From August 11 to 16, Chiron played in the World Computer Chess Championships organized by the International Computer Games Association. The playing venue was the Florence Room 2202 at the Venetian Resort in Macau. Once again the WCCCs took place alongside the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. During the player meeting, the participants agreed on a double round robin format for all of the three tournaments to play as many games as possible. That meant we had to play every day from 9 AM to 10 PM. On August 11 and 12, the World Chess Software Championship was played. All the participants had to use the same hardware: a notebook with a Pentium Silver N5000. The time control was 45’+15″ for 10 games. Komodo won. Chiron scored 5.5 points, same as the runner-up Jonny but placed third because its SB was lower. On Tuesday 13, the World Computer Chess Championship started. The tc was 90’+15″. For the WCCC and the WSCCC, Chiron ran on an Amazon EC2 instance with two Xeon Platinum 8175M (48 cores) reaching an average speed of 60-70 MNPS in the middlegame and 90-100 in the endgame. EBS storage was used for the 6-men Syzygy bases. Komodo had already won the WCCC after the 9th game. The last one decided the 2nd place. Chiron had to play with white against Komodo having a half a point advantage over Shredder who played as white against Jonny. The Pirc against Komodo ended in a draw and so did the other game thus Chiron was second. Jonny won the Speed Championship (tc 5’+5″). Chiron placed 2nd with 4/8. To be fair, Chiron placement was due also to a lucky book win against Komodo and to Komodo losing one of its games because of connection problems. Congratulations to Komodo and Jonny for their well deserved wins. This was the last edition with Dr. David Levy as ICGA President after 26 years. The handover to the new President, Prof. Jonathan Schaeffer, took place during the dinner on Tuesday 13.
You can find more info about the WCCCs on the ICGA site and on their Facebook page.
