The Real #2 Chess Engine

[jorose]

I think a lot of things on that website stem from nothing but somebody's imagination. If you want some entertainment, you can check the past competition tab, where you will see that Torch v4 won the first two editions of the event back in 2014. It won this event ahead of Reckless, Integral v7, Caissa v1.24, and Plentychess v7.0.

Easily the most stacked event to ever take place in 2014. Poor Stockfish was relegated to 7th place. That event was truly ahead of its time.

[Damir]

I happened to come across a ranking list that I had never seen before, which is called ICCRL (https://www.iccrl.org/rankings). And on the rank, I noticed an engine called Gillespie is #2, stronger than Torch and is only 1 elo behind Stockfish 17.1. Checking its official website(https://gillespie.alexdukas.dev/), The author Alexander Dukas wrote Gillespie employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) NNUE architecture with five specialized neural networks, each trained on billions of positions from specific game phases,(seems like Cerberus on SPCC)which interests me a lot. Can anyone get this chess engine from the author and send it to me please？

I imagine the list is fake, because I have not provided Torch to any such list.

So it probably only exists to promote "Gillespie". Which itself sounds like its not an actual original work, just running 5 engines at once, and at that point you're basically just running Stockfish with extra steps.

A shame though, the site has a nice layout to it.

Hi Andrew

There is an engine called Torch on github. Maybe he was using that one?

https://github.com/0wwafa/torch-v2/releases/tag/v1

[AndrewGrant]

I happened to come across a ranking list that I had never seen before, which is called ICCRL (https://www.iccrl.org/rankings). And on the rank, I noticed an engine called Gillespie is #2, stronger than Torch and is only 1 elo behind Stockfish 17.1. Checking its official website(https://gillespie.alexdukas.dev/), The author Alexander Dukas wrote Gillespie employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) NNUE architecture with five specialized neural networks, each trained on billions of positions from specific game phases,(seems like Cerberus on SPCC)which interests me a lot. Can anyone get this chess engine from the author and send it to me please？

I imagine the list is fake, because I have not provided Torch to any such list.

So it probably only exists to promote "Gillespie". Which itself sounds like its not an actual original work, just running 5 engines at once, and at that point you're basically just running Stockfish with extra steps.

A shame though, the site has a nice layout to it.

Hi Andrew

There is an engine called Torch on github. Maybe he was using that one?

https://github.com/0wwafa/torch-v2/releases/tag/v1

Firstly: Clearly not, since the entire list is fabricated.
Secondly: That is not Torch, that is a watered down WASM build you get on chesscom analysis in 2024
Thirdly: Him hosting that is an unauthorized reproduction and redistribution of chesscom assets, infringing our copyright. If it mattered, I would send the legal team over to him.

[Mark Tang]

Nowadays, it gradually shows the battle for the #2 engine has a temporary answer. Reckless has a huge possibility to enter into the TCEC superfinal as it has already be the number two engine on most rating website, about more than 10 elo stronger than the Torch. But Torch still beat reckless in CCC, maybe they didn’t the lastest version of reckless. So I want to ask Andrew, will you turn back to improve Torch’s strength to let it return to the second place. (I suddenly found Chess.com develop torch on site GitHub.com/ChessCom/TorchDev, which is a private repository)

[Jouni]

Andrew has written in Discord, that Torch development is stopped. TCEC version is 20260128-7136070b.

[AndrewGrant]

Andrew has written in Discord, that Torch development is stopped. TCEC version is 20260128-7136070b.

I wrote it here too, 2 years ago? viewtopic.php?t=83917

[AndrewGrant]

Nowadays, it gradually shows the battle for the #2 engine has a temporary answer. Reckless has a huge possibility to enter into the TCEC superfinal as it has already be the number two engine on most rating website, about more than 10 elo stronger than the Torch. But Torch still beat reckless in CCC, maybe they didn’t the lastest version of reckless. So I want to ask Andrew, will you turn back to improve Torch’s strength to let it return to the second place. (I suddenly found Chess.com develop torch on site GitHub.com/ChessCom/TorchDev, which is a private repository)

No plans at this time.

[Jouni]

Andrew this info in CCC needs change: The most powerful server of any engine-vs-engine tournament (128 cores of AMD EPYC).