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Top Chess Engine Championship

tcec-chess.com

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#31
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

That was against an old version of Stockfish. Both Stockfish and Leela are much stronger now than AlphaZero.

And the reason for that is because they haven't been actively developing AlphaZero anymore. It's not worth it to them to spend their limited resources doing so when others in the Chess community are perfectly willing to. DeepMind has meanwhile instead been spending their efforts on solving protein folding, which I think we can all agree is a better use of their limited resources.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#32

The Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) is a computer chess tournament. The goal is to provide the viewers with a live broadcast of long time control, quality chess - played strictly between computer chess engines created by different programmers. One Season is divided into several Stages and lasts about 3-4 months. The winner of the Season will be the TCEC Grand Champion. They are current playing to lowest league--…

Are there niche versions of this? There's like communities that try to write code that can run on old hardware and in certain space requirements, etc. From a coding perspective - I think it could get really interesting to see people try to make super small engines. I've seen a couple and am blown away that a pretty small program w/o an ML model can destroy me in Chess. It'd be cool to see how good super simple progra…

> I think it could get really interesting to see people try to make super small engines. I wonder what's the minimal hardware which can outplay any human with time control?

We know supercomputers can outplay any human, nowadays any smartphone can. But what about 286? 8080?

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#33

Other than the board, that page is completely opaque to me. There's a whole bunch of what are apparently technical stats, but I can't even infer enough to know whether big numbers are good or bad. This would be a whole lot more engaging with more explanation, at least hover tips over all the fields and so forth.

This website is niche enough that I think they are better of optimizing for what in-the-know users want than dumbing it down for people passing by. I recognize that is not really what you are asking for though, and I agree that they could do better with tool-tips and the likes.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#34

The Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) is a computer chess tournament. The goal is to provide the viewers with a live broadcast of long time control, quality chess - played strictly between computer chess engines created by different programmers. One Season is divided into several Stages and lasts about 3-4 months. The winner of the Season will be the TCEC Grand Champion. They are current playing to lowest league--…

Are there niche versions of this? There's like communities that try to write code that can run on old hardware and in certain space requirements, etc. From a coding perspective - I think it could get really interesting to see people try to make super small engines. I've seen a couple and am blown away that a pretty small program w/o an ML model can destroy me in Chess. It'd be cool to see how good super simple progra…

I'd also like to see something of a chess Turing test, and while very hard to quantify a competition for the most human-like low- or mid-level chess engine. On Chess.com there's a plethora of bots of different ratings, but outside a few gimmicks (e.g. "Nelson" always gets his queen out early) they're all the same, only differing in how frequently they blunder in-between perfect moves.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#35

The Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) is a computer chess tournament. The goal is to provide the viewers with a live broadcast of long time control, quality chess - played strictly between computer chess engines created by different programmers. One Season is divided into several Stages and lasts about 3-4 months. The winner of the Season will be the TCEC Grand Champion. They are current playing to lowest league--…

> live broadcast As in, real time to the computation? Why though. The SC2 bots don't compete in real time, many of them can't, most of those that can are clearly hampered when playing against a human (necessarily real time) versus a machine (not real time), but you just watch the matches as if they'd happened in real time after the game is finished. Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "real…

Seeing chess bots play as fast as possible isn't all that interesting - play gets better the longer they have to think and the more resources they have to use. They could potentially do what you're suggesting, but unless they buy a bunch of new/better hardware the play would be worse because the engines would get less real time to calculate their positions, which defeats the point. And even if they did get better hardware, they could keep doing what they're currently doing and get better games due to the increased hardware.

Basically, you're asking why they're not playing blitz instead of classical - it's just fundamentally a different format.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> live broadcast As in, real time to the computation? Why though. The SC2 bots don't compete in real time, many of them can't, most of those that can are clearly hampered when playing against a human (necessarily real time) versus a machine (not real time), but you just watch the matches as if they'd happened in real time after the game is finished. Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "real…

Sports/eSports are more fun to watch live, because it's going on right now and you're finding out the results the same time as everyone else in the world is. As for the SC2 bots, it sounds like they aren't very good. Chess bots, on the other hand, are, and these ones are playing a standard classical time control that is often used by human players. Time management is a super important part of this (indeed there are o…

Well, whether the SC2 bots are "good" depends on how you squint at the problem.

The framework being used was developed for Google DeepMind's AlphaStar, which is a learning AI approach although obviously very different from their approach to chess.

But today the framework is used by rules-based bots largely competing against each other. This means unlike AlphaStar, which set out specifically with a human-like approach to beat excellent human players, the amateur bots are entirely focused on winning versus other bots by any means necessary. The most successful tend to have sprawling multi-theatre conflict as their end game, maximum army size, and a half dozen or more different small skirmishes happening at once, hard for the human observer to be sure who is better until suddenly there's a decisive outcome. That wouldn't be compatible with AlphaStar's mission at all, obviously human players can't fight these battles with success.

Their most obvious defect is they don't resign. A competent human player resigns hopeless positions in SC2 knowing quickly that they have lost, but most bots will stay in the game until destroyed which would be very rude for a human. They can be indecisive, attacking then pulling back, then attacking again in seconds, and they are much more easily thrown off by unexpected situations than a human - but overall they're a match for a good human player unless that player has prepared specifically to exploit a known weakness of a particular bot. (e.g. there are bots that do not understand why an enemy Nydus Worm in your base can't be allowed to complete... since that basically never happens)

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports/eSports are more fun to watch live, because it's going on right now and you're finding out the results the same time as everyone else in the world is. As for the SC2 bots, it sounds like they aren't very good. Chess bots, on the other hand, are, and these ones are playing a standard classical time control that is often used by human players. Time management is a super important part of this (indeed there are o…

Well, whether the SC2 bots are "good" depends on how you squint at the problem. The framework being used was developed for Google DeepMind's AlphaStar, which is a learning AI approach although obviously very different from their approach to chess. But today the framework is used by rules-based bots largely competing against each other. This means unlike AlphaStar, which set out specifically with a human-like approach…

[deleted]

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there niche versions of this? There's like communities that try to write code that can run on old hardware and in certain space requirements, etc. From a coding perspective - I think it could get really interesting to see people try to make super small engines. I've seen a couple and am blown away that a pretty small program w/o an ML model can destroy me in Chess. It'd be cool to see how good super simple progra…

> I think it could get really interesting to see people try to make super small engines. I wonder what's the minimal hardware which can outplay any human with time control? We know supercomputers can outplay any human, nowadays any smartphone can. But what about 286? 8080?

I like that. I've actually generated competitive [1] genetic programs for Corewar [2]. It was only 5 instructions long, but proves that in theory, given enough time, a computer program could be generated that plays Chess better.

In a constrained environment like microcontrollers, the smallness of the space of all possible programs makes it faster for finding a good one. There is one catch, though: It may fail in unexpected ways.

[1] https://sal.discontinuity.info/hill.php?key=nano

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#39
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was against an old version of Stockfish. Both Stockfish and Leela are much stronger now than AlphaZero.

And the reason for that is because they haven't been actively developing AlphaZero anymore. It's not worth it to them to spend their limited resources doing so when others in the Chess community are perfectly willing to. DeepMind has meanwhile instead been spending their efforts on solving protein folding, which I think we can all agree is a better use of their limited resources.

DeepMind has limited resources? I'll remember that and smile next time I'm running my experiments on the same machine as another two PhD students.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#40
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> live broadcast As in, real time to the computation? Why though. The SC2 bots don't compete in real time, many of them can't, most of those that can are clearly hampered when playing against a human (necessarily real time) versus a machine (not real time), but you just watch the matches as if they'd happened in real time after the game is finished. Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "real…

Most chess players play through chess games after the fact at their own pace, clicking one button to move ahead or another to move backwards. We've had this ability for hundreds of years: at one time using printed pages and wooden chessboards instead of computers, but the principle is the same. But if you're really interested in the TCEC as a competitive sporting event, you might prefer to watch the drama in real tim…

Is "100% speed" here the speed the actual Superbowl happens at, or the speed the game would proceed at if, in fact the goal was to play football not sell advertisements?

It's a sixty minute football game. So to me 100% is sixty minutes. Whereas when broadcast it's a four hour TV show.

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