[irishsultan]

> As in, real time to the computation? Why though.

Why not? What have SC2 bots (or their abilities) to do with chess bots?

> Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "really" took to calculate, with a (no longer real time) clock shown to indicate how the machines used their allotted time?

You can't show moves that haven't been played yet, so either your pace is much too slow, or you have to wait until the game is finished before displaying it. And it still wouldn't make sense to display the moves in a fixed pace when the pace (and time pressure) is in fact part of the game (see also the recent human world championship where many blunders were often played just before the 40th move because of time pressure).

[tialaramex]

> You can't show moves that haven't been played yet, so either your pace is much too slow, or you have to wait until the game is finished before displaying it.

This makes sense for human players, but the Chess Engines aren't human, so their matches can proceed in parallel. Whereupon a human audience isn't actually watching them in real time anyway. AIUI The engines are not learning during tournament play, so unlike a human (who may discover an opponent's weaknesses during play over the course of a tournament) they're only getting updates at specific points between play.

"That's not how humans do it" is a pretty weak excuse even if not for the fact that TCEC has a completely inhuman design. Humans don't start from positions chosen more or less arbitrarily to reduce the number of draws, whereas TCEC does.

[gliptic]

> Whereupon a human audience isn't actually watching them in real time anyway.

Uhm, yes they are.

TCEC can't afford to run more games in parallel. And if they did, they'd use all that processing power to run one game instead. The point is to produce the highest quality chess possible.

Why would you delay showing the moves that happen when you can just... not do it? You can always go through the games at your own pace afterwards anyway.

[irishsultan]

> This makes sense for human players, but the Chess Engines aren't human, so their matches can proceed in parallel.

And if they wanted to they could show multiple matches in parallel. After all that's what happens in the case of a tournament such as the recent Tata Steel tournament. I assume that the issue is that they want to maximize resources for the engines and for that you need to run at most a few engines (and therefore matches) in parallel.

If I read things correctly it's all running on a single server with "only" 96GiB of RAM per engine (https://wiki.chessdom.org/TCEC_Season_Further_information#TC...), running more matches in parallel would be detrimental to the quality of the chess played.