Stockfish won the 2016 TCEC, but this year the match is currently in progress between the other 2 big names in computer chess, Houdini and Komodo (interestingly Stockfish was better against Komodo head-to-head in qualifying but didn't do so well beating up the weaker half of the 8-player field, not enough "contempt" in the lingo, I suppose this means it reads for both players so will play a draw line if it sees against itself that's the best it could do, but maybe it could overplay and go for a win and get away with it against weaker opposition, I don't know if other engines do anything clever like evaluating opponent's previous moves to work out they are weaker so they can get away with overplays and go for a win). Here's an interesting interview with the creators of Houdini and Komodo, which includes GM Larry Kaufman who is also a strong shogi and decent Go player who wrote an interesting comparison of the games I've posted before (he thinks shogi is the best game).
http://www.chessdom.com/interview-with- ... y-kaufman/
Some famous last words on November 27th
Robert (Houdini developer): Well, I think we are all waiting for artificial intelligence to pop up in chess after having seen the success of the artificial intelligence approach of Google for the Go game. And so basically what I would expect if some of these giant corporations would be interested is that in the next five years chess also might see that kind of development. For example the artificial intelligence for the evaluation of a position, it could produce some very surprising results in chess. And so, we’re probably waiting for that and then we can retire our old engines. Look at the AlphaChess engine that will be 4000 Elo. [chuckles]
Nelson (moderator): Yep, at that point we can all fade back into history. Larry, anything to add?
Larry (GM and Komodo developer): Well, I also followed closely the AlphaGo situation. The guy who is the head of it at Google Mind is a chess master himself, Demis Hassabis. Although Go is thought to be a much harder game than chess to beat the best humans at, and they have certainly proven that they can do that, it is so far yet to be proven that a learning program such as the latest one from DeepMind [can replicate that in chess]. Their latest learning program beat the pants off all other, previous Go programs. But that does not apply to chess. Nobody has a self-teaching chess program that can fight with Houdini or Komodo. That’s a fantasy. Maybe that’s the challenge, to get Google to prove that it applies to chess too. But who knows.
5 years turned out to be 12 days
