The Thoresen Chess Engine Competition is in progress. Programs have 2 hours to make their moves meaning a game can last about 4 hour. There is a time increment of 30 seconds per move so long games can even last much longer than that. Martin (Thoresen) has built a computer with 8-core processors – not one, but two, so 16 cores all running simultaneously. (For the geeks: not hyperthreading, but 16 genuine cores.) His computer also has gigabytes and gigabytes of RAM and the processors share the RAM so that information learned by one core can be used by another.

His competition is for state-or-the-art computer programs. The programs have access to endgame tablebases and many standard formats are supported: Nalimov, Gaviota and (later in this competition) the new Syzygy format that appears to have the highest compression. To ensure the fastest possible access, Martin is putting crucial parts of the endgame tablebases (eg 6-men Win/Draw/Loss information) onto a solid state drive -SSD.

That makes the quality of chess played, some of the highest quality chess ever played. Magnus Carlson prefers not to play against programs like these because losing regularly depresses him.

Now among the games played in the competition, occassionally something stands out – a game which spectators think is drawn and where one engine sees a very deep combination that the other misses. This is one such game, where discussion and admiration continued well into the next game.

The feature to watch in this game is the white king march. Enjoy!