Top Chess Engine Championship

Top Chess Engine Championship, formerly known as Thoresen Chess

Engines Competition  (TCEC or nTCEC), is a computer chess tournament that
has been run since 2010. It was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin
Thoresen until the end of Season 6; from Season 7 onward it has been
organized by Chessdom. It is often regarded as the Unofficial World Computer
Chess Championship because of its strong participant line-up and long time-
control matches on high-end hardware, giving rise to very high-class chess. [1][2]
After a short break in 2012,[3] TCEC was restarted in early 2013 (as nTCEC)
[4]
 and is currently active (renamed as TCEC in early 2014) with 24/7 live
broadcasts of chess matches on its website.
Since season 5, TCEC has been sponsored by Chessdom Arena. [5][6] The current
TCEC champion is Stockfish 202006170741, which defeated LCZero v0.25.1-
svjio-t60-3972-mlh by a score of 53.5-46.5 in the TCEC Season 18 Superfinal
100-game match ending 3 Jul 2020.

Overview[edit]
Basic structure of competition[edit]
The TCEC competition is divided into seasons, where each season happens
over a course of a few months, with matches played round-the-clock and
broadcast live over the internet. Each season is divided into several qualifying
stages and one "superfinal", where the top two chess engines play 100 games
to win the title of "TCEC Grand Champion". In the superfinal, each engine plays
50 openings, once as each side. Beginning in Season 11 in 2018, a division
system was introduced; the top 2 engines in each division are promoted, and
the bottom 2 are relegated. Currently, there are 5 divisions (a Premier
division, and divisions 1-4); newcomers generally start in division 4.
Engine settings/characteristics[edit]
Pondering is set to off. All engines run on mostly the same hardware[7] and use
the same opening book, which is set by the organizers and changed in every
stage. Large pages are disabled but access to various endgame tablebases is
permitted. Engines are allowed updates between stages; if there is a critical
play-limiting bug, they are also allowed to be updated once during the stage. If
an engine crashes 3 times in one event, it is disqualified to avoid distorting the
results for the other engines. TCEC generates an Elo rating list from the
matches played during the tournament. An initial rating is given to any new
participant based on its rating in other chess engine rating lists.
Criteria for entering the competition[edit]
There is no definite criterion for entering into the competition, other than
inviting the top participants from various rating lists. Initially, the list of
participants was personally chosen by Thoresen before the start of a season.
His stated goal was to include "every major engine that is not a direct clone".
[8]
 However, Shredder's developers have declined to enter it in the
competition. Usually chess engines that support multiprocessor mode are
preferred (8-cores or higher). Both Winboard and UCI engines are supported.