WCCC 2019: the 25th World Computer Chess Championship

WCCC 2019, the 25th World Computer Chess Championship, continued the ICGA's longitudinal computer chess experiment begun in 1974. This event was held in Macau, featured six chess engines and was won by KOMODO which thereby retained its title of World Champion. CHIRON and SHREDDER were respectively second and third

WCSC 2019: the 9th World Chess Software Championship

The 'WCSC 2019' World Chess Software Championship was the ICGA's ninth experimental test of computer chess software in a neutral hardware environment. Held in Macau, this event was won by KOMODO with JONNY and CHIRON scarcely separable in second and third

WSCC 2019: the World Speed Chess Championship

WSCC 2019 was ICGA's continuation of its investigation of top chess engines playing at Blitz tempo with the consequential loss of accuracy. It was held in Macau in parallel with the 'WCCC' classical tempo and 'WCSC' neutral-hardware events. The ICGA demonstrated that, even so, the engines play at super-GM level. On this occasion, JONNY proved incisive to win while KOMODO sustained two losses

Scaling Monte Carlo Tree Search on Intel Xeon Phi

Many algorithms have been parallelized successfully on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, especially those with regular, balanced, and predictable data access patterns and instruction flows. Irregular and unbalanced algorithms are harder to parallelize efficiently. They are, for instance, present in artificial intelligence search algorithms such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In this paper we study the scaling behavior of MCTS, on a highly optimized real-world application, on real hardware. The Intel Xeon Phi allows shared memory scaling studies up to 61 cores and 244 hardware threads. We compare work-stealing (Cilk Plus and TBB) and work-sharing (FIFO scheduling) approaches. Interestingly, we find that a straightforward thread pool with a work-sharing FIFO queue shows the best performance. A crucial element for this high performance is the controlling of the grain size, an approach that we call Grain Size Controlled Parallel MCTS. Our subsequent comparing with the Xeon CPUs shows an even more comprehensible distinction in performance between different threading libraries. We achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the fastest implementation of a parallel MCTS on the 61 core Intel Xeon Phi using a real application (47 relative to a sequential run).Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

WSCC 2017: the World Speed Computer Chess Championship

WSCC is the ICGA's World Speed Computer Chess Championship, held at 'blitz' 5'+5" tempo in parallel with the similar WCCC (Computer Chess) and common-platform WCSC (Chess Software) competitive computational experiments. Even at this tempo, the games are super-GM quality. The title was taken this time by Komodo with Jonny and Shredder also on the podium