and uses bitboards. Compared to other engines, it is ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dynamic-link Library
Dynamic-link library (DLL) is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. These libraries usually have the file extension DLL, OCX (for libraries containing ActiveX controls), or DRV (for legacy system drivers). The file formats for DLLs are the same as for Windows EXE files – that is, Portable Executable (PE) for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and New Executable (NE) for 16-bit Windows. As with EXEs, DLLs can contain code, data, and resources, in any combination. Data files with the same file format as a DLL, but with different file extensions and possibly containing only resource sections, can be called ''resource DLLs''. Examples of such DLLs include ''icon libraries'', sometimes having the extension ICL, and font files, having the extensions FON and FOT. Background The first versions of Microsoft Windows ran programs together in a single address space. Every program was meant to co-operate by yielding ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sicilian Dragon
In chess, the Dragon Variation is one of the main lines of the Sicilian Defence and begins with the moves: :1. e4 c5 :2. Nf3 d6 :3. d4 cxd4 :4. Nxd4 Nf6 :5. Nc3 g6 In the Dragon, Black fianchettoes their bishop on g7, castling on the king's side while aiming the bishop at the center and . In one of the most popular and theoretically important lines, the Yugoslav Variation, White meets Black's setup with Be3, Qd2 and Bh6, exchanging off the Dragon bishop, followed by launching a pawn storm with h4–h5 and g4. To involve the a1-rook in the attack, White usually castles queenside, placing the white king on the semi-open c-file. The result is often both sides attacking the other's king with all available resources. The line is considered one of the of all chess openings. The modern form of the Dragon was originated by German master Louis Paulsen around 1880. It was played frequently by Henry Bird that decade, then received general acceptance around 1900 when played ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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AlphaZero
AlphaZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master the games of chess, shogi and go. This algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero. On December 5, 2017, the DeepMind team released a preprint introducing AlphaZero, which within 24 hours of training achieved a superhuman level of play in these three games by defeating world-champion programs Stockfish, elmo, and the three-day version of AlphaGo Zero. In each case it made use of custom tensor processing units (TPUs) that the Google programs were optimized to use. AlphaZero was trained solely via self-play using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks, all in parallel, with no access to opening books or endgame tables. After four hours of training, DeepMind estimated AlphaZero was playing chess at a higher Elo rating than Stockfish 8; after nine hours of training, the algorithm defeated Stockf ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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ICGA Journal
The ''ICGA Journal'' is a quarterly academic journal published by the International Computer Games Association. It was renamed in 2000. Its previous name was the ''ICCA Journal'' of the International Computer Chess Association, which was founded in 1977. The journal covers computer analysis on two-player games, especially games with perfect information such as chess, checkers, and Go. It has been the primary outlet for publication of articles on solved games, including the development of endgame tablebases in chess and other games. For example, John W. Romein and Henri E. Bal reported in the journal in 2002 that they had solved Awari and, in 2015, David J. Wu reported his solution for the Arimaa Challenge.{{cite journal , first=David J. , last=Wu , year=2015 , title=Designing a Winning Arimaa Program , journal=ICGA Journal , volume=38 , number=1 , pages=19–40 , doi=10.3233/ICG-2015-38104 , url=https://icosahedral.net/downloads/djwu2015arimaa.pdf From 1983 till 2015 ''ICGA Jou ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Matthew Sadler
Matthew David Sadler (born 15 May 1974) is an English chess grandmaster, chess writer and two-time British Chess Champion. He is the No. 2 ranked English player Personal life Sadler has a French mother, speaks French perfectly and is also qualified to play in closed French events. He was tipped to reach the heights scaled by other leading English players as Michael Adams and Nigel Short but made the decision to cease playing professionally in his mid 20s, opting for an IT career in the Netherlands. Chess career Sadler won the British Championship in 1995 at the age of 21 and again in 1997 (jointly with Michael Adams). He represented England in the 1996 Chess Olympiad, scoring 10½/13 and winning a gold medal for the best score on board four (England finished fourth), and also played in 1998 scoring 7½/12. He made 7/9 on board four for England at the European Team Chess Championship in Pula in 1997. His was the best individual score of the five-man English team and so ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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King's Indian Defense
The King's Indian Defence is a common chess opening. It is defined by the following moves: :1. d4 Nf6 :2. c4 g6 Black intends to follow up with 3...Bg7 and 4...d6 (the Grünfeld Defence arises when Black plays 3...d5 instead, and is considered a separate opening). White's major third move options are 3.Nc3, 3.Nf3 or 3.g3, with both the King's Indian and Grünfeld playable against these moves. The ''Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings'' classifies the King's Indian Defence under the codes E60 through E99. The King's Indian is a hypermodern opening, where Black deliberately allows White control of the with its pawns, with the view to subsequently challenge it. In the most critical lines of the King's Indian, White erects an imposing pawn centre with Nc3 followed by e4. Black stakes out its own claim to the centre with the Benoni-style ...c5, or ...e5. If White resolves the central pawn tension with d5, then Black follows with either ...b5 and queenside play, or ...f5 and an ev ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Houdini (chess)
Houdini is a UCI chess engine developed by Belgian programmer Robert Houdart. It is influenced by open-source engines IPPOLIT/RobboLito, Stockfish, and Crafty. Versions up to 1.5a are available for non-commercial use, while 2.0 and later are commercial only. Playing style Chess commentator and video annotator CM Tryfon Gavriel compared Houdini's playing style to that of the Romantic Era of chess, where an attacking, sacrificial style was predominant. According to Robert Houdart, Houdini's advantage against other top engines is in its handling of piece mobility, which is why it "favors aggressive play that tries to win the game". Version history The latest stable release of Houdini comes in two versions: ''Houdini 6 Standard'' and ''Houdini 6 Pro''. ''Houdini 6 Pro'' supports up to 128 processor cores, 128 GB of RAM (hash) and is NUMA-aware, ''Houdini 5 Standard'' only supports up to 8 processor cores, 4 GB of hash and is not NUMA-aware. As with many other UCI eng ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Komodo (chess)
Komodo and Dragon by Komodo Chess (also known as Dragon or Komodo Dragon) are UCI chess engines developed by Komodo Chess, which is a part of Chess.com. The engines were originally authored by Don Dailey and GM Larry Kaufman. Dragon and Komodo are commercial chess engines, but older versions of Komodo (13 and older) are free for non-commercial use. Dragon is consistently ranked near the top of most major chess engine rating lists, along with Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero. History Komodo Komodo was derived from Don Dailey's former engine Doch in January 2010. The first multiprocessor version of Komodo was released in June 2013 as ''Komodo 5.1 MP''. This version was a major rewrite and a port of Komodo to C++11. A single-processor version of Komodo (which won the CCT15 tournament in February earlier that year) was released as a stand-alone product shortly before the 5.1 MP release. This version, named ''Komodo CCT'', was still based on the older C code, and was approxima ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open source software development projects. As of June 2022, GitHub reported having over 83 million developers and more than 200 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the largest source code host . History GitHub.com Development of the GitHub.com platform began on October 19, 2007. The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon after it had been made available for a few months prior as a beta release. GitHub has an annual keynote called GitHub Universe. Organizational ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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MinGW
MinGW ("Minimalist GNU for Windows"), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. MinGW includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows (assembler, linker, archive manager), a set of freely distributable Windows specific header files and static import libraries which enable the use of the Windows API, a Windows native build of the GNU Project's GNU Debugger, and miscellaneous utilities. MinGW does not rely on third-party C runtime dynamic-link library (DLL) files, and because the runtime libraries are not distributed using the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is not necessary to distribute the source code with the programs produced, unless a GPL library is used elsewhere in the program. MinGW can be run either on the native Microsoft Windows platform, cross-hosted on Linux (or other Unix), or "cross-native" on Cygwin. Although programs produced under MinGW are 32-b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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AllieStein
Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source, and deep neural network–based chess engine and volunteer computing project. Development has been spearheaded by programmer Gary Linscott, who is also a developer for the Stockfish chess engine. Leela Chess Zero was adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine, which in turn was based on Google's AlphaGo Zero project. One of the purposes of Leela Chess Zero was to verify the methods in the AlphaZero paper as applied to the game of chess. Like Leela Zero and AlphaGo Zero, Leela Chess Zero starts with no intrinsic chess-specific knowledge other than the basic rules of the game. Leela Chess Zero then learns how to play chess by reinforcement learning from repeated self-play, using a distributed computing network coordinated at the Leela Chess Zero website. As of December 2022, Leela Chess Zero has played over 1.5 billion games against itself, playing around 1 million games every day, and is capable of play at a lev ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |