16 November 2015

TCEC Season 8 Superfinal Week 2

A week ago in TCEC Season 8 Superfinal in Progress, I noted

Komodo won the first game of the match and currently leads +2-0=14, with an average of five games played per day.

Since then the world's top two engines, Komodo and Stockfish, have played another 30 games with a result of +2-1=27 in Komodo's favor. Komodo scored both of its wins with Black, bringing the total score of the match to +4-1=41, with 54 more games to be played.

The week's most memorable game was undoubtedly no.22, where Stockfish seemed to throw away a huge advantage with White in the following position.

TCEC Season 8 Superfinal, game 22
Stockfish - Komodo

After 63...Qd6-Qf6

The position was discussed at length in the FishCooking forum (see my recent post Chess Engines : FishCooking for background), especially From +26.13 to 0.00 in two moves (11 November).

What happened in game 22 of the final? Stockfish's evaluation was steeply raising, until at move 62 it evaluated its position as +26.13. Komodo agreed to a degree by evaluating it at +4.22. Then two moves later both evals had dropped to 0.00, and it ended in draw. Rather unusual, I would say.

The post included a link to the original game, TCEC Archive game 22, where the moves and evaluations are preserved for posterity. The incident just goes to show -- in case there is any doubt -- that even the strongest chess engines in the world can have trouble coping with the depths of chess.

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