For the other promoted engines, Winter and PeSTO performed surprisingly well, comfortably finishing above their peers in 7th and 8th respectively. Second-placed Defenchess also turned in a strong performance, finishing with an undefeated 20.5/28 (13 wins and 15 draws). It defeated seven engines, including fourth-place Vajolet, 2–0.
This season, the original, traditional engine played, and it dominated with an undefeated 22/28 (16 wins and 12 draws). It had been relegated in the previous season because its developer had submitted a drastically different neural network-based version that turned out to be significantly weaker. Posįormer Premier Division engine Fire won League Two.
#Houdini 16.5 no promote parameter update
chess22k's and Fritz's authors were not able to update the engines in time, resulting in Minic and PeSTO promoting as lucky losers. By TCEC rules, if this happened, the author(s) would have to update the engine or it is disqualified. Nonetheless, in a stroke of good fortune for Minic (and 8th-placed PeSTO), the League Two engines chess22k and Fritz crashed three times during testing for the division. Minic had the better Sonneborn–Berger score, but it also had one crash, and the number of crashes was the first tiebreak. 7th-placed Minic was in a promotion spot all the way up to the final round, when it lost to Gogobello while iCE beat Counter. Pirarucu went through a tense moment when it lost to Winter in the penultimate round however, it pulled out a win with Black against Topple to promote. Comparatively, iCE was whitewashed by Defenchess and Igel, but it turned in a strong performance against its other rivals, losing only one other game to Winter. Among the competitors, Igel was the only engine to not lose to Defenchess and Demolito, but it lost to bottom-half engines FabChess and Topple. Demolito and Winter also locked up two of the promotion spots smoothly, but the remaining three slots were closely contested. It scored 18 wins while conceding no losses, finishing 3.5 points clear at the top. Results CPU Qualification League Īfter not competing for five seasons, Season 11 Div 3 engine Defenchess trailblazed the qualification league. Finally, the top two engines in Premier Division qualify for the 100-game superfinal match. Six engines – Stockfish, Komodo, Houdini, Leela Chess Zero, AllieStein, and Stoofvlees – are seeded directly to Premier Division, based on their top 6 finishes in the previous season. Premier Division is also expanded from 8 engines to 10.
The top 2 GPU engines will then contest a playoff against the top 4 CPU engines in League 1, with the four highest-placing engines promoting to Premier Division. For GPU engines, there will be one league only, with up to 16 competitors. The engines in each league are seeded based on their performances in previous seasons. In the Qualification League the top 6 engines promote.
#Houdini 16.5 no promote parameter upgrade
While an upgrade to the GPU servers is being secured, the CPU leagues are played first.įor CPU engines, there will first be a Qualification League consisting of 16 engines, followed by League 2 (16 engines) and League 1 (16 engines). Because this upgrade advantages CPU engines compared to GPU engines, TCEC split the qualification paths to Premier Division by introducing separate leagues for CPU and GPU engines. Among other changes, the number of cores available is doubled from 44 to 88, the operating system used is now Linux, and Syzygy endgame tablebases are now cached directly in the RAM for faster access. In keeping with its identity as a competition run at long time controls on high-end hardware, TCEC secured a hardware upgrade for the competing CPU engines.