Author: Shep
Date: 05:54:02 06/08/99
Shep Championship 1999 Official Announcement The Shep Championship 1999 will commence soon at Shep's Computer Chess Site. Here are the full details: Starting date: Probably June 21st, 1999. Estimated tournament length is 6-8 weeks. Location: Shep's Computer Chess Site, Cologne, Germany. http://sccs.8m.com or http://come.to/SCCS for the SCCS main server, http://sccs.8m.com/wc99.html takes you directly to the championship pages. Coverage: Expected rate of play is one game per day average. SCCS will be updated 2-3 times a week with results. PGN and/or CBV files will be updated at least once a week (Monday). Update time is somewhere around 1200 CET. Interesting games and/or positions will also be reported to CCC (no r.g.c.c. coverage, but anyone is free to forward results to the newsgroup). Used hardware: Two Pentium III @ 550 MHz (overclocked if possible), 512 KB L2 cache, 256 MB RAM, large Ultra-ATA harddisk (8 and 13 GB, respectively), Windows 98 and NT 4.0. Time controls: 40 moves in 2 hours twice, then 1 hour for the rest of the game. Rules: 11-round round robin tournament. No autoplayer, all games are played manually. A tie for first place will be resolved in a 6-game playoff series. A tie for second place will be resolved by (in that order): direct comparison, Sonneborn-Berger, TPR. A tie for third place or below will not be resolved, the place will be shared. Participants: The 12 strongest programs as of today: (please note that excerpts from this presentation may NOT be used in commercial advertisements without explicit permission by SCCS) Hiarcs 7.32 The successor of the runner-up of last (Mark Uniacke, year's championship has improved by as Eric Hallsworth, much as 25-30% in speed, has set a new GB) record for solved LCTII positions and is one of only two participants using the Nalimov endgame tablebases. This new version may very well be the strongest PC-based chess program ever, especially at the expected 100,000+ nps. Chessmaster 5555 At +45 =33 -17, this beast has the best (Johan de Koning, 40/120 record at SCCS ever and has rated NED) 1st or 2nd in every standard tournament except last year's championship where it got an unlucky 6th place. Like no other program, CM masters the art of slowly grinding its opponents down, gradually increasing its positional advantage. And of course it is a master tactician as well. CM 5555 is a modified CM 5500 personality created by myself, based on the "Walter-Pilz settings" originally intended for CM 4000 Turbo. Chess Tiger 11.5 The reigning SCCS champion both at standard (Christophe Théron, and blitz, this all-round genius is FRA) extremely hard to beat. It remained undefeated at last year's SC on 400 MHz and has only lost on slower machines so far. Much like Chessmaster, it wins its matches "out of nowhere" by exploiting even the slightest inaccuracy on its opponent's part. Chess Tiger 11.9 "Tiger Paderborn" is the newest and by far (Christophe Théron, strongest incarnation of the - FRA) unfortunately not publically available - Tiger series. This WCCC '99 version already incorporates part of the cooperation work between its author Christophe Théron of Guadeloupe and Ed Schroeder, maker of Rebel. Its scores at 60/game on the Rebel website indicate it is probably 100-150 points stronger than Junior or Fritz. Chess System Tal II (In-)famous for its speculative and (Chris Whittington, sacrificial, very un-computerlike style, Thorsten Czub, CSTal is both the big excitement GB) and the big mystery in this extraordinary tournament. Playing today like a Super-GM and tomorrow like a patzer, it may end up anywhere between #1 and #12. At only 1/10th of the speed of Hiarcs and merely 1/100th of the speed of Fritz, CSTal relies exclusively on expert knowledge and knows better how to attack than any other chess playing entity apart from Deep Blue. Shredder 3.0 After reaching 9th place in last year's (Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, championship, Shredder is back with a GER) vengeance. It may very well be the strongest endgame player in the silicon world and plays a much more solid game than S2, making it almost impossible to beat if you don't succeed to in the early middlegame. Nimzo 99 Judged by some as a step backwards from (Chrilly Donninger, the very strong Nimzo 98, this Fritz Helmut Weigel, engine is nevertheless an extremely AUT) dangerous opponent with an astonishing positional ability for such a fast searcher. Together with its new and highly refined book, Chrilly's new baby is not to be underestimated. Fritz 5.32 Having done battle with Grandmasters (Frans Morsch, in the Frankfurt Classics and elsewhere, NED) Fritz is well prepared for its silicon foes. It still holds the SCCS record for longest lossless debut streak and has harvested some impressive tournament results, including runner-up at Ace of Chess and demolishing 3 opponents in a row at the current Candidate Finals. Fritz is by far the fastest searcher among the world elite, hitting more than half a million positions per second on the used hardware, peaking at up to 1 million nps. Rebel 10.0a EOC The only program to beat Hiarcs 7 in the (Ed Schroeder, last championship, this Rebel has proven Jeroen Noomen, to be still the best both against silicon NED) and human opposition. With the help of the unique EOC database of 10 million positions, it has the essence of chess history backing up its evaluation. With solid, yet attack-oriented play and a very strong endgame, this Dutch program is the meat-grinder on the chess market, still much better than the knowledge-stripped successor 10.0c. Junior 5.0 One of the best positional players, (Amir Ban, this fine product from Israel has recently Shay Bushinsky, won the prestigious Summer Cup, ahead of ISR) top competition. In its unspectacular manner, it may draw more won games than its competitors, but it also draws more lost games. :) Being regularly pitted against strong human players, Junior excels at precise and delightful play. L. Goliath Gold 2.05 The first program since Comet to (Michael Borgstaedt, challenge Crafty for the crown of Best GER) Freeware Program, LGG displays its tactical skills in many test suites and may strive for more than just "don't come up last place". XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (The final competitor remains to be (XXXXXXX XXXXXX, announced.) XXX) Sponsors: I wish to acknowledge the following people and companies for supporting SCCS in general and this tournament in particular: Schülerhilfe Feyen, for providing the second machine, NordmannSoft, for providing the 128->256 MB memory upgrade for the second machine, Christophe Théron, for providing Chess Tiger, Amir Ban and Chessbase, for providing Junior, Ed Schroeder, for providing Rebel, Didzis Cirulis, for FTP-ing my updates to the SCCS server. --- Shep
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