Season 17 starting

TCEC is back with season 17, you can read the official chessdom announcement. The engine wiki page and rules wiki page provide more details about the season to come.

Season 17 features a new CPU machine, provided by noobpwnftw, that has 88 cores running 176 threads. In season 16 CPU engines only used 43 threads so this is a significant hardware improvement. The new server also uses the Linux operating system instead of Windows. Only CPU engines that run on this machine can participate.

The GPU machine for season 17 is not ready yet, so only CPU engines can play at this stage. There are also many CPU engines, some new to TCEC, and the list of GPU engines is much shorter (though perhaps when the hardware is ready there will be more GPU candidates). As a result this season will start with a CPU-only Qualification League followed by a CPU-only League 2. There will be two paths for League 1, a CPU-only League 1 and a GPU-only League 1 (the GPU machine should be ready by then). CPU and GPU engines will only play each other in the premier division, and possibly in the superfinal.

In the last few seasons we have seen the rise of GPU engines, climbing from the lower leagues all the way to the premier division and superfinal. Leela was the first, then AllieStein, and last season there were Stoofvlees and ScorpioNN. There will not be a similar story in season 17.

The engines playing in the Qualification League are:
- Pirarucu, Marvin, Topple: relegated from league 2 in season 16
- Asymptote, Winter, Igel, Minic, Cheese, Tucano: played in the season 16 Qualification League
- Demolito, Gogobello, iCE, DefenChess, FabChess, Counter, PeSTO: new engines