nTCEC season 2 summary (now renamed TCEC season 5)

Results

My first post on this blog was a summary of the results of the first nTCEC season.   Since then Season 2 has taken place with Komodo being the winner, beating Stockfish in the final.

Someone else, Martijn Grimme, has done a superb job in documenting the results of season 1 and season 2.   http://chess.martijngrimme.nl/stage.php
There is little point in me duplicating his work.

However, there are a few extra things that don't appear in Martijn's results that are worth recording for posterity's sake.

Conditions

nTCEC season 2 ran from late August to the beginning of December in 2013.

It ran on a Dual Xeon E5-2689 @ 3.3 GHz (i.e 16 cores) with 32 GB off RAM.   This was the same hardware that was used for later stages of nTCEC season 1.

Engines ran with ponder off and were allowed to use up to 8GB of hash and up to 1GB of tablebase hash.

The time limit was 120 minutes + 30 second increment.   (This was appreciably faster than the 150 minutes + 60 seconds allowed in season 1).

5-men Syzygy, 5-men Nalimov, 5-men Gaviota (cp2), 5-men Shredderbases and 5-men Robbobases (Totalbases + Triplebases) were available depending on which each specific engine can use. For some engines specifying more than one type is possible, but here only one was allowed.  They were hosted on a dual Samsung SSD Raid 0 setup.

This varied from season 1 in so far as:
- 6-men Nalimovs were dropped having being introduced  part of the way through nTCEC season 1
- Syzygy's were introduced for the first time having been released in the summer of 2013.

The GUI used TBs to adjudicate games regardless of whether the engines used TBs.

Engine updates were allowed between rounds but not during rounds.  Some authors took this opportunity whilst others did not.

Notes on the leading engines.

Unlike in season 1 of nTCEC, Komodo was multi-core.   It was updated at each stage of the tournament.   Before the start of the tournament Komodo 5 had been publicly released, during the tournament Komodo 6 was publicly released and at the end of the tournament Komodo TCEC was released, this being the version that played in the nTCEC season 2 superfinal.   All these versions of Komodo ran without tablebases.

Stockfish was also updated at each stage of the tournament.   The Stockfish version that started the tournament was stronger than Stockfish 4.   The version that played in the superfinal was released as Stockfish DD.   At the time the tournament was running (and still at the point of writing this) the versions of Stockfish produced by its official developers did not support tablebases.    However, other developers have produced versions of Stockfish that support TBs.   In Stage 3 a version of Stockfish using Syzygy TBs played.   In all other rounds versions of Stockfish produced by the offical team (i.e. using no TBs) played.

Houdini 3 (the publicly released version) played in Stages 1 and 2.    Houdini 9601, a development version, played in Stages 4 and 5.    People were commonly referring to this as "Houdini 4 beta" though as far as I am aware no public statement was made to this effect by its author, Robert Houdart, so we do not know how close to Houdini 4 this version was.    Regardless, it did not reach the superfinal, having come a close third in stage 4.   Houdini 3 ran with Nalimovs and Houdini 9601 with Syzygy TBs.

Don Dailey

Don Dailey and Larry Kaufmann were the original authors of Komodo with Don being the computer guy (who could also play chess!) and Larry being the chess expert.   Don had been fighting leukaemia for some time but his condition worsened dramatically during the tournament and during this period he was admitted to hospital for the final time.  Very sadly he died during the superfinal.

Don regularly participated on nTCEC chat in both season 1 and 2 and was always thoughtful, polite and fun.   He will be missed for that as well as his other contributions to chess and wider life.

During the tournament it was announced that Mark Lefler would be taking over from Don on the Komodo team.