It could have been an 11-way tie for first, had Halogen and Leela split the points. However, Leela managed to outplay Halogen in a QGD Slav and jumped ahead of competition.

The standings bring exciting matchups in the next round , where we will see Leela Chess Zero – Stockfish and Ceres – RofChade

Follow TCEC live: Official website / TCEC Chess TV / Lichess / Chessdom live More: Interview with Gabriele Lombardo from Obsidian

Standings

1. Leela Chess Zero 4,5/6

2-10. Ethereal, Stockfish, Ceres, Ginkgo, rofChade, Stormphrax, Viridithas, Devre, and Stoofvlees 4,0/6

11-17. Halogen, Velvet, Berserk, Minic, Obsidian, Caissa and Igel 3,5/6

Total 44 engines, full standings here

See Obsidian in action now live at https://tcec-chess.com/

Obsidian is currently one of the top engines in the world. How did you decide to enter computer chess programming?

My interest in chess engines began about 2 years ago. I began playing chess with a friend OTB, and soon I found out about chess.com and began playing there. In chess.com the game review feature sparked my interest in chess engines because I was wondering, “How does this guy know what moves are good and bad?”. So I found out about chess engines and I worked for some months on a kind of “toy” engine. Then, I decided to rewrite everything from scratch in a more serious manner and that was what is now Obsidian.

The other day in chat someone mentioned that you are very young, actually the youngest of all developers in TCEC

That’s right. Every engine developer I have ever talked to is older than me. I am 16 years old and will turn 17 in March 2025.

The new season of Top Chess Engine Championship TCEC has started with Swiss 7, the strongest chess event regarding playing strength. What are your expectations?

Obsidian most recent versions defeated Komodo Dragon 3.3 (the latest version) on SP-CC and Ipmanchess (two leaderboards). I hope Obsidian can repeat this performance in the Top Chess Engine Championship. The number of games played on TCEC is limited, so bad luck could happen. Hopefully not!

What do you consider the biggest strength of Obsidian? And the biggest weakness?

The biggest strength of Obsidian is the evaluation. It is not a random Leela data NNUE – my NNUE is, by a big margin, stronger than the NNUE of any other Leela data engine, outside of Stockfish of course. Excluding the datagen process (which is missing), there is a lot of effort into training. It was speculated about 2 months ago by a Torch developer that Obsidian’s evaluation might be almost as strong as that of Torch.

The biggest weakness is probably the search algorithm, being the engine very fast in terms of nps.

What are the original inventions in Obsidian?

I don’t know if calling them “inventions” is appropriate. There are several original implementation details that gained Elo in my engine in comparison to the way I’ve seen other engines do things. They are very technical and specific things I won’t go over.

Regarding speed, Obsidian until recently had 2 completely original techniques about efficient updates of the neural network. Recently I had to remove them due to their high RAM consumption – but they were significant speedups.

Lastly, I don’t do datagen, but in the training process itself I use various techniques that result in a (far) stronger evaluation than that of engines with similar training data.

What are the things that you are currently researching?

In this period I am trying to introduce 3 hidden layers (instead of 1) in the neural network evaluation of Obsidian. Every attempt until now has been a failure. I can successfully measure an increased strength of evaluation, but the speed loss is exaggerate.

Does Obsidian have plans to pull away from using Leela data for NNUE towards a more original approach?

Generating data by myself would be impossible for now, due to my very restricted amount of resources/hardware. I don’t think I could find someone else who would dedicate to generate data for Obsidian either.

Make a prediction for top 5 in the current TCEC Swiss 7

My prediction is: Stockfish, LCZero, Ceres, Berserk, Obsidian

Do you follow human chess games? Are you going to follow the Chess Olympiad in Budapest?

I watch human games sometimes. I mostly follow Hikaru, and last week I’ve been watching the Speed Chess Championship. I didn’t know about the chess Olympiad in Budapest until I read your message – I will probably watch some games.

TCEC Swiss 7 will be the first event of the season and will be the strongest chess event (ever!). A total of 44 participants, including the Swiss 6 champion LcZero, the top rated Stockfish and exciting newcomers Ceres, PlentyChess, and Patricia, will battle it out for the title in this record breaking Swiss.

Swiss 7 will be daily live on the official website of TCEC, in video format on TCEC Twitch TV, a broadcast on our favorite game server Lichess, and news reports on Chessdom.

Breaking the ELO record

ELO records depend on multiple factors. They include, but are not limited to, the formula used, the field, the sample size (number of games), and even the configuration (when talking about computer chess). Luckily, TCEC has the precise measurements to detect rating jumps in chess software. And the jump in Swiss 7 is huge! With high confidence we can claim that this is by far the strongest chess event in history.

Putting the record into perspective and “human terms”: imagine a classical tournament at a time where Carlsen and Kasparov close to 3000 ELO and Caruana, Aronian, Firouzja, Topalov, Anand, So, Nakamura, Kramnik, and Giri are all above and around 2900 ELO. Now this is what we are viewing in computer chess at TCEC Swiss 7!

Here is a comparison of the top 10 participants in Swiss 1 and Swiss 7 events. The difference of rating jumps is even bigger among the rest of the participants.

Breaking the participation record

The state of computer chess – thriving! The sector has experienced a recent !boom with the development of new technology and ideas. For the first time ever TCEC had more applications than the event can accommodate. As a result, various engines had to undergo qualifications tournaments, raising the average ELO of the field even more.

TCEC Swiss 7 seeding and participants

This is the full participants list of TCEC Swiss 7 according to seeding. The seed number is determined according to the season rules, starting with the previous champion of TCEC – LcZero

1. LCZero (defending champion of TCEC Swiss 6)
2. Stockfish (Season 26 league champion)
3. Berserk
4. KomodoDragon
5. Ethereal
6. Seer
7. Ceres
8. RubiChess
9. Stoofvlees
10. Caissa
11. Obsidian
12. rofChade
13. Viridithas
14. Igel
15. Revenge
16. Arasan
17. Clover
18. Lizard
19. Velvet
20. PlentyChess
21. Minic
22. Uralochka
23. Stormphrax
24. Ginkgo
25. DeepSjeng
26. BlackMarlin
27. Marvin
28. Altair
29. Equisetum
30. Booot
31. Weiss
32. Tucano
33. Halogen
34. Renegade
35. akimbo
36. Texel
37. Winter
38. Devre
39. ChessFighter
40. Patricia
41. Princhess
42. ice4
43. 4ku
44. Heimdall

Which record is not broken?

TCEC Swiss 7 is part of the 27th edition of TCEC. It is one of the four titles that the engines can compete for, namely the Swiss, FRC, Leagues, and Cup titles. Inherently, every season is stronger than the previous one. Engine chess is booming, authors are more active than ever, technology is developing, ideas are growing. This season and the TCEC Swiss 7 event seems to break all records, but one. It is the TCEC Leagues S11 record, where the Premier Division average rating grew by 150+ ELO points. The average ELO of top 10 engines then was 3351 points, a full 150 points jump.

Another record in sight is the audience. The most viewed season of TCEC was 2 million people audience. Back then it was fueled by Carlsen’s World Chess Championships success. Since then TCEC seasons have crossed 1 million viewers several times, but has never been close to this record.

Today, this was the starting position for Stockfish (3667 elo) vs Berserk (3565 elo), submitted by CrazyIgelFan. You can see the game live here and or if it has finished replay it here in the archives

TCEC 4k IV standings

1. Ice4 43,5/48
2. 4ku 40,0
3. Stro4k 36,0
4. Molly 20,5
5. M4sseur 19,5
6. Moonfish 5,0
7. Pygone 3,5

Next: the 4k IV mini final, watch live at Visit the TCEC 4k live page / Follow TCEC on Twitch

From time to time TCEC treats us with side events. Currently ongoing is one of the most amazing such bonuses – the TCEC 4k competition. The key: all participating engines are limited to to a maximum of 4KiB (4096 bytes)

In modern age it is a challenge to find applications of this size. At TCEC, however, the competitors not only meet the requirement, but play above GM level. The top two engines – Ice4 and 4ku – even participate successfully in the regular season, boasting ELO of over 3000.

Visit the TCEC 4k live page / Follow the games on Twitch

The second Deep Blue – Kasparov match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions, and was the subject of a documentary film, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. The match marked the end of human attempts to meaningfully challenge “the machine”.

In a podcast with a Russian-American computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and philosopher Lex Fridman, Garry Kasparov spoke about the matches with Deep Blue and how it felt losing to an engine in 1997.

The match started with Leela taking the lead 2,5-0,5 after winning a game with white in round 1 in Paulsen attack and a second game in round 3 in Sicilian Najdorf. Stockfish reacted, bringing the score level by game 10 and taking a two point lead afterwards. And just when everyone thought Stockfish might be on the way to an easy title, Leela Chess Zero showed that the games from the first rounds were not a coincidence and returned a point.

Replay the decisive games

Lc0 – Stockfish (Center game, Paulsen attack) 1-0
Lc0 – Stockfish (Sicilian Najdorf) 1-0
Stockfish – Lc0 (Sicilian Najdorf) 1-0
Stockfish – Lc0 (King’s Indian, Averbakh system) 1-0
Stockfish – Lc0 (Pirc, Austrian attack) 1-0
Stockfish – Lc0 (French, Tarrash) 1-0
Lc0 – Stockfish (King’s Indian, 5.Be2)

Currently the score is Stockfish 10,5 – Leela Chess Zero 9,5, with a game 22 (a Budapest) going on. Games are going on 24/7 and you can follow then with detailed analysis at the official website here