The Week in Chess

Conditions

Chess Engines Tournament and Rating Conditions:

This chess site is for education and fun.  Any controversial issues concerning chess engines are best discussed elsewhere.

Chess engines selection:
- All chess engines are eligible for inclusion in the tournaments and rating list.  But for practical reasons which is constrained by time, resources and the inherent brevity of blogs, a limit is set to the ELO rating quality of at least 2400 that will be determined as the blog is in progress.
- For optimal compatibility and better performance, the generic 64bit versions will be used when available.

CPU Hardware:
- Chess tournament will run in any Intel or AMD processors with at least 2Ghz processor speed and 4GB physical memory.

Software:
- The primary operating system is Linux with WINE.
- Secondary OS is Windows 7/8 64 bit running under Linux VirtualBox.
- Arena Chess GUI by Martin Blume is the GUI interface to run the tournaments.

Tournament settings:
- Time control is 1 minute base + 1 second increment
- Ponder or permanent brain is off
- Resign at  less than -700 centipawns for 3 moves
- Common hash table size set to 64 MB
- Common max. CPU cores setting set to 1.
- Adjudicate as loss below -900 centipawns
- Adjudicate game as draw when 120 moves played
- Adjudicate draw when 50 moves played and value is 0.00
- Opening book is up to 6 half moves using the recent Sedat's Perfect opening book
- No endgame tablebases
- Restart engines after each game
- Restart Arena GUI after every 20 games

Rating list:
-  New chess engines will undergo at least 200 games of play for inclusion in the rating list. The top 20 strongest engines will undergo a mandatory 100 round games to increase the accuracy of the ELO rating statistics.
- Older versions will be purged immediately in the rating list for tidy presentation and minimize inconsistencies.

ELO Rating:
- The ORDO ELO rating program by Miguel Ballicora is used and the ELO median is set to 2800 with Shredder 12 as the anchor effective September 6, 2014.

Chess Engines Selection:

- The preferred engine version is 64 bit, UCI compliant, generic compile which would run on a diverse set of computers/processors and GUI set-up.

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