30.07.2008 - Today, another highlight of the Chess Classic 2008 started: the fourth Livingston Chess960 Computer World Championship with the four strongest Chess960 engines in the world: apart from reigning champion Rybka and Shredder, the most successful program in the history of chess computers, the programs Naum and Deep Sjeng, which qualified in the ICC internet tournament played their first games today. These four programs also happen to be the top four on the current Chess960 computer world ranking list. After the first day, Rybka and Naum lead the field with 3,5/6, Shredder has 3/6 and Deep Sjeng scored 2/6 today. On Thursday another round robin will be played to determine which programs will play the final on Friday.

All programmers play on the same machines with quadcore AMD processors, but after testing the machines and installing the programs, the players were not satisfied with the speed of the processors. After the first round the players were puzzled and discussed what to do to speed up their engines. They measured the speed of their programs again and again on other PC´s. Fortunately, Felix Kling, webmaster of the Rybka website discovered a bugfix, installed it on all four PC´s and suddenly the computers operated faster and calculated more nodes per second.

GM Vlastimil Hort and GM Klaus Bischoff throwing the dice

Here we go! 1.b3!

Hans-Walter Schmitt keeping things firmly in hand

Is the bug really fixed?

In the first three rounds, there were only wins for white (six in a row), but Rybka broke that streak by winning a nice game against Deep Sjeng in the seventh round, and eventually winning the mini-match 2-0. But in the two games against Naum, developed by Aleksandar Naumov, she (Rybka is a she!) lost 1,5-0,5. In the last game of the exciting first day, Vasik Raijlich made an operator mistake: he executed a different move on the DGT board than his program suggested. The human factor in computer chess should not be underestimated! The players noticed the mistake only a few moves later. After stopping and adjusting the clock, the game had to be reconstructed and after a short break, the game went on, mind you, with only a minute left on the clock for both programs. There were some difficulties adjusting the clock correctly, but Naum managed to convert his advantage to a full point after 130 moves. “Take me to the hospital, this was such a crazy experience”, an exhausted Aleksandar Naumov said immediately after his opponent resigned. Even minutes after the game was over, he was still shaking like a leaf, and his hands were as cold as ice. The spectators were excited and applauded after this exciting battle between two great chess programs.

The crowd watching the exciting game between Naum and Rybka (1)

The crowd watching the exciting game between Naum and Rybka (2)