Season 16 of the Top Chess Engine Championship starts this Sunday July 14th at 15:00 CEST. A total of 18 engines will battle for six promotion spots in the newly formed Qualification Division. Among them are three Neural Networks – ScorpioNN, ChessFighterNN, and Stoofvlees. Their main competitors are the seasoned engines Rodent, Wasp, chess22k, and Winter. However, as most engines come with solid updates any surprise can be expected.

Format of the Qualification Division

TCEC Qualification Division is entirely invitational field. Initially set to be 16 engines, it was expanded to 18 due to the entrance of the brand new Asymptote engine (suggested by Graham Banks from CCRL) and a Promo Engine.

The engines will play a 1x DRR with time control 30+5. The top six will qualify for League 2 of TCEC, you can see the format of Season 16 here

Promo engine in the field

Many engines are now hopping on the Neural Network bandwagon, making full use of GPUs. Yet, the champion Lc0 has released a strong version playing on CPU only! It is not a unique engine by the TCEC criteria, but it certainly is exciting to see it perform against real competitors of 3000 ELO+ strength. Thus, Lc0 CPU enters TCEC as a promo engine in the field. It will play all games in the division, but at the end of the division all results of the engine will nullified.

Participants list

1. Bagatur 1.7b
2. The Baron 3.44.1
3. Cheese 2.1
4. chess22k 1.12
5. ChessFighterNN v2.1-n8x128c_7411
6. Igel 1.8.0
7. Jumbo 0.6.117
8. Marvin 3.4.0
9. Minic 0.76
10. ScorpioNN v2.9.0-n_maddex_INT8
11. Stoofvlees II a10
12. Topple 0.7.2_dev
13. Tucano 7.07
14. Wasp 3.68
15. Winter 0.6
16. Asymptote 0.6.2
17. Rodent III
18. Lc0 CPU