Russell Sherwood Sunday, September 2, 2018
It has been an interesting month, ICCF Congress notwithstanding (For which I will produce a separate report with some of the interesting ideas I picked up there!).
7 Piece Tablebases.
These have now been completed for download! The only issue is that they are about 17 TB in size. This is about the size of 9 typical laptop hard drives! At the moment unless you have superfast fibre or a team effort takes place, these would be difficult to download (and not all chess engines will work with them yet) but you can pick selected ones which fit the positions you seek!
TCEC and CCCC
These engine v engine tournaments are interesting to the serious CC player. Whilst the addition of a human changes things significantly these give a good indication of the improvements and issues of the metal monsters. The two most interesting developments to date have been around Ethereal and Neural Network engines (LCZero and Deus X). Ethereal as it is a new kid on the block and may add something to our analysis. Deus X was also interesting as whereas LCZero "learned" chess from scratch, Dues X learned from Human games. From our perspective, two possible research avenues jump out: (1) A NN based on CC games and (2) a NN based on a certain type of position. I would expect to see both of these appear in coming months.
CorrChess.ru
Turn on your translator for this! Early days yet but some interesting thoughts from some very strong CC players
www.tccmb.com
Even earlier days yet but this revival of an old CC discussion board could be interesting!
