The 16th Top Chess Engine Championship: TCEC 16

TCEC16 was the 16th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship and ran from July 14th to October 13th, 2019. TCEC has become the largest Open Computer Chess Championship. It attracts the best engines in the field and provides an opportunity for a comparative analysis of the Shannon-AB and the new Neural-Network engines’ styles of play. STOCKFISH regained the title of Grand Champion by beating ALLIESTEIN in the Superfinal. The defending Grand Champion, LEELA CHESS ZERO was third. The attached files at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/86830 provide the 950 games with engine PVs, the detail on them and some summary statistics

TCEC Cup 3

This is a report of the 'TCEC Cup 3' computational experiment, the 3rd TCEC knockout event and the second major part of TCEC’s 15th season. It featured the best 32 engines of the ‘TCEC 15’ league event and the games were held at Blitz tempo. The different format called for different optimal settings in the engines, thereby enabling a comparison with performance at slower tempi. LEELA CHESS ZERO retained the TCEC Cup, defeating STOCKFISH this time. All decisive games in the supplementary data have been played out by FRITZ17 at search depth 24 to enable and benchmark endgame practice

Understanding distributions of chess performances

This paper presents evidence for several features of the population of chess players, and the distribution of their performances measured in terms of Elo ratings and by computer analysis of moves. Evidence that ratings have remained stable since the inception of the Elo system in the 1970’s is given in several forms: by showing that the population of strong players fits a simple logistic-curve model without inflation, by plotting players’ average error against the FIDE category of tournaments over time, and by skill parameters from a model that employs computer analysis keeping a nearly constant relation to Elo rating across that time. The distribution of the model’s Intrinsic Performance Ratings can hence be used to compare populations that have limited interaction, such as between players in a national chess federation and FIDE, and ascertain relative drift in their respective rating systems

Making a star on the small screen: The case of Mina and RAI

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. Anna Maria Quaini (née Mazzini), or Mina as she is more commonly known, is a prolific Italian pop singer who rose to fame in the late 1950s. She was particularly dominant from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, before her retirement from television appearances in 1974 and public performances in 1978. In particular, it was her relationship with and continued appearances on Radiotelevisione Italiana/Italian Radio-Television (RAI) programmes during this dominant period, which helped to cement her popularity with Italian audiences. This article examines Mina’s celebrity status through a detailed analysis of the construction of her star persona in a televisual context, taking as case studies her appearances on three RAI television series: Studio Uno/‘Studio One’ (1961-1962), Canzonissima 1968/‘Lots of Songs 1968' (1968-1969) and Teatro 10/‘Theatre 10' (1972). A comparative reading of her performances on these variety shows enables us to evaluate the extent to which RAI facilitated the construction of Mina’s star persona according to a specific set of cultural and ideological values. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the ways in which Mina’s evolving celebrity came to challenge the homogenizing mission of RAI during the period

Chess endgame knowledge advances

This review of recent developments starts with the publication of Harold van der Heijden's Study Database Edition IV, John Nunn's second trilogy on the endgame, and a range of endgame tables (EGTs) to the DTC, DTZ and DTZ50 metrics. It then summarises data-mining work by Eiko Bleicher and Guy Haworth in 2010. This used CQL and pgn2fen to find some 3,000 EGT-faulted studies in the database above, and the Type A (value-critical) and Type B-DTM (DTM-depth-critical) zugzwangs in the mainlines of those studies. The same technique was used to mine Chessbase's BIG DATABASE 2010 to identify Type A/B zugzwangs, and to identify the pattern of value-concession and DTM-depth concession in sub-7-man play

Database Engines for Geographical Information Systems

Our ability to identify, acquire, store, enquire on and analyse data is increasing as never before, especially in the GIS field. Technologies are becoming available to manage a wider variety of data and to make intelligent inferences on that data. The mainstream arrival of large-scale database engines is not far away. The experience of using the first such products tells us that they will radically change data management in the GIS field

Process scheduling by output considerations

In multi-tasking systems when it is not possible to guarantee completion of all activities by specified times, the scheduling problem is not straightforward. Examples of this situation in real-time programming include the occurrence of alarm conditions and the buffering of output to peripherals in on-line facilities. The latter case is studied here with the hope of indicating one solution to the general problem

Self-play: statistical significance

Heinz recently completed a comprehensive experiment in self-play using the FRITZ chess engine to establish the ‘decreasing returns’ hypothesis with specific levels of statistical confidence. This note revisits the results and recalculates the confidence levels of this and other hypotheses. These appear to be better than Heinz’ initial analysis suggests