ICGA WCCC and WCSC in Santiago de Compostela

[AlexChess]

It's a pity that, after the first day, it has been impossible to watch the WCCC24 LIVE. Next events must be mainly based on an ONLINE site, like TCEC, and opened to all challengers.

This link has worked for every round https://view.livechesscloud.com/#415e62 ... 423b1802fb

Thx! I have searched it here every day.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

It's a pity that, after the first day, it has been impossible to watch the WCCC24 LIVE. Next events must be mainly based on an ONLINE site, like TCEC, and opened to all challengers.

It has been live on lichess broadcasts too the whole time, just not the blitz.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Raptor won the World Speed Chess Championship. It looks like in the starting position, Fritz made a few more bookmoves and they were pretty bad, so it lost fairly quickly. The reverse was then drawn.

[AlexChess]

It's a pity that, after the first day, it has been impossible to watch the WCCC24 LIVE. Next events must be mainly based on an ONLINE site, like TCEC, and opened to all challengers.

It has been live on lichess broadcasts too the whole time, just not the blitz.

Maybe links to the online boards on IGCA and ECAI sites would had been helpful
https://icga.org/?page_id=3957
https://www.ecai2024.eu/programme/world ... mpionships

[Peter Berger]

https://icga.org/?page_id=3957

Thanks for posting this link I was not aware of. I can technically understand the decision of the ICGA now, but it is very strange nevertheless.

This is how they put it on their page:

"(*) Shashchess is a derivative of the Stockfish engine. The authors of Stockfish,
the Stockfish team, do not endorse its participation. "

If we go back to (in)famous rule 2:

"Each program must be the original work of the entering developers, possibly with the
inclusion of game playing code and/or data from other sources for which the entering
developers have a legal right of use ..."

The possibly .. part is technically OK - due to the Stockfish license you have a legal right to use it.

But what about part 1? "Each program must be the original work of the entering developers" ? To every reasonable person this kind of suggests that some very major or +extremely+ relevant part of the engine is original - something like 50%+ feels natural.This is something I can't even imagine the Shashchess author to claim.

And what about Lion Turino 2006 again that was sent home?

Good luck for the engines that do the tiebreak, fortunately the participation of Shashchess turned out to be irrelevant other than giving Jonny a little boost.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Based on my understanding of the situation, the original mail from the Stockfish team was understood as meaning the Stockfish team (i.e. the maintainer) was OK with the participation. I think that's the statement from Stockfish the "Leela WCCC team" quoted too, and it seems a reasonable interpretation of that text to me. It only said they would not endorse specific entries if there were multiple - which there were not.

From what I understood from the tournament director, he received a second mail while the tournament was already underway that the Stockfish maintainer did not want to be seen as endorsing the Sashchess entry and they did not want to be listed as the author. So they removed "Stockfish team" from the list of authors on all the posters at the conference. This seems even more unfair to all the other entries in the tournament to me, but I guess nobody wanted to throw even more fuel on the fire so there was no protest. I think that's the only reason the text you quoted is there, basically Joost demanded this and the ICGA honored his request.

When asked by some of the passing researchers if their program was more like AlphaZero or more like Stockfish, one of the Sashchess guys immediately said "it IS Stockfish". It's not like they're making any misrepresentations here in that regard.

[AlexChess]

at do the tiebreak, fortunately the participation of Shashchess turned out to be irrelevant other than giving Jonny a little boost.

Shashchess has played with only 6 cores instead of 162 as planned (for connection issues not dued to IGCA or to the dev team), while ChessGrid using Fritz was using 400 computers given by Hamburg University. Despite that, Fritz isn't WCSC24 or WCCC24, and the winners finally deserve their titles.

[Harvey Williamson]

I have heard from Erdo this morning who is operating Raptor. He says there will be no more playoffs. Raptor, Stoofvlees and Jonny will share the title and prizes.

[AlexChess]

When asked by some of the passing researchers if their program was more like AlphaZero or more like Stockfish, one of the Sashchess guys immediately said "it IS Stockfish". It's not like they're making any misrepresentations here in that regard.

Same for Tornado https://www.chessprogramming.org/Tornado

[AlexChess]

I hope that there will be a new WCCC 25 online with 50 rounds, starting from unbalanced positions +0.75 each played by both sides with reverse colors.