World Computer Chess Championship
WCCC and the Computer Olympiad to take place in Pamplona
Report by Chessdom.com
The XVII World Computer Chess Championship will take place 11-18 May, 2009, in Pamplona, Spain. The championship will be part of the International Week of Computation which will be held in Palacio del Condestable. Other events include the Advances in Computer Games conference, the XIV Computer Olympiad (with the modalities of Chinese Chess, Go, Checkers, Hex, etc.), and many additional seminars.
The official opening is on Monday 11.30 hours, in the playing hall.
Participants
There will be 10 participants in the XVII World Computer Chess Championship. Three of them, Cluster Toga, Shredder, and Jonny, play under the German flag. The favorites are Rybka (USA), Junior (Israel), and Hiracs (Great Britain). Last seeded are The Baron (NED) and Mobile Chess (China).
Rybka Hiarcs Junior Cluster Toga Shredder Falcon Jonny Sjeng The Baron Mobile Chess
The last two events were dominated by the current world chess champion Rybka. In both events there were not many participants (10 in Beijing 2008 and 12 in Amsterdam 2007). The event with most participants so far was the 1999 Paderborn championship with 30 participants. If you ever wondered how many programs are there, here is a comprehensive list of computer chess programs.
Here are all the winners by year.
1. 1974, Stockholm, Kaissa
2. 1977, Toronto, Chess 4.6
3. 1980, Linz, Belle
4. 1983, New York, Cray Blitz
5. 1986, Cologne, Cray Blitz
6. 1989, Edmonton, Canada, Deep Thought
7. 1992, Madrid, Spain, ChessMachine (Gideon)
8. 1995, Hong Kong, Fritz
9. 1999, Paderborn, Germany, Shredder
10. 2002, Maastricht, Netherlands, Deep Junior
11. 2003, Graz, Austria, Shredder
12. 2004, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, Deep Junior
13. 2005, Reykjavík, Iceland, Zappa
14. 2006, Torino, Italy, Junior
15. 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Rybka
16. 2008, Beijing, China Rybka
More about the XVII World Computer Chess Championship
Junior will win!
The Participants list is wrong! That was last year’s list.
There is no Cluster Rybka this year, only 8 cpu limit this year. Some of the other participants (mostly Hiarcs) managed to handicap Rybka this year. They don’t like the Rybka dominance (because they can’t compete with Rybka’s cluster programming).
To be fair, most other chess computer programmers hate this hardware limit.
Btw, here is the participants list of this year:
http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/icga/tournament.php?id=192
But even this list is not totaly correct.
It’s exciting