I'll respond to a few of the comments:
Will Torch only be tested on Chess.com, or is there a chance that the engine will play in the TCEC tournament as well?
For now, this is the case. It is an undertaking to be able to provide binaries to other groups ( TCEC, CCRL, CEGT, FastGM, SPCC, ...). Because we need to protect ourselves from being reverse engineered, and also from testers sharing the binaries with the entire world. But I'm certain that we want to share when we can, and the reason is very simple. If someone googles "Chess Engine Rating List", I want them to see Torch.
Openbench already existed before Torch, chesscom might improve it which is nice but not because they want to help the community in general but because of their own interests.
I disagree with your assessment here. You say "not because they want to help the community". Well that is
exactly why OpenBench's changes are still open source. OpenBench is, for all intents and purposes, me providing my code to the world for free. It would be great if OpenBench had more people contributing, but that is not the case. It was an explicit decision to continue sharing my changes with the world. The work we are doing for Torch, via OpenBench as the central location for all of it, helps the community.
In the top twenty engines according to CCRL ( Adding in Torch, and subtracting Fire ), 50% of them are using OpenBench. Torch, Berserk, Ethereal, RubiChess, Igel, Kovisto, Seer, Clover, Minic, Viridithas. And many many engines below that top-20 cutoff are too.
As you already said before, you could close source Openbench but that is something that you wouldn't even have a reason to do before now.
Indeed. I could stop pushing changes to OpenBench starting right now. It would benefit Torch because it would not let the Fishtest folk see any ideas. It would also hinder new developers from joining the space, which helps us ( If they were to eventually help Stockfish ), and hurts us ( If they were to eventually join us with Torch ). OpenBench, ( for the sake of Torch ), is being developed on Chess.com's dime. That is an incredible contribution to the entire engine development community. I don't know how I can make this point any more clear and pronounced.
Now you also made it clear that you guys are not willing to help the open source chess engine community anymore. If you guys come up with a good and original idea, you will not try to implement it in Stockfish or any other open source engine like you would before, now only in Torch, only for chesscom.
The two statements here are logically placed together in, but don't make sense together. Its possible to help the community, AND maintain any of our secret sauce. I, and others, still talk in the OpenBench discord, or the Stockfish discord. I'll still bounce ideas around with Vizvez. But when we come up with real novel ideas like we have thus far, we don't want to share that edge. Otherwise there is no edge.
I want to beat Stockfish by being different than Stockfish.
If Torch ideas do not reach SF framework, it would be a good stress test to see how SF team holds, but there are many people in SF team to just give up, IMHO, so I think they will more less keep the current slow pace of progress. Elo race becomes more difficult!
Free market economics dictates that Torch is good for Stockfish development. What is the draw in endlessly improving Stockfish, when there is no viable competition? Leela has not been anyway close for a good while now... but now Torch comes in? Gets strong very quickly? Takes some back to back game-pairs off of Stockfish at CCC? Okay now there is a fire under the feet of Stockfish developers and fans.
The number 1 engine is the one that wins the TCEC tournament. Everyone agrees: This is the best engine!
I agree with this sentiment to an extent. TCEC indeed has the best time controls, but for that they lose out on sample size. So the results are a little bit flimsy if engines are close in strength. TCEC and CCC both have the same GPUs, but TCEC has a significantly weaker set of CPUs.
If Chess.com comes out with their own engine, then I don't want to trust Chess.com tournaments anymore.
For this statement to be true for you, you would have to assume that I am doing something unethical as the tournament director. But I don't recall anyone complaining in the time I was running things with Ethereal as my engine. As someone who wrote a framework that 50% of the top 20 engines uses, as someone who has elo gaining contributions into both Stockfish and Dragon, and as a TD who works closely with the Lc0 team to make sure that everything is running as they desire -- I find any such assumption or accusation about me running things unethically to be quite offensive and unfounded.
Lc0 becomes really strong with strong GPU
Indeed. It would be better to have Lc0 with 4090s, but those are hard to get on servers. Which is why
both TCEC and CCC are using 2xA100s last I checked. So Leela is pretty fair between the two venues, the only nuance is the CPUs have a little bit of an impact. I believe Leela wants low core count but fast CPUs. Just like CPU engines do.
The King need not declare it.