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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