The TCEC16 computer chess superfinal: A perspective

In past years, I have paid only cursory attention to DivP, experiencing it as the necessary but pallid taster before the anticipated main course! However, this year’s DivP was extremely entertaining and captivated my attention from beginning to end. The format was slightly odd as – in order to save costs on the hiring of the GPU server – all CPU machines games were played first. The downside was that the exact ranking order was shrouded in mystery until the very end due to the differing numbers of games played by CPU and GPU engines. On the other hand, organising the games in this fashion did reveal some interesting trends and contrasts.